100 Notable Books of the New Your Times Book Review(17, 16, 12, 11, 07)

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100 Notable Books of 2017 - the New Your Times Book Review

The year’s notable fiction, poetry and nonfiction, selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review. This list represents books reviewed since Dec. 4, 2016, when we published our previous Notables list.

Fiction & Poetry

AMERICAN WAR. By Omar El Akkad. (Knopf, $26.95.)

This haunting debut novel imagines the events that lead up to and follow the Second American Civil War at the turn of the 22nd century.

ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE. By Elizabeth Strout. (Random House, $27.)

This audacious novel is about small-town characters struggling to make sense of past family traumas.

AUTUMN. By Ali Smith. (Pantheon, $24.95.)

Smith’s ingenious novel is about the friendship between a 101-year-old man and a 32-year-old woman in Britain after the Brexit vote.

BAD DREAMS AND OTHER STORIES. By Tessa Hadley. (Harper/HarperCollins, $26.99.)

Hadley serves up the bitter along with the delicious in these 10 stories.

BEAUTIFUL ANIMALS. By Lawrence Osborne. (Hogarth, $25.)

On a Greek island, two wealthy young women encounter a handsome Syrian refugee, whom they endeavor to help, with disastrous results.

THE BOOK OF JOAN. By Lidia Yuknavitch. (Harper/HarperCollins, $26.99.)

In this brilliant novel, Earth, circa 2049, has been devastated by global warming and war.

A BOY IN WINTER. By Rachel Seiffert. (Pantheon, $25.95.)

Seiffert’s intricate novel probes the bonds and betrayals in a Ukrainian town as it succumbs to Hitler.

THE CHANGELING. By Victor LaValle. (Spiegel & Grau, $28.)

LaValle’s novel, about Apollo Kagwa, a used-book dealer, blends social criticism with horror, while remaining steadfastly literary.

CHRISTMAS DAYS: 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days. By Jeanette Winterson. (Grove, $24.)

A gift book from the British novelist, containing otherworldly and wickedly funny stories.

DANCE OF THE JAKARANDA. By Peter Kimani. (Akashic, paper, $15.95.)

This funny, perceptive and ambitious work of historical fiction by a Kenyan poet and novelist explores his country’s colonial past.

THE DARK FLOOD RISES. By Margaret Drabble. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.)

This masterly novel follows its 70-something heroine on a road trip through England.

THE DINNER PARTY: And Other Stories. By Joshua Ferris. (Little, Brown, $26.)

Anxiety, self-consciousness and humiliation are the default inner states of the characters in these 11 stories.

THE ESSEX SERPENT. By Sarah Perry. (Custom House/Morrow, $26.99.)

This novel’s densely woven plot involves an independent-minded widow and the possible haunting presence of a giant serpent.

EXIT WEST. By Mohsin Hamid. (Riverhead, $26.) T

he new novel by the author of “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” and “How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia” mixes global unrest with a bit of the fantastic.

FAST. By Jorie Graham. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $25.99.)

Graham created these poems against a backdrop of personal and political trauma — her parents are dying, she is undergoing cancer treatment, the nation is mired in war and ecological crisis.

FIVE-CARAT SOUL. By James McBride. (Riverhead, $27.)

In his delightful first story collection, the author of the National Book Award-winning novel “The Good Lord Bird” continues to explore race, masculinity, music and history.

FOREST DARK. By Nicole Krauss. (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99.)

Tracing the lives of two Americans in Israel, this restless novel explores the mysteries of disconnection and the divided self.

4 3 2 1. By Paul Auster. (Holt, $32.50.) Auster’s book is an epic bildungsroman that presents the reader with four versions of the formative years of a Jewish boy born in Newark in 1947.

FRESH COMPLAINT: Stories. By Jeffrey Eugenides. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.)

Eugenides’s expert debut collection of short stories is his first book since “The Marriage Plot” in 2011.

FUTURE HOME OF THE LIVING GOD. By Louise Erdrich. (HarperCollins, $28.99.)

What if human beings are neither inevitable nor ultimate? That’s the premise of Erdrich’s fascinating new novel.

GIVING GODHEAD. By Dylan Krieger. (Delete, paper, $17.99.)

Seamlessly mixing the religious with the obscene, Krieger’s poetry is inventive and powerful.

HISTORY OF WOLVES. By Emily Fridlund. (Atlantic Monthly, $25.)

A slow-motion tragedy unfolds in Minnesota’s north woods in Fridlund’s disturbing debut.

HOME FIRE. By Kamila Shamsie. (Riverhead, $26.)

A bold retelling of Sophocles’ “Antigone” that follows the lives of three British siblings of Pakistani descent.

HOMESICK FOR ANOTHER WORLD. By Ottessa Moshfegh. (Penguin Press, $26.)

The insightful stories in this dark debut collection are about “loneliness, desire, hope and self-awareness.”

A HORSE WALKS INTO A BAR. By David Grossman. Translated by Jessica Cohen. (Knopf, $29.95.)

Grossman’s magnificently funny, sucker-punch-tragic novel about a tormented stand-up comedian combines comic dexterity with Portnoyish detail.

The IDIOT. By Elif Batuman. (Penguin Press, $27.)

An innocent, language-intoxicated teenager, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives at Harvard in the ’90s to pursue love and (especially) literature in Batuman’s hefty, gorgeous digressive slab of a novel.

ILL WILL. By Dan Chaon. (Ballantine, $28.)

Chaon’s dark, disturbing literary thriller encompasses drug addiction, accusations of satanic abuse and a self-deluding Midwestern psychologist.

A KIND OF FREEDOM. By Margaret Wilkerson Sexton. (Counterpoint, $26.)

This assured first novel shines an unflinching, compassionate light on three generations of a black family in New Orleans.

LESS. By Andrew Sean Greer. (Lee Boudreaux/Little, Brown, $26.)

On the eve of his 50th birthday and a former lover’s wedding, a mediocre novelist takes refuge in literary invitations that enable him to travel around the world.

LINCOLN IN THE BARDO. By George Saunders. (Random House, $28.)

In this Man Booker Prize-winning first novel by a master of the short story, Abraham Lincoln visits the grave of his son Willie in 1862, and is surrounded by ghosts in purgatory.

MANHATTAN BEACH. By Jennifer Egan. (Scribner, $28.)

Egan’s engaging novel tells overlapping stories, but is most fundamentally about a young woman who works at the Brooklyn Naval Yard during World War II.

MRS. OSMOND. By John Banville. (Knopf, $27.95.)

Banville’s sequel to Henry James’s “Portrait of a Lady” follows Isabel Archer back to Rome and the possible end of her marriage.

MY ABSOLUTE DARLING. By Gabriel Tallent. (Riverhead, $27.)

The heroine of this debut novel is Turtle, a 14-year-old who grows up feral in the forests and hills of Northern California.

NEW PEOPLE. By Danzy Senna. (Riverhead, $26.)

Senna’s sinister and charming novel, about a married couple who are both biracial, riffs on themes she’s made her own — about what happens when races and cultures mingle in the home, and under the skin.

THE NINTH HOUR. By Alice McDermott. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.)

In McDermott’s novel, the cause of a young Irish widow and her daughter is taken up by the nuns of a Brooklyn convent.

PACHINKO. By Min Jin Lee. (Grand Central, $27.)

This stunning novel chronicling four generations of an ethnic Korean family in Japan is about outsiders and much more.

THE POWER. By Naomi Alderman. (Little, Brown, $26.)

In this fierce and unsettling novel, the ability to generate a dangerous electrical force from their bodies lets women take control, resulting in a vast, systemic upheaval of gender dynamics across the globe.

THE REFUGEES. By Viet Thanh Nguyen. (Grove, $25.)

This superb collection of stories concerns men and women displaced from wartime Saigon and (mostly) settled in California.

SELECTION DAY. By Aravind Adiga. (Scribner, $26.)

Adiga’s third novel (he won the Booker Prize in 2008 for “The White Tiger”) is a sharp look at modern India. It revolves around two teenage brothers groomed by their father to be cricket stars.

A SEPARATION. By Katie Kitamura. (Riverhead, $25.)

Deceptions pile on deceptions in this coolly unsettling postmodern mystery, in which a British woman travels to a Greek fishing village to search for her estranged husband, who has disappeared.

SING, UNBURIED, SING. By Jesmyn Ward. (Scribner, $26.)

Ward’s novel, which won the National Book Award, combines aspects of the American road novel and the ghost story with an exploration of the long aftershocks of a hurricane.

SIX FOUR. By Hideo Yokoyama.

Translated by Jonathan Lloyd-Davies. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.) A former criminal investigator, now working in police media relations, faces angry reporters, the nagging 14-year-old case of a kidnapped girl, and his own teenage daughter’s disappearance.

STAY WITH ME. By Ayobami Adebayo. (Knopf, $25.95.)

This debut novel is a portrait of a marriage in Nigeria beginning in the politically tumultous 1980s.

THE STONE SKY: The Broken Earth: Book Three. By N.K. Jemisin. (Orbit, paper, $16.99.)

Jemisin won a Hugo Award for each of the first two novels in her Broken Earth trilogy. In the extraordinary conclusion, a mother and daughter do geologic battle for the fate of the earth.

TIES. By Domenico Starnone. Translated by Jhumpa Lahiri. (Europa, paper, $16.)

The husband of the woman who has been identified as Elena Ferrante offers a powerful novel about a fraying marriage.

TRANSIT. By Rachel Cusk. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) In the second novel of a planned trilogy,

Cusk continues the story of Faye, a writer and teacher who is recently divorced and semi-broke.

WAKING LIONS. By Ayelet Gundar-Goshen.

Translated by Sondra Silverston. (Little, Brown, $26.) An Israeli doctor in the Negev accidentally hits an Eritrean immigrant, then drives off. The consequences are explored with insight and a thriller’s twists and turns.

WHEREAS. By Layli Long Soldier. (Graywolf, paper, $16.)

Long Soldier, a member of the Oglala Sioux tribe, troubles our consideration of the language we use to carry our personal and national narratives in this moving debut poetry collection.

WHITE TEARS. By Hari Kunzru. (Knopf, $26.95.)

This complex ghost story about racial privilege, cultural appropriation and the blues is written with Kunzru’s customary eloquence and skill.

WHO IS RICH? By Matthew Klam. Illustrated by John Cuneo. (Random House, $27.)

The protagonist of this novel, a middle-aged illustrator, is a conflicted adulterer. Klam agilely balances an existentially tragic story line with morbid humor and self-assured prose.

Nonfiction

AGE OF ANGER: A History of the Present. By Pankaj Mishra.

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) Mishra argues that broad swaths of the globe are reliving the traumas and violent dislocations that accompanied Europe’s transition to modernity in the 18th and 19th centuries.

AMERICAN FIRE: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land. By Monica Hesse.

(Liveright, $26.95.) Hesse tells the story of 67 fires set in Virginia during a five-month arson spree, beginning in 2012, and the mystery of why a local auto mechanic was behind them.

ANIMALS STRIKE CURIOUS POSES: Essays. By Elena Passarello. (Sarabande, $19.95.)

Passarello presents biographies of famous animals, from an ancient mummified mammoth to Mr. Ed and Cecil the Lion.

THE BLOOD OF EMMETT TILL. By Timothy B. Tyson. (Simon & Schuster, $27.)

Tyson’s absorbing retelling of the events leading up to the horrific lynching in 1955 includes an admission from Till’s accuser that some of her testimony was false.

BORN A CRIME: Stories From a South African Childhood. By Trevor Noah. (Spiegel & Grau, $28.)

The host of “The Daily Show” writes about growing up in South Africa under apartheid, and about the country’s rocky transition into the post-apartheid era in the 1990s.

BUNK: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News. By Kevin Young.

 (Graywolf, $30.) Young’s enthralling and essential history is both exhaustive and unapologetically subjective — not to mention timely. Again and again, he plumbs the undercurrents of a hoax to discover the fearfulness and racism that often lurk inside.

CHURCHILL AND ORWELL: The Fight for Freedom. By Thomas E. Ricks. (Penguin Press, $28.)

This enjoyable dual biography draws out the common causes of these 20th-century giants: two independent thinkers and opponents of totalitarianism whose influence remains pervasive today.

THE COLLECTED ESSAYS OF ELIZABETH HARDWICK. Selected and with an introduction by Darryl Pinckney. (New York Review Books, $19.95.)

The landmark American critic surveys everything from the 1968 Democratic convention to the literature of New York City. 

A COLONY IN A NATION. By Chris Hayes. (Norton, $26.95.)

Hayes paints a portrait of two “distinct regimes” in America — one for whites, which he calls the Nation; the other for blacks, which he calls the Colony.

THE COLOR OF LAW: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. By Richard Rothstein. (Liveright, $27.95.)

Going back to the late 19th century, the author uncovers a policy of de jure segregation in virtually every presidential administration.

THE CRISIS OF THE MIDDLE-CLASS CONSTITUTION: Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic. By Ganesh Sitaraman. (Knopf, $28.)

 Sitaraman argues that the Constitution is premised on the existence of a thriving middle class, and that the current explosion of inequality will destroy it.

THE DAWN WATCH: Joseph Conrad in a Global World. By Maya Jasanoff. (Penguin Press, $30.)

Conrad explored the frontiers of a globalized world at the turn of the last century. Jasanoff uses Conrad’s novels and his biography to tell the history of that moment, one that mirrors our own.

THE DEATH AND LIFE OF THE GREAT LAKES. By Dan Egan. (Norton, $27.95.)

Climate change, population growth and invasive species are destabilizing the Great Lakes’ wobbly ecosystem, but Egan provides a taut and cautiously hopeful narrative.

DESTINED FOR WAR: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? By Graham Allison. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28.)

Allison offers erudite historical case studies that illuminate the pressure toward military confrontation when a rising power challenges a dominant one.

DEVIL’S BARGAIN: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency. By Joshua Green. (Penguin Press, $27.)

Green’s book is a deeply reported and compulsively readable account of this fateful political partnership.

THE EVANGELICALS: The Struggle to Shape America. By Frances FitzGerald. (Simon & Schuster, $35.)

FitzGerald’s fair-minded history focuses on the doctrinal and political issues that have concerned white conservative Protestants since they abandoned their traditional separation from the world and merged with the Republican Party.

THE EVOLUTION OF BEAUTY: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World — and Us. By Richard O. Prum. (Doubleday, $30.)

A mild-mannered ornithologist and expert on the evolution of feathers makes an impassioned case for the importance of Darwin’s second theory as his most radical and feminist.

FASTING AND FEASTING: The Life of Visionary Food Writer Patience Gray. By Adam Federman. (Chelsea Green, $25.)

Federman’s biography is the first of this cult food writer.

FLÂNEUSE: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London. By Lauren Elkin. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.)

Elkin joins memoir and biographies of walking women like Woolf and Sand.

FRIENDS DIVIDED: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. By Gordon S. Wood. (Penguin Press, $35.)

Wood traces the long, fraught ties between the second and third presidents, and sides almost reluctantly with Jefferson in their philosophical smack-down.

THE FUTURE IS HISTORY: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. By Masha Gessen. (Riverhead, $28.)

Gessen, a longtime critic of Vladimir Putin, tells the story of modern Russia through the eyes of seven individuals who found that politics was a force none of them could escape; winner of the National Book Award.

GENERATION REVOLUTION: On the Front Line Between Tradition and Change in the Middle East. By Rachel Aspden. (Other Press, $24.95.)

What happened to Egypt’s revolution? This excellent social history argues that despite their politics, young Egyptians did not reject the conservative mores of family and religion.

THE GLASS UNIVERSE: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars. By Dava Sobel. (Viking, $30.)

This book, about the women “computers” whose calculations helped shape observational astronomy, is a highly engaging group portrait.

GRANT. By Ron Chernow. (Penguin Press, $40.)

Chernow gives us a Grant for our time, recounting not only the victories of the general but also the challenges of a president who fought against the K.K.K.

GREATER GOTHAM: A History of New York City From 1898 to 1919. By Mike Wallace. (Oxford, $45.)

A vibrant, detailed chronicle of the 20 years that made New York City the place we know today.

THE GULF: The Making of an American Sea. By Jack E. Davis. (Liveright, $29.95.)

Davis’s sweeping history of the Gulf of Mexico takes into account colorful nature, idiosyncratic human characters and economic development.

HAMLET GLOBE TO GLOBE: Two Years, 190,000 Miles, 197 Countries, One Play. By Dominic Dromgoole. (Grove, $27.)

To celebrate the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, London’s Globe Theater performed “Hamlet” all around the world. Dromgoole’s witty account offers insight about the play and its enduring appeal.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU: A Life. By Laura Dassow Walls. (University of Chicago, $35.)

This new life of Thoreau, in time for his 200th birthday, paints a moving portrait of a brilliant, complex man.

THE HOUSE OF GOVERNMENT: A Saga of the Russian Revolution. By Yuri Slezkine. (Princeton University, $39.95.) 

This history describes the lives of Bolsheviks who were swallowed up by their own cause.

THE INVENTION OF ANGELA CARTER: A Biography. By Edmund Gordon. (Oxford University, $35.)

This terrific book is the first full-length biography of Carter, whose novels were fantastical, feminist and sexy.

JANESVILLE: An American Story. By Amy Goldstein. (Simon & Schuster, $27.)

Goldstein writes about the impact on the small Wisconsin factory city of the title when General Motors closes a plant there.

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. By David Grann. (Doubleday, $28.95.)

In the 1920s, the Osage Indians had been driven onto land in Oklahoma that sat on top of immense oil deposits. The oil made the Osage rich, and then members of the nation started turning up murdered.

KRAZY: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White. By Michael Tisserand. (Harper/HarperCollins, $35.)

Who was the man behind “Krazy Kat”? This fascinating biography and guide to the work of the cartoonist, who passed for white, tells the full story.

LENIN: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror. By Victor Sebestyen. (Pantheon, $35.)

Sebestyen has managed to produce a first-rate thriller by detailing the cynicism and murderous ambition of the founder of the Soviet Union.

LETTERMAN: The Last Giant of Late Night. By Jason Zinoman. (Harper/HarperCollins, $28.99.)

Zinoman’s lively book does impressive triple duty as an acute portrait of stardom, an insightful chronicle of three rambunctious decades of pop-culture evolution, and a very brainy fan’s notes.

LOCKING UP OUR OWN: Crime and Punishment in Black America. By James Forman Jr. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.)

A masterly account of how a generation of black elected officials wrestled with crises of violence and drug use by unleashing the brutal power of the criminal justice system on their constituents.

LOOKING FOR “THE STRANGER”: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic. By Alice Kaplan. (University of Chicago, $26.)

Impressive research illuminates the context and history of Camus’s classic novel.

THE LOST CITY OF THE MONKEY GOD: A True Story. By Douglas Preston. (Grand Central, $28.)

The novelist joins a rugged expedition in search of pre-Columbian ruins in the Honduran rain forest.

NOMADLAND: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century. By Jessica Bruder. (Norton, $26.95.)

For three years, Bruder traveled and worked alongside “workampers,” older people, casualties of the Great Recession, who drive around the United States looking for seasonal work.

NOTES ON A FOREIGN COUNTRY: An American Abroad in a Post-American World. By Suzy Hansen. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.)

Hansen, who moved to Istanbul after 9/11, grapples with her country’s violent role in the world.

PRAIRIE FIRES: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder. By Caroline Fraser. (Metropolitan/Holt, $35.)

This thoroughly researched biography of the “Little House” author perceptively captures Wilder’s extraordinary life and legacy.

PRIESTDADDY: A Memoir. By Patricia Lockwood. (Riverhead, $27.)

The poet’s memoir is fueled by a great character: her father, a rare married Catholic priest, a big bear of a man fond of guns, cream liqueurs and pork rinds.

THE SONGS WE KNOW BEST: John Ashbery’s Early Life. By Karin Roffman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30.)

This first full-fledged biography of the poet is full of rich and fascinating detail.

TENEMENTS, TOWERS & TRASH: An Unconventional Illustrated History of New York City. By Julia Wertz. (Black Dog & Leventhal, $29.99.)

Wertz has become a cult favorite for her graphic memoirs. Her new book is a departure, focusing on her great love, New York.

TO SIRI WITH LOVE: A Mother, Her Autistic Son, and the Kindness of Machines. By Judith Newman. (Harper/HarperCollins, $26.99.)

Newman’s tender, boisterous memoir strips the usual zone of privacy to edge into the world her autistic son occupies.

THE UNDOING PROJECT: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds. By Michael Lewis. (Norton, $28.95.)

Lewis profiles the enchanted collaboration between Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, whose groundbreaking work proved just how unreliable our intuition could be.

WE WERE EIGHT YEARS IN POWER: An American Tragedy. By Ta-Nehisi Coates. (One World, $28.)

A selection of Coates’s most influential pieces about race in America from The Atlantic, with subjects including Barack and Michelle Obama, Donald J. Trump, reparations and mass incarceration.

WHAT HAPPENED?. By Hillary Rodham Clinton. (Simon & Schuster, $30.)

Clinton tells the story of what it was like to run for president of the United States as the first female nominee of a major party.

WORLD WITHOUT MIND: The Existential Threat of Big Tech. By Franklin Foer. (Penguin Press, $27.)

Foer dons the heavy mantle of cyber-skeptic with this persuasive brief against the big four tech giants who he believes pose a threat to the individual and society.

YOU SAY TO BRICK: The Life of Louis Kahn. By Wendy Lesser. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30.)

This biography covers the best-known works of the architect Louis Kahn as well as his complicated personal life.

100 Notable Books of 2016 - the New Your Times Book Review

Fiction & Poetry

ALL THAT MAN IS. By David Szalay. (Graywolf, $26.)

Szalay writes with voluptuous authority about masculinity under duress in this novel in stories.

ANOTHER BROOKLYN. By Jacqueline Woodson. (Amistad/HarperCollins, $22.99.)

Girlhood and the half-life of its memory are the subjects of this intense, moving novel, Woodson’s first for adults (she is a Newbery Honor winner) in years.

THE ASSOCIATION OF SMALL BOMBS. By Karan Mahajan. (Viking, $26.)

Mahajan’s smart, devastating novel traces the fallout over time of a terrorist attack at a market in Delhi.

BARKSKINS. By Annie Proulx. (Scribner, $32.)

Tracing two families and their part in the destruction of the world’s forests, Proulx’s latest novel is a tale of long-term, shortsighted greed.

BEFORE THE FALL. By Noah Hawley. (Grand Central, $26.)

A private-jet crash leads to a media firestorm in Hawley’s readable thrill ride of a novel.

BEHOLD THE DREAMERS. By Imbolo Mbue. (Random House, $28.)

In Mbue’s bighearted debut, set against the backdrop of the American financial crisis, a Cameroonian family makes a new life in Harlem.

BLACK WATER. By Louise Doughty. (Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus &Giroux, $26.)

 Expecting to be assassinated, the hero of this excellent novel grapples with guilt over his actions in Indonesia.

CHILDREN OF THE NEW WORLD. By Alexander Weinstein. (Picador, paper, $16.)

The terror that technology may rob us of authentic experience — that it may annihilate our very sense of self — is central to this debut collection of short stories.

COLLECTED POEMS 1950-2012. By Adrienne Rich. (Norton, $50.)

Work from seven decades displays Rich’s evolution from careful neo-classicism to free verse, and her embrace of lesbian feminism and radical politics.

COMMONWEALTH. By Ann Patchett. (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99.)

An engaging family portrait, tracing the lives of six stepsiblings over half a century.

DO NOT SAY WE HAVE NOTHING. By Madeleine Thien. (Norton, $26.95.)

A Chinese-Canadian professor probes the mystery of her father’s life amid upheavals in China in this ambitious novel.

DON’T LET MY BABY DO RODEO. By Boris Fishman. (Harper/HarperCollins, $26.99.)

A family from the former Soviet Union embarks on an American road trip in a novel that is a joy to read.

END OF WATCH. By Stephen King. (Scribner, $30.)

The gloriously fitting final installment of King’s trilogy featuring the retired police detective Bill Hodges is a big genre-busting romp.

EVERYBODY’S FOOL. By Richard Russo. (Knopf, $27.95.)

This sequel to “Nobody’s Fool,” set 10 years later in the same upstate New York town, presents engaging characters and benign humor.

THE FORTUNES. By Peter Ho Davies. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27.)

This novel, a meditation on 150 years of the Chinese-American experience, asks what it means to be a Chinese-American.

A GAMBLER’S ANATOMY. By Jonathan Lethem. (Doubleday, $27.95.)

 A backgammon hustler with telepathic powers returns to Berkeley, Calif., for surgery in Lethem’s inventive 10th novel, the theme of which is remaining open to possibilities.

THE GLOAMING. By Melanie Finn. (Two Dollar Radio, paper, $16.99.)

A woman tries to remake her life in Africa in Finn’s intricately plotted novel.

GRIEF IS THE THING WITH FEATHERS. By Max Porter. (Graywolf, paper, $14.)

A father and his sons struggle with a death in this luminous novel.

HERE COMES THE SUN. By Nicole Dennis-Benn. (Liveright, $26.95.)

 Dennis-Benn’s tale of life in the impoverished neighborhoods of Montego Bay, Jamaica, sheds light on the island’s disenfranchised.

HERE I AM. By Jonathan Safran Foer. (Farrar, Straus &Giroux, $28.)

 Private and public crises converge for four generations of a Jewish family in this ambitious, often brilliant novel, Foer’s third.

HOMEGOING. By Yaa Gyasi. (Knopf, $26.95.)

This wonderful debut by a Ghanaian-American novelist follows the shifting fortunes of the progeny of two half sisters, unknown to each other, in West Africa and America. Gyasi was one of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 honorees in 2016.

HOT MILK. By Deborah Levy. (Bloomsbury, $26.)

 In Levy’s evocative novel, dense with symbolism, a woman struggles against her hypochondriacal mother to achieve her own identity.

HOUSE OF LORDS AND COMMONS. By Ishion Hutchinson. (Farrar, Straus &Giroux, $23.)

 Exuberant work from a young Jamaican-born poet who looks to the island’s teeming life and fractured past.

I MUST BE LIVING TWICE: New and Selected Poems, 1975-2014. By Eileen Myles. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $29.99.)

 Charming and confounding poems from a provocative voice.

IZA’S BALLAD. By Magda Szabo. Translated by George Szirtes. (New York Review, paper, $16.95.)

A meditative Hungarian novel about grief and history by the author of “The Door.”

LAROSE. By Louise Erdrich. (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99.)

A man who accidentally killed his best friend’s son gives the man his own child in this powerful story about justice and forgiveness, set in and near a North Dakota Ojibwe reservation.

THE LIFE-WRITER. By David Constantine. (Biblioasis, paper, $14.95.)

 A widow immerses herself in the letters her late husband received from an earlier lover in Constantine’s lyrical novel.

THE LITTLE RED CHAIRS. By Edna O’Brien. (Little, Brown, $27.)

 In her harrowing, boldly imagined novel, O’Brien both explores Irish provincial life and offers an unsettling fabulist vision.

LOOK: Poems. By Solmaz Sharif. (Graywolf, paper, $16.) Sharif’s skillful debut collection draws on a Defense Department lexicon of military terms.

THE MIRROR THIEF. By Martin Seay. (Melville House, $27.95.)

 Linked narratives and various Venices reflect one another in this clever first novel.

MISCHLING. By Affinity Konar. (Lee Boudreaux/Little, Brown, $27.)

Konar uses the unsettling and grievous history of Dr. Josef Mengele’s experiments on children, particularly twins, to riveting effect in her debut novel.

MISTER MONKEY. By Francine Prose. (Harper/HarperCollins, $26.99.)

The dreadful revival of a musical based on a children’s novel about an orphaned chimp is observed through various points of view in this fresh, Chekhovian novel.

MOONGLOW. By Michael Chabon. (Harper/HarperCollins, $28.99.)

 In this beautifully written hybrid, a San Francisco writer named Mike presents a memoir about his grandparents, a World War II soldier and a Holocaust survivor.

THE MORTIFICATIONS. By Derek Palacio. (Tim Duggan, $27.)

This sweeping debut novel limns the exile and return of a Cuban-American family.

MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON. By Elizabeth Strout. (Random House, $26.)

A writer and her estranged mother attempt to reconnect during a brief visit in a Pulitzer Prize winner’s exquisite novel of careful words and vibrating silences.

NINETY-NINE STORIES OF GOD. By Joy William

s. (Tin House, $19.95.) This collection of micro-fictions is a treasure trove of tiny wry masterpieces.

THE NIX. By Nathan Hill. (Knopf, $27.95.)

In this entertaining debut novel, full of postmodern digressions, a young professor tries to write a biography of his political activist mother.

THE NORTH WATER. By Ian McGuire. (Holt, $27.)

In McGuire’s darkly brilliant novel, the crew of a doomed whaling ship bound for the Arctic Circle must reckon with fierce weather, pure evil, and the shadows of Melville and Conrad.

NUTSHELL. By Ian McEwan. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $24.95.)

An unborn baby overhears his mother and her lover plotting to murder his father in McEwan’s compact, captivating novel.

REPUTATIONS. By Juan Gabriel Vásquez. Translated by Anne McLean. (Riverhead, $25.)

A slender but impactful Colombian novel about a political cartoonist who re-examines his accusations against a politician.

THE SPORT OF KINGS. By C. E. Morgan. (Farrar, Straus &Giroux, $27.)

Three Kentucky dynasties — black, white and equine — converge in this vitally written if melodramatic novel.

Still Here. By Lara Vapnyar. (Hogarth, $26.)

In this razor-funny novel, four Russian friends try to make their way in New York.

SWING TIME. By Zadie Smith. (Penguin Press, $27.)

Two multiracial girls in North London dream of becoming dancers (one has talent, the other doesn’t) in Smith’s exuberant new novel about friendship, music, race and global politics.

TODAY WILL BE DIFFERENT. By Maria Semple. (Little, Brown, $27.)

 In this brainy, seriously funny novel by the author of “Where’d You Go, Bernadette,” a Seattle woman confronts private school parents, a husband’s secret life and more.

THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD. By Colson Whitehead. (Doubleday, $26.95.)

Whitehead’s well-built, stunningly daring novel turns the historical freedom network from metaphor to reality, complete with tracks, locomotives and platforms. The winner of this year’s National Book Award for fiction.

VALIANT GENTLEMEN. By Sabina Murray. (Grove, $27.)

An audacious historical novel about the Irish revolutionary martyr Roger Casement.

THE VEGETARIAN. By Han Kang. Translated by Deborah Smith. (Hogarth, $21.)

This novella in three parts is both thriller and parable. The winner of the 2016 Man Booker International Prize.

WAR AND TURPENTINE. By Stefan Hertmans. Translated by David McKay. (Pantheon, $26.95.)

A masterly novel about memory, art, love and war, based on the author’s grandfather’s notebooks.

WEATHERING. By Lucy Wood. (Bloomsbury, $26.)

This poetic debut novel, set in a damp house near a roaring river, explores the relationship between mothers and daughters.

ZERO K. By Don DeLillo. (Scribner, $27.)

 In the post-postcolonial future of DeLillo’s moving, mysterious 16th novel, a man joins his billionaire father at a desert compound where people can be preserved forever.

Nonfiction

ALL THE SINGLE LADIES: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation. By Rebecca Traister. (Simon &Schuster, $27.)

A deeply researched and thought-provoking examination of the role of single women throughout history.

AMERICAN HEIRESS: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst. By Jeffrey Toobin. (Doubleday, $28.95.)

 In this riveting account, even the S.L.A. is shown some compassion.

AT THE EXISTENTIALIST CAFÉ: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails. By Sarah Bakewell. (Other Press, $25.)

 A lucid joint portrait of the writers and philosophers who embodied existentialism.

BLOOD AT THE ROOT: A Racial Cleansing in America. By Patrick Phillips. (Norton, $26.95.)

How a Georgia county drove out its black citizens in 1912 and remained all-white for 80 years: a well-written, timely and important account.

Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. By Heather Ann Thompson. (Pantheon, $35.)

 A masterly — and heartbreaking — history, based in part on new materials about the Attica prison uprising and its terrible aftermath.

BORN TO RUN. By Bruce Springsteen. (Simon &Schuster, $32.50.)

 Springsteen’s autobiography, explaining how he rose from Freehold, N.J., to international fame is both plain-spoken and eloquent.

CITY OF DREAMS: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York. By Tyler Anbinder. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $35.)

A richly textured guide to the past of the nation’s chief immigrant city.

DARK MONEY: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. By Jane Mayer. (Doubleday, $29.95.)

 A formidable account of how the Koch brothers and their allies have bought their way to political power.

THE DEFENDER: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America From the Age of the Pullman Porters to the Age of Obama. By Ethan Michaeli. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $32.)

 A powerful, elegant history of the influential paper.

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT: The War Years and After. Volume Three: 1939-1962. By Blanche Wiesen Cook. (Viking, $40.)

The long-awaited conclusion of a monumental and inspirational biography.

THE ENGLISH AND THEIR HISTORY. By Robert Tombs. (Knopf, $45.)

A Cambridge historian’s clearsighted retelling of English history also analyzes how the English themselves have viewed their past.

EVICTED: Poverty and Profit in the American City. By Matthew Desmond. (Crown, $28.)

A sociologist shows what the lack of affordable housing means as he portrays the desperate lives of people who spend most of their incomes in rent.

THE FACE OF BRITAIN: A History of the Nation Through Its Portraits. By Simon Schama. (Oxford University, $39.95.)

A splendid book to accompany a BBC series hosted by the eminently readable historian and art critic.

FAR AND AWAY. REPORTING FROM THE BRINK OF CHANGE: Seven Continents, Twenty-Five Years. By Andrew Solomon. (Scribner, $30.)

Some 30 travel pieces, in prose sparkling with insight, describe “places in the throes of transformation.”

FROM THE WAR on POVERTY TO THE WAR on CRIME: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America. By Elizabeth Hinton. (Harvard University, $29.95.)

 A well-researched study of the bipartisan embrace of punishment after the 1960s.

THE GENE: An Intimate History. By Siddhartha Mukherjee. (Scribner, $32.)

With scope and grandeur, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Emperor of All Maladies” presents the history of the science of genetics and examines the philosophical questions it raises.

GHETTO: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea. By Mitchell Duneier. (Farrar, Straus &Giroux, $28.)

 Duneier offers a stunningly detailed, timely survey of scholarly work on the topic.

HERO OF THE EMPIRE: The Boer War, a Daring Escape and the Making of Winston Churchill. By Candice Millard. (Doubleday, $30.)

Imperialism and courage are on display as Churchill fights the Boer War in Millard’s readable, enjoyable book.

HIS FINAL BATTLE: The Last Months of Franklin Roosevelt. By Joseph Lelyveld. (Knopf, $30.)

 A gripping, deeply human account of Roosevelt’s last 16 months in office, when the president fought to create lasting global peace — despite having received a diagnosis of acute congestive heart failure.

HITLER: Ascent 1889-1939. By Volker Ullrich. Translated by Jefferson Chase. (Knopf, $40.)

The first volume of a timely new biography focuses on Hitler the man, seeing him as a consummate tactician and an actor aware of his audience.

HOW EVERYTHING BECAME WAR AND THE MILITARY BECAME EVERYTHING: Tales From the Pentagon. By Rosa Brooks. (Simon &Schuster, $29.95.)

A disturbing exploration of the erosion of boundaries between war and peace.

HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS. By David France. (Knopf, $30.)

 A remarkable account of how activists and patients won the funding that led to AIDS treatment from a reluctant government.

I CONTAIN MULTITUDES: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life. By Ed Yong. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $27.99.)

 A science journalist’s first book is an excellent, vivid introduction to the all-enveloping realm of our secret sharers.

IN THE DARKROOM. By Susan Faludi. (Metropolitan/Holt, $32.)

 Faludi offers a rich and ultimately generous investigation of her long-estranged father, who suddenly contacted her from his home in Hungary after undergoing gender-reassignment surgery at the age of 76.

IN GRATITUDE. By Jenny Diski. (Bloomsbury, $26.)

In her final memoir before her death, Diski, who was quasi-adopted by Doris Lessing, examines the origin, and the close, of her life as a writer.

AN IRON WIND: Europe Under Hitler. By Peter Fritzsche. (Basic, $29.99.)

A deep reflection about World War II’s moral challenges for civilians.

LAB GIRL. By Hope Jahren. (Knopf, $26.95.)

A geobiologist with a literary bent makes her science both accessible and lyrical, and offers a gratifying and moving chronicle of the scientist’s life.

THE LIMOUSINE LIBERAL: How an Incendiary Image United the Right and Fractured America. By Steve Fraser. (Basic Books, $27.50.)

An incisive history of a right-wing metaphor and its effects.

THE MAN WHO KNEW: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan. By Sebastian Mallaby. (Penguin Press, $40.)

This thorough account of the former Fed chairman’s rise depicts him as political to a fault.

NEW ENGLAND BOUND: Slavery and Colonization in Early America. By Wendy Warren. (Liveright, $29.95.)

Warren enlivens her study of Northern slavery with new research and a fresh approach.

ORSON WELLES. Volume 3: One-Man Band. By Simon Callow. (Viking, $40.)

Expertly and convincingly, Callow rejects the common disdain for Welles’s post-1948 career.

THE PEOPLE AND THE BOOKS: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature. By Adam Kirsch. (Norton, $28.95.)

 Detailed and lucid accounts of seminal texts highlight the variety of Jewish experience.

PLAYING TO THE EDGE: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror. By Michael V. Hayden. (Penguin Press, $30.) 

The former C.I.A. director makes the case for Bush-era security measures.

PRETENTIOUSNESS: Why It Matters. By Dan Fox. (Coffee House, paper, $15.95.)

A nimble case for pretentiousness as a willingness to take risks.

PUMPKINFLOWERS: A Soldier’s Story. By Matti Friedman. (Algonquin, $25.95.)

 Friedman has written a striking memoir about his stint in the Israeli Army in southern Lebanon in the 1990s.

A RAGE FOR ORDER: The Middle East in Turmoil, From Tahrir Square to ISIS. By Robert F. Worth. (Farrar, Straus &Giroux, $26.)

The story of the 2011 Arab Spring and its slide into autocracy and civil war, beautifully told by a veteran correspondent.

THE RETURN: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between. By Hisham Matar. (Random House, $26.)

In this extraordinary memoir-cum-family history, Matar describes his search for his father, who disappeared into a Libyan prison in 1990.

THE RISE AND FALL OF AMERICAN GROWTH: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War. By Robert J. Gordon. (Princeton University, $39.95.)

An economic historian’s magisterial assessment of the past and future of American living standards.

SECONDHAND TIME: The Last of the Soviets. By Svetlana Alexievich. Translated by Bela Shayevich. (Random House, $30.) The Nobel winner offers a powerful oral history of Russia, post-1991.

SHIRLEY JACKSON: A Rather Haunted Life. By Ruth Franklin. (Liveright, $35.)

This thorough biography traces Jackson’s evolution as an artist and makes a case for her importance.

SING FOR YOUR LIFE: A Story of Race, Music, and Family. By Daniel Bergner. (Lee Boudreaux/Little, Brown, $28.)

A portrait of Ryan Speedo Green, an African-American opera singer who overcame terrible childhood poverty and abuse. This season he has a lead role in the Metropolitan Opera’s “La Bohème.”

STRANGERS IN THEIR OWN LAND: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. By Arlie Russell Hochschild. (New Press, $27.95.)

A Berkeley sociologist takes a generous but disconcerting look at Tea Party backers in Louisiana to explain the way many people in this country live now, often to the astonishment of everyone else.

TRUEVINE. Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother’s Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South. By Beth Macy. (Little, Brown, $28.)

A riveting account of two albino African-American brothers who were exhibited in a circus.

UNFORBIDDEN PLEASURES. By Adam Phillips. (Farrar, Straus &Giroux, $25.)

Linked essays examine the idea that forbidden pleasures have a tendency to obscure the meaningfulness to our lives of the unforbidden ones.

WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. By Cathy O’Neil. (Crown, $26.)

A frightening look at the risks of the algorithms that regulate our lives, by a former hedge fund “quant” (she got her Ph.D. in math at Harvard) who became an Occupy Wall Street activist.

WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR. By Paul Kalanithi. (Random House, $25.)

 A brilliant young neurosurgeon reckons with the meaning of life and death when he learns he has advanced lung cancer; a moving and courageous account.Continue reading the main story

WHEN IN FRENCH: Love in a Second Language. By Lauren Collins. (Penguin Press, $27.)

Collins, a New Yorker staff writer married to a Frenchman, writes a very personal memoir about love and language, shrewdly assessing how language affects our lives.

WHITE RAGE: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide. By Carol Anderson. (Bloomsbury, $26.)

A timely and urgent call to confront the forces opposed to black progress since the Civil War.

WHITE TRASH: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. By Nancy Isenberg. (Viking, $28.) A masterly and ambitious cultural history of changing concepts of class and inferiority.

YOU’LL GROW OUT OF IT. By Jessi Klein. (Grand Central, $26.)

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100 Notable Books of 2012

The year’s notable fiction, poetry and nonfiction, selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review.

FICTION & POETRY

ALIF THE UNSEEN.

By G. Willow Wilson. (Grove, $25.) A young hacker on the run in the Mideast is the protagonist of this imaginative first novel.

ALMOST NEVER.

By Daniel Sada. Translated by Katherine Silver. (Graywolf, paper, $16.) In this glorious satire of machismo, a Mexican agronomist simultaneously pursues a prostitute and an upright woman.

AN AMERICAN SPY.

By Olen Steinhauer. (Minotaur, $25.99.) In a novel vividly evoking the multilayered world of espionage, Steinhauer’s hero fights back when his C.I.A. unit is nearly destroyed.

ARCADIA

By Lauren Groff. (Voice/Hyperion, $25.99.) Groff’s lush and visual second novel begins at a rural commune, and links that utopian past to a dystopian, post-global-warming future.

AT LAST

By Edward St. Aubyn. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) The final and most meditative of St. Aubyn’s brilliant Patrick Melrose novels is full of precise observations and glistening turns of phrase.

BEAUTIFUL RUINS

By Jess Walter. (Harper/HarperCollins, $25.99.) Walter’s witty sixth novel, set largely in Hollywood, reveals an American landscape of vice, addiction, loss and disappointed hopes.

BILLY LYNN’S LONG HALFTIME WALK

By Ben Fountain. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $25.99.) The survivors of a fierce firefight in Iraq are whisked stateside for a brief victory tour in this satirical novel.

BLASPHEMY

By Sherman Alexie. (Grove, $27.) The best stories in Alexie’s collection of new and selected works are moving and funny, bringing together the embittered critic and the yearning dreamer.

THE BOOK OF MISCHIEF: New and Selected Stories

By Steve Stern. (Graywolf, $26.) Jewish immigrant lives observed with effusive nostalgia.

BRING UP THE BODIES

By Hilary Mantel. (Macrae/Holt, $28.) Mantel’s sequel to “Wolf Hall” traces the fall of Anne Boleyn, and makes the familiar story fascinating and suspenseful again.

BUILDING STORIES

By Chris Ware. (Pantheon, $50.) A big, sturdy box containing hard-bound volumes, pamphlets and a tabloid houses Ware’s demanding, melancholy and magnificent graphic novel about the inhabitants of a Chicago building.

BY BLOOD

By Ellen Ullman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) This smart, slippery novel is a narrative striptease, as a professor listens in on the sessions between the therapist next door and her patients.

CANADA

By Richard Ford. (Ecco/Har­perCollins, $27.99.) A boy whose parents rob a bank in Montana in 1960 takes refuge across the border in this mesmerizing novel, driven by fully realized characters and an accomplished prose style.

CARRY THE ONE

By Carol Anshaw. (Simon & Schuster, $25.) Anshaw pays close attention to the lives of a group of friends bound together by a fatal accident in this wry, humane novel, her fourth.

CITY OF BOHANE

By Kevin Barry. (Graywolf, $25.) Somewhere in Ireland in 2053, people are haunted by a “lost time,” when something calamitous happened, and hope to reclaim the past. Barry’s extraordinary, exuberant first novel is full of inventive language. 

COLLECTED POEMS

By Jack Gilbert. (Knopf, $35.) In orderly free verse constructions, Gilbert deals plainly with grief, love, marriage, betrayal and lust.

DEAR LIFE: Stories

By Alice Munro. (Knopf, $26.95.) This volume offers further proof of Munro’s mastery, and shows her striking out in the direction of a new, late style that sums up her whole career.

THE DEVIL IN SILVER.

By Victor LaValle. (Spiegel & Grau, $27.) LaValle’s culturally observant third novel is set in a shabby urban mental hospital.

ENCHANTMENTS

By Kathryn Harrison. (Random House, $27.) Harrison’s splendid and surprising novel of late imperial Russia centers on Rasputin’s daughter Masha and the hemophiliac ­czarevitch Alyosha.

FLIGHT BEHAVIOR

By Barbara Kingsolver. (Harper/HarperCollins, $28.99.) An Appalachian woman becomes involved in an effort to save monarch butterflies in this brave and majestic novel.

FOBBIT

By David Abrams. (Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic, paper, $15.) Clerks, cooks and lawyers at a forward operating base in Iraq populate this first novel.

THE FORGETTING TREE

By Tatjana Soli. (St. Martin’s, $25.99.) In Soli’s haunting second novel, a mysterious Caribbean woman cares for a cancer patient on an isolated California ranch.

GATHERING OF WATERS

By Bernice L. McFadden. (Akashic, $24.95.) Three generations of black women confront floods and murder in Mississippi.

GODS WITHOUT MEN

By Hari Kunzru. (Knopf, $26.95.) Related stories, spanning centuries and continents, and all tethered to a desert rock formation, emphasize interconnectivity across time and space in Kunzru’s relentlessly modern fourth novel.

HHhH

By Laurent Binet. Translated by Sam Taylor. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) This gripping novel examines both the killing of an SS general in Prague in 1942 and Binet’s experience in writing about it.

A HOLOGRAM FOR THE KING

By Dave Eggers. (McSweeney’s, $25.) Eg­gers’s novel is a haunting and supremely readable parable of America in the global economy, a nostalgic lament for a time when life had stakes and people worked with their hands.

HOME

By Toni Morrison. (Knopf, $24.) A black Korean War veteran, discharged from an integrated Army into a segregated homeland, makes a reluctant journey back to Georgia in a novel engaged with themes that have long haunted Morrison.

HOPE: A TRAGEDY

By Shalom Auslander. (Riverhead, $26.95.) Hilarity alternates with pain in this novel about a Jewish man seeking peace in upstate New York who discovers Anne Frank in his ­attic.

HOW SHOULD A PERSON BE?

 By Sheila Heti. (Holt, $25.) The narrator (also named Sheila) and her friends try to answer the question in this novel’s title.

IN ONE PERSON

By John Irving. (Simon & Schuster, $28.) Irving’s funny, risky new novel about an aspiring writer struggling with his sexuality examines what happens when we face our desires honestly.

A LAND MORE KIND THAN HOME

By Wiley Cash. (Morrow/HarperCollins, $24.99.) An evil pastor dominates Cash’s mesmerizing first novel.

MARRIED LOVE: And Other Stories

By Tessa Hadley. (Harper Perennial, paper, $14.99.) Hadley’s understatedly beautiful collection is filled with exquisitely calibrated gradations and expressions of class.

NW

By Zadie Smith. (Penguin Press, $26.95.) The lives of two friends who grew up in a northwest London housing project diverge, illuminating questions of race, class, sexual identity and personal choice, in Smith’s energetic modernist novel.

ON THE SPECTRUM OF POSSIBLE DEATHS

By Lucia Perillo. (Copper Canyon, $22.) Taut, lucid poems filled with complex emotional reflection.

PURE

By Julianna Baggott. (Grand Central, $25.99.) Children battle for the planet’s redemption in this precisely written postapocalyptic adventure story.

THE RIGHT-HAND SHORE

By Christopher Tilghman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) A dark, magisterial novel set on a Chesapeake Bay estate.

THE ROUND HOUSE

 By Louise Erdrich. (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99.) In this novel, an American Indian family faces the ramifications of a vicious crime.

SALVAGE THE BONES

By Jesmyn Ward. (Bloomsbury, $24.) A pregnant 15-year-old and her family await Hurricane Katrina in this lushly written novel.

SAN MIGUEL

By T. Coraghessan Boyle. (Viking, $27.95.) Two utopians from different eras establish private idylls on California’s desolate Channel Islands; this novel preserves their tantalizing dreams.

SHINE SHINE SHINE

By Lydia Netzer. (St. Martin’s, $24.99.) This thought-provoking debut novel presents a geeky astronaut and his pregnant wife.

SHOUT HER LOVELY NAME

By Natalie Serber. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $24.) The stories in Serber’s first collection are smart and nuanced.

SILENT HOUSE

By Orhan Pamuk. Translated by Robert Finn. (Knopf, $26.95.) A family is a microcosm of a country on the verge of a coup in this intense, foreboding novel, first published in Turkey in 1983.

THE STARBOARD SEA

By Amber Dermont. (St. Martin’s, $24.99.) Dermont’s captivating debut novel, whose narrator is a boarding school student and a sailor, takes pleasure in the sea and in the exhilarating freedom of being young.

SWEET TOOTH

By Ian McEwan. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $26.95.) The true subject of this smart and tricky novel, set inside a cold war espionage operation, is the border between make-believe and reality.

SWIMMING HOME

By Deborah Levy. (Bloomsbury, paper, $14.) In this spare, disturbing and frequently funny novel, a troubled young woman tests the marriages of two couples.

TELEGRAPH AVENUE

By Michael Chabon. (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99.) Chabon’s rich comic novel about fathers and sons in Berkeley and Oakland, Calif., juggles multiple plots and mounds of pop culture references in astonishing prose.

THE TESTAMENT OF MARY

By Colm Toibin. (Scribner, $19.99.) This beautiful work takes power from the surprises of its language and its almost shocking characterization of Mary, mother of Jesus.

THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE HER

By Junot Díaz. (Riverhead, $26.95.) The stories in this collection are about love, but they’re also about the undertow of family history and cultural mores, presented in Díaz’s exciting, irresistible and entertaining prose.

THREE STRONG WOMEN

By Marie NDiaye. Translated by John Fletcher. (Knopf, $25.95.) In loosely linked narratives, three women from Senegal struggle with fathers and husbands in France. This subtle, hypnotic novel won the Prix Goncourt in 2009.

TOBY’S ROOM.

By Pat Barker. (Doubleday, $25.95.) This novel, a sequel to “Life Class,” delves further into the lives of an English family torn apart by World War I.

WATERGATE

By Thomas Mallon. (Pantheon, $26.95.) This novelistic re­imagining of the “third-rate burglary” proposes surprising motives for the break-in and the 18-minute gap, and has a sympathetic Nixon.

WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT ANNE FRANK: Stories

By Nathan Englander. (Knopf, $24.95.) Englander tackles large questions of morality and history in a masterly collection that manages to be both insightful and ­uproarious.

THE YELLOW BIRDS.

By Kevin Powers. (Little, Brown, $24.99.) A young private and his platoon struggle through the war in Iraq but find no peace at home in this powerful and moving first novel about the frailty of man and the brutality of war.

NONFICTION

ALL WE KNOW: Three Lives

By Lisa Cohen. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30.) The vanished world of midcentury upper-class lesbians is portrayed as beguiling, its inhabitants members of a stylish club.

AMERICAN TAPESTRY: The Story of the Black, White, and Multiracial Ancestors of Michelle Obama

By Rachel L. Swarns. (Amistad/HarperCollins, $27.99.) A Times reporter’s deeply researched chronicle of several generations of Mrs. Obama’s family.

AMERICAN TRIUMVIRATE: Sam Snead, Byron Nelson, Ben Hogan, and the Modern Age of Golf

By James Dodson. (Knopf, $28.95.) The author evokes an era when the game was more vivid and less corporate than it seems now.

ARE YOU MY MOTHER? A Comic Drama

By Alison Bechdel. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $22.) Bechdel’s engaging, original graphic memoir explores her troubled relationship with her distant mother.

BARACK OBAMA: The Story

By David Maraniss. (Simon & Schuster, $32.50.) This huge and absorbing new biography, full of previously unexplored detail, shows that Obama’s saga is more surprising and gripping than the version we’re familiar with.

BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity

By Katherine Boo. (Random House, $27.) This extraordinary moral inquiry into life in an Indian slum shows the human costs exacted by a brutal social Darwinism.

BELZONI: The Giant Archaeologists Love to Hate

By Ivor Noël Hume. (University of Virginia, $34.95.) The fascinating tale of the 19th-century Italian monk, a “notorious tomb robber,” who gathered archaeological treasures in Egypt while crunching bones underfoot.

THE BLACK COUNT: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte CristoB

y Tom Reiss. (Crown, $27.) The first Alexandre Dumas, a mixed-race general of the French Revolution, is the subject of this imaginative biography.

BREASTS: A Natural and Unnatural History

By Florence Williams. (Norton, $25.95.) Williams’s environmental call to arms deplores chemicals in breast milk and the vogue for silicone implants.

COMING APART: The State of White America, 1960-2010

By Charles Murray. (Crown Forum, $27.) The author of “The Bell Curve” warns that the white working class has abandoned the “founding virtues.”

DARWIN’S GHOSTS: The Secret History of Evolution

By Rebecca Stott. (Spiegel & Grau, $27.) Stott’s lively, original history of evolutionary ideas flows easily across continents and centuries.

A DISPOSITION TO BE RICH: How a Small-Town Preacher’s Son Ruined an American President, Brought on a Wall Street Crash, and Made Himself the Best-Hated Man in the United StatesB

y Geoffrey C. Ward. (Knopf, $28.95.) The author’s ancestor was the bane of Ulysses S. Grant.

FAR FROM THE TREE: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

By Andrew Solomon. (Scribner, $37.50.) This passionate and affecting work about what it means to be a parent is based on interviews with families of “exceptional” children.

FLAGRANT CONDUCT. The Story of Lawrence v. Texas: How a Bedroom Arrest Decriminalized Gay Americans

By Dale Carpenter. (Norton, $29.95.) Carpenter stirringly describes the 2003 Supreme Court decision that overturned the Texas sodomy law.

THE FOLLY OF FOOLS: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life

By Robert Trivers. (Basic Books, $28.) An intriguing argument that deceit is a beneficial evolutionary “deep feature” of life.

THE GREY ALBUM: On the Blackness of Blackness

By Kevin Young. (Graywolf, paper, $25.) A poet’s lively account of the central place of the trickster figure in black American culture could have been called “How Blacks Invented America.”

HAITI: The Aftershocks of History

By Laurent Dubois. (Metropolitan/Holt, $32.) Foreign meddling, the lack of a democratic tradition, a humiliating American occupation and cold-war support of a brutal dictator all figure in a scholar’s well-written analysis.

HOW CHILDREN SUCCEED: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character

By Paul Tough. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27.) Noncognitive skills like persistence and self-control are more crucial to success than sheer brainpower, Tough maintains.

HOW MUSIC WORKS

By David Byrne. (McSweeney’s, $32.) This guidebook also explores the eccentric rock star’s personal and professional experience.

IRON CURTAIN: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

By Anne Applebaum. (Doubleday, $35.) An overwhelming and convincing account of the Soviet push to colonize Eastern Europe after World War II.

KAYAK MORNING: Reflections on Love, Grief, and Small Boats

By Roger Rosenblatt. (Ecco/HarperCollins, paper, $13.99.) This thoughtful meditation on the evolution of grief over time asks the big questions.

LINCOLN’S CODE: The Laws of War in American History

By John Fabian Witt. (Free Press, $32.) A tension between humanitarianism and righteousness has shaped America’s rules of warfare.

LITTLE AMERICA: The War Within the War for Afghanistan

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran. (Knopf, $27.95.) A beautifully written and deeply reported account of America’s troubled involvement in ­Afghanistan.

MEMOIR OF A DEBULKED WOMAN: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

By Susan Gubar. (Norton, $24.95.) A feminist scholar recounts her experience and criticizes the medical treatment of a frightening disease in a voice that is straightforward and incredibly brave.

MY POETSBy Maureen N. McLane. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) Part memoir and part criticism, this friendly book includes essays on poets canonical and contemporary, as well as lineated poem-games.

THE OBAMASBy Jodi Kantor. (Little, Brown, $29.99.) Michelle Obama sets the tone and tempo of the current White House, Kantor argues in this admiring account, full of colorful insider anecdotes.

ODDLY NORMAL: One Family’s Struggle to Help Their Teenage Son Come to Terms With His Sexuality

By John Schwartz. (Gotham, $26.) A Times reporter’s deeply affecting account of his son’s coming out also reviews research on the experience of LGBT kids.

ON A FARTHER SHORE: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson

By William Souder. (Crown, $30.) An absorbing biography of the pioneering environmental writer on the 50th anniversary of “Silent Spring.”

ON SAUDI ARABIA: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines — and Future

By Karen Elliott House. (Knopf, $28.95.) A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist unveils this inscrutable country, comparing its calcified regime to the Soviet Union in its final days.

THE ONE: The Life and Music of James Brown

By RJ Smith. (Gotham, $27.50.) Smith argues that Brown was the most significant modern American musician in terms of style, messaging, rhythm and originality.

THE PASSAGE OF POWER: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

By Robert A. Caro. (Knopf, $35.) The fourth volume of Caro’s magisterial work spans the five years that end shortly after Kennedy’s assassination, as Johnson prepares to push for a civil rights act.

THE PATRIARCH: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy

By David Nasaw. (Penguin Press, $40.) This riveting history captures the sweep of Kennedy’s life — as Wall Street speculator, moviemaker, ambassador and dynastic founder.

PEOPLE WHO EAT DARKNESS: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished From the Streets of Tokyo — and the Evil That Swallowed Her Up

By Richard Lloyd Parry. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, paper, $16.) An evenhanded investigation of a murder.

RED BRICK, BLACK MOUNTAIN, WHITE CLAY: Reflections on Art, Family, and Survival

By Christopher Benfey. (Penguin Press, $25.95.) Mixing memoir, family saga, travelogue and cultural ­history.

RULE AND RUIN. The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party: From Eisenhower to the Tea Party

By Geoffrey Kabaservice. (Oxford University, $29.95.) Pragmatic Republicanism was hardier than we remember, Kabaservice argues.

SAUL STEINBERG: A Biography

By Deirdre Bair. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $40.) A gripping and revelatory biography of the eminent cartoonist.

SHOOTING VICTORIA: Madness, Mayhem, and the Rebirth of the British Monarchy

By Paul Thomas Murphy. (Pegasus, $35.) An uninhibited and learned account of the attempts on the life of Queen Victoria, which only increased her popularity.

SHORT NIGHTS OF THE SHADOW CATCHER: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis

By Timothy Egan. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28.) A deft portrait of the man who made memorable photographs of American ­Indians.

THE SOCIAL CONQUEST OF EARTH.

By Edward O. Wilson. (Norton, $27.95.) The evolutionary biologist explores the strange kinship between humans and some insects.

SOMETIMES THERE IS A VOID: Memoirs of an Outsider

By Zakes Mda. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $35.) The South African novelist and playwright absorbingly illuminates his wide, worldly life.

SPILLOVER: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

By David Quammen. (Norton, $28.95.) Quammen’s meaty, sprawling book chronicles his globe-trotting scientific adventures and warns against animal microbes spilling over into people.

THE TASTE OF WAR: World War II and the Battle for Food

By Lizzie Colling­ham. (Penguin Press, $36.) Collingham argues that food needs contributed to the war’s origins, strategy, outcome and aftermath.

THOMAS JEFFERSON: The Art of Power

By Jon Meacham. (Random House, $35.) This readable and well-researched life celebrates Jefferson’s skills as a practical politician, unafraid to wield power even when it conflicted with his small-government views.

VICTORY: The Triumphant Gay Revolution

By Linda Hirshman. (Harper/Har­perCollins, $27.99.) Written with knowing finesse, this expansive history of gay rights from the early 20th century to the present draws on archives and interviews.

WHEN GOD TALKS BACK: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God

By T. M. Luhrmann. (Knopf, $28.95.) Evangelicals believe that God speaks to them personally because they hone the skill of prayer, this insightful study argues.

WHY BE HAPPY WHEN YOU COULD BE NORMAL?

By Jeanette Winterson. (Grove, $25.) Winterson’s unconventional and winning memoir wrings humor from adversity as it describes her upbringing by a wildly deranged mother.

WHY DOES THE WORLD EXIST? An Existential Detective Story

By Jim Holt. (Liveright/Norton, $27.95.) An elegant and witty writer converses with philosophers and cosmologists who ponder why there is something rather than nothing.

A version of this article appeared in print on December 2, 2012, on page BR24 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: 100 Notable Books of 2012.

by nyt

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100 Notable Books of 2011

FICTION & POETRY

THE ANGEL ESMERALDA: Nine Stories

THE ART OF FIELDING

THE BARBARIAN NURSERIES

BIG QUESTIONS. Or, Asomatognosia: Whose Hand Is It Anyway?

THE BUDDHA IN THE ATTIC

CANTI

THE CAT’S TABLE

CHANGÓ’S BEADS AND TWO-TONE SHOES

COME ON ALL YOU GHOSTS

11/22/63

THE FREE WORLD

GHOST LIGHTS

THE GRIEF OF OTHERS

GRYPHON: New and Selected Stories

HOUSE OF HOLES: A Book of Raunch

THE LAST WEREWOLF

THE LEFTOVERS

LIFE ON MARS

THE LONDON TRAIN

LONG, LAST, HAPPY: New and Selected Stories

LOST MEMORY OF SKIN

THE MARRIAGE PLOT

A MOMENT IN THE SUN

MR. FOX

MY NEW AMERICAN LIFE

1Q84

OPEN CITY

THE PALE KING: An Unfinished Novel

PARALLEL STORIES

SAY HER NAME

SCENES FROM VILLAGE LIFE

THE SENSE OF AN ENDING

SEVEN YEARS

SHARDS

SPACE, IN CHAINS

STONE ARABIA

THE STRANGER’S CHILD

THE SUBMISSION

SWAMPLANDIA!

TALLER WHEN PRONE: Poems

TEN THOUSAND SAINTS

THIS BEAUTIFUL LIFE

THE TIGER’S WIFE

THE TRAGEDY OF ARTHUR

TRAIN DREAMS

NONFICTION

AND SO IT GOES. Kurt Vonnegut: A Life

ARGUABLY: Essays

THE ART OF CRUELTY: A Reckoning

ASSASSINS OF THE TURQUOISE PALACE

THE BEGINNING OF INFINITY: Explanations That Transform the World

BELIEVING IS SEEING: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography

THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE: Why Violence Has Declined

BLOOD, BONES AND BUTTER: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef

BLUE NIGHTS

THE BOY IN THE MOON: A Father’s Journey to Understand His Extraordinary Son

CARAVAGGIO: A Life Sacred and Profane

CATHERINE THE GREAT: Portrait of a Woman

CLARENCE DARROW: Attorney for the Damned

COCKTAIL HOUR UNDER THE TREE OF FORGETFULNESS

DESTINY OF THE REPUBLIC: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President

THE ECSTASY OF INFLUENCE: Nonfictions, Etc

1861: The Civil War Awakening

EXAMINED LIVES: From Socrates to Nietzsche

1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

GEORGE F. KENNAN: An American Life

GREAT SOUL: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India

HARLEM IS NOWHERE: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America

HOLY WAR: How Vasco da Gama’s Epic Voyages Turned the Tide in a Centuries-Old Clash of Civilizations

IN THE GARDEN OF BEASTS: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin

INFERNO: The World at War, 1939-1945

THE INFORMATION: A History

INSIDE SCIENTOLOGY: The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion

IS THAT A FISH IN YOUR EAR? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

JERUSALEM: The Biography

THE KEATS BROTHERS: The Life of John and George

KNOCKING ON HEAVEN’S DOOR: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World

MALCOLM X: A Life of Reinvention

THE MEMORY CHALET

MIDNIGHT RISING: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War

MOBY-DUCK: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers,

Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them

MY SONG: A Memoir

THE NET DELUSION: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom

ONE DAY I WILL WRITE ABOUT THIS PLACE: A Memoir

THE ORIGINS OF POLITICAL ORDER: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

PAULINE KAEL: A Life in the Dark

PULPHEAD

THE QUEST: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World

RIGHTS GONE WRONG: How Law Corrupts the Struggle for Equality

RIN TIN TIN: The Life and the Legend

[SIC]: A Memoir

THE STORM OF WAR: A New History of the Second World War

THE SWERVE: How the World Became Modern

THINKING, FAST AND SLOW.

TO A MOUNTAIN IN TIBET

TO END ALL WARS: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

A TRAIN IN WINTER: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France

VAN GOGH: The Life

WHO’S AFRAID OF POST-BLACKNESS? What It Means to Be Black Now

WHY THE WEST RULES — FOR NOW: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future

A WORLD ON FIRE: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War

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100 Notable Books of 2007
Fiction & Poetry
THE ABSTINENCE TEACHERBy Tom Perrotta. (St. Martin’s, $24.95.) In this new novel by the author of “Little Children,” a sex-ed teacher faces off against a church bent on ridding her town of “moral decay.”

AFTER DARKBy Haruki Murakami. Translated by Jay Rubin. (Knopf, $22.95.) A tale of two sisters, one awake all night, one asleep for months.

THE BAD GIRLBy Mario Vargas Llosa. Translated by Edith Grossman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) This suspenseful novel transforms “Madame Bovary” into a vibrant exploration of the urban mores of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s.

BEARING THE BODYBy Ehud Havazelet. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) In this daring first novel, a man travels to California after his brother is killed in what may have been a drug transaction.

THE BEAUTIFUL THINGS THAT HEAVEN BEARSBy Dinaw Mengestu. (Riverhead, $22.95.) A first novel about an Ethiopian exile in Washington, D.C., evokes loss, hope, memory and the solace of friendship.

BRIDGE OF SIGHSBy Richard Russo. (Knopf, $26.95.) In his first novel since “Empire Falls,” Russo writes of a small town in New York riven by class differences and racial hatred.

THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAOBy Junot Díaz. (Riverhead, $24.95.) A nerdy Dominican-American yearns to write and fall in love.

CALL ME BY YOUR NAMEBy André Aciman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.) Aciman’s novel of love, desire, time and memory describes a passionate affair between two young men in Italy.

CHEATING AT CANASTABy William Trevor. (Viking, $24.95.) Trevor’s dark, worldly short stories linger in the mind long after they’re finished.

THE COLLECTED POEMS, 1956-1998By Zbigniew Herbert. Translated by Alissa Valles. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $34.95.)Herbert’s poetry echoes the quiet insubordination of his public life.

DANCING TO “ALMENDRA.” By Mayra Montero. Translated by Edith Grossman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) Fact and fiction rub together in this rhythmic story of a reporter on the trail of the Mafia, set mainly in 1950s Cuba.

EXIT GHOSTBy Philip Roth. (Houghton Mifflin, $26.) In his latest novel Roth brings back Nathan Zuckerman, a protagonist whom we have known since his potent youth and who now must face his inevitable decline.

FALLING MANBy Don DeLillo. (Scribner, $26.) Through the story of a lawyer and his estranged wife, DeLillo resurrects the world as it was on 9/11, in all its mortal dread, high anxiety and mass confusion.

FELLOW TRAVELERSBy Thomas Mallon. (Pantheon, $25.) In Mallon’s seventh novel, a State Department official navigates the anti-gay purges of the McCarthy era.

A FREE LIFEBy Ha Jin. (Pantheon, $26.) The Chinese-born author spins a tale of bravery and nobility in an American system built on risk and mutual exploitation.

THE GATHERINGBy Anne Enright. (Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic, paper, $14.) An Irishwoman searches for clues to what set her brother on the path to suicide.

HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWSBy J. K. Rowling. (Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic, $34.99.) Rowling ties up all the loose ends in this conclusion to her grand wizarding saga.

HOUSE LIGHTSBy Leah Hager Cohen. (Norton, $24.95.) The heroine of Cohen’s third novel abandons her tarnished parents for the seductions of her grand-mother’s life in theater.

HOUSE OF MEETINGSBy Martin Amis. (Knopf, $23.) A Russian World War II veteran posthumously acquaints his stepdaughter with his grim past of rape and violence.

IN THE COUNTRY OF MENBy Hisham Matar. (Dial, $22.) The boy narrator of this novel, set in Libya in 1979, learns about the convoluted roots of betrayal in a totalitarian society.

THE INDIAN CLERKBy David Leavitt. (Bloomsbury, $24.95.) Leavitt explores the intricate relationship between the Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy and a poor, self-taught genius from Madras, stranded in England during World War I.

KNOTSBy Nuruddin Farah. (Riverhead, $25.95.) After 20 years, a Somali woman returns home to Mogadishu from Canada, intent on reclaiming a family house from a warlord.

LATER, AT THE BAR: A Novel in StoriesBy Rebecca Barry. (Simon & Schuster, $22.) The small-town regulars at Lucy’s Tavern carry their loneliness in “rough and beautiful” ways.

LET THE NORTHERN LIGHTS ERASE YOUR NAMEBy Vendela Vida. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $23.95.) A young woman searches for the truth about her parentage amid the snow and ice of Lapland in this bleakly comic yet sad tale of a child’s futile struggle to be loved.

LIKE YOU’D UNDERSTAND, ANYWAY: StoriesBy Jim Shepard. (Knopf, $23.) Shepard’s surprising tales feature such diverse characters as a Parisian executioner, a woman in space and two Nazi scientists searching for the yeti.

MAN GONE DOWNBy Michael Thomas. (Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic, paper, $14.) This first novel explores the fragmented personal histories behind four desperate days in a black writer’s life.

MATRIMONYBy Joshua Henkin. (Pantheon, $23.95.) Henkin follows a couple from college to their mid-30s, through crises of love and mortality.

THE MAYTREESBy Annie Dillard. (HarperCollins, $24.95.) A married couple find their way back to each other under unusual circumstances.

THE MINISTRY OF SPECIAL CASESBy Nathan Englander. (Knopf, $25.) A Jewish family is caught up in Argentina’s “Dirty War.”

MOTHERS AND SONS: StoriesBy Colm Toibin. (Scribner, $24.) In this collection by the author of “The Master,” families are not so much reassuring and warm as they are settings for secrets, suspicion and missed connections.

NEXT LIFEBy Rae Armantrout. (Wesleyan University, $22.95.) Poetry that conveys the invention, the wit and the force of mind that contests all assumptions.

ON CHESIL BEACHBy Ian McEwan. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $22.) Consisting largely of a single sex scene played out on a couple’s wedding night, this seeming novel of manners is as much a horror story as any McEwan has written.

OUT STEALING HORSESBy Per Petterson. Translated by Anne Born. (Graywolf Press, $22.) In this short yet spacious Norwegian novel, an Oslo professional hopes to cure his loneliness with a plunge into solitude.

THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALISTBy Mohsin Hamid. (Harcourt, $22.) Hamid’s chilling second novel is narrated by a Pakistani who tells his life story to an unnamed American after the attacks of 9/11.

REMAINDERBy Tom McCarthy. (Vintage, paper, $13.95.) In this debut, a Londoner emerges from a coma and seeks to reassure himself of the genuineness of his existence.

THE SAVAGE DETECTIVESBy Roberto Bolaño. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) A craftily autobiographical novel about a band of literary guerrillas.

SELECTED POEMSBy Derek Walcott. Edited by Edward Baugh. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) The Nobel Prize winner Walcott, who was born on St. Lucia, is a long-serving poet of exile, caught between two races and two worlds.

THE SEPTEMBERS OF SHIRAZBy Dalia Sofer. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $24.95.) In this powerful first novel, the father of a prosperous Jewish family in Tehran is arrested shortly after the Iranian revolution.

SHORTCOMINGSBy Adrian Tomine. (Drawn & Quarterly, $19.95.) The Asian-American characters in this meticulously observed comic-book novella explicitly address the way in which they handle being in a minority.

SUNSTROKE: And Other StoriesBy Tessa Hadley. (Picador, paper, $13.) These resonant tales encapsulate moments of hope and humiliation in a kind of shorthand of different lives lived.

THEN WE CAME TO THE ENDBy Joshua Ferris. (Little, Brown, $23.99.) Layoff notices fly in Ferris’s acidly funny first novel, set in a white-collar office in the wake of the dot-com debacle.

THROW LIKE A GIRL: StoriesBy Jean Thompson. (Simon & Schuster, paper, $13.) The women here are smart and strong but drawn to losers.

TIME AND MATERIALS: Poems, 1997-2005By Robert Hass. (Ecco/Harper-Collins, $22.95.) What Hass, a former poet laureate, has lost in Californian ease he has gained in stern self-restraint.

TREE OF SMOKEBy Denis Johnson. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) The author of “Jesus’ Son” offers a soulful novel about the travails of a large cast of characters during the Vietnam War.

TWENTY GRAND: And Other Tales of Love and MoneyBy Rebecca Curtis. (Harper Perennial, paper, $13.95.) In this debut collection, a crisp, blunt tone propels stories both surreal and realistic.

VARIETIES OF DISTURBANCE: Stories. By Lydia Davis. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, paper, $13.) Dispensing with straight narrative, Davis microscopically examines language and thought.

THE VIEW FROM CASTLE ROCK: StoriesBy Alice Munro. (Knopf, $25.95.) This collection offers unusually explicit reflections of Munro’s life.

WHAT IS THE WHAT. The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng: A NovelBy Dave Eggers. (McSweeney’s, $26.) The horrors, injustices and follies in this novel are based on the experiences of one of the Lost Boys of Sudan.

WINTERTON BLUEBy Trezza Azzopardi. (Grove, $24.) An unhappy young woman meets an even unhappier drifter.

THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN’S UNIONBy Michael Chabon. (HarperCollins, $26.95.) Cops, thugs, schemers, rabbis, chess fanatics and obsessives of every stripe populate this screwball, hard-boiled murder mystery set in an imagined Jewish settlement in Alaska.

Nonfiction

AGENT ZIGZAG: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and BetrayalBy Ben Macintyre. (Harmony, $25.95.) The exploits of Eddie Chapman, a British criminal who became a double agent in World War II.

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE: A LifeBy Hugh Brogan. (Yale University, $35.) Brogan’s combative biography takes issue with Tocqueville’s misgivings about democracy.

ALICE: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, From White House Princess to Washington Power BrokerBy Stacy A. Cordery. (Viking, $32.95.) A biography of Theodore Roosevelt’s shrewd, tart-tongued older daughter.

AMERICAN CREATION: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the RepublicBy Joseph J. Ellis. (Knopf, $26.95.) This history explores an underappreciated point: that this country was constructed to foster arguments, not to settle them.

THE ARGUMENT: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic PoliticsBy Matt Bai. (Penguin Press, $25.95.) An exhaustive account of the Democrats’ transformative efforts, by a political reporter for The New York Times Magazine.

ARSENALS OF FOLLY: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race. By Richard Rhodes. (Knopf, $28.95.) This artful history focuses on the events leading up to the pivotal 1986 Reykjavik summit meeting between Reagan and Gorbachev.

THE ART OF POLITICAL MURDER: Who Killed the Bishop? By Francisco Goldman. (Grove, $25.) The novelist returns to Guatemala, a major inspiration for his fiction, to try to solve the real-life killing of a Roman Catholic bishop.

BROTHER, I’M DYINGBy Edwidge Danticat. (Knopf, $23.95.) Danticat’s cleareyed prose and unflinching adherence to the facts conceal an undercurrent of melancholy in this memoir of her Haitian family.

CIRCLING MY MOTHERBy Mary Gordon. (Pantheon, $24.) Gordon’s deeply personal memoir focuses on the engaged and lively Catholicism of her mother, a glamorous career woman who was also an alcoholic with a body afflicted by polio. 

CLEOPATRA’S NOSE: 39 Varieties of DesireBy Judith Thurman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.95.) These surgically analytic essays of cultural criticism showcase themes of loss, hunger and motherhood.

CULTURAL AMNESIA: Necessary Memories From History and the ArtsBy Clive James. (Norton, $35.) Essays on 20th-century luminaries by one of Britain’s leading public intellectuals.

THE DAY OF BATTLE: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944. Volume Two of the Liberation TrilogyBy Rick Atkinson. (Holt, $35.) A celebration of the American experience in these campaigns.

THE DIANA CHRONICLESBy Tina Brown. (Doubleday, $27.50.) The former New Yorker editor details the sordid domestic drama that pitted the Princess of Wales against Britain’s royal family.

THE DISCOVERY OF FRANCE: A Historical Geography From the Revolution to the First World WarBy Graham Robb. (Norton, $27.95.) Robb presents France as a group of diverse regions, each with its own long history, intricate belief systems and singular customs.

DOWN THE NILE: Alone in a Fisherman’s SkiffBy Rosemary Mahoney. (Little, Brown, $23.99.) Mahoney juxtaposes her solo rowing journey with encounters with the Egyptians she met.

DRIVEN OUT: The Forgotten War Against Chinese AmericansBy Jean Pfaelzer. (Random House, $27.95.) How the Chinese were brutalized and demonized in the 19th-century American West — and how they fought back.

DUE CONSIDERATIONS: Essays and CriticismBy John Updike. (Knopf, $40.) Updike’s first nonfiction collection in eight years displays breathtaking scope as well as the author’s seeming inability to write badly.

EASTER EVERYWHERE: A MemoirBy Darcey Steinke. (Bloomsbury, $24.95.) A minister’s daughter confronts her own spiritual rootlessness.

EDITH WHARTONBy Hermione Lee. (Knopf, $35.) This meticulous biography shows Wharton’s significance as a designer, decorator, gardener and traveler, as well as a writer.

THE FATHER OF ALL THINGS: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of VietnamBy Tom Bissell. (Pantheon, $25.) Bissell mixes rigorous narrative accounts of the war and emotionally powerful scenes of the distress it brought his own family.

THE FLORIST’S DAUGHTERBy Patricia Hampl. (Harcourt, $24.) In her fifth and most powerful memoir, Hampl looks hard at her relationship to her Midwestern roots as her mother lies dying in the hospital.

FORESKIN’S LAMENT: A MemoirBy Shalom Auslander. (Riverhead, $24.95.) With scathing humor and bitter irony, Auslander wrestles with his Jewish Orthodox roots.

GOMORRAH: A Personal Journey Into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System. By Roberto Saviano. Translated by Virginia Jewiss. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) This powerful work of reportage started a national conversation in Italy when it was published there last year.

THE HOUSE THAT GEORGE BUILT: With a Little Help From Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About FiftyBy Wilfrid Sheed. (Random House, $29.95.) A rich homage to Gershwin, Berlin and other masters of the swinging jazz song.

HOW DOCTORS THINK. By Jerome Groopman. (Houghton Mifflin, $26.) Groopman takes a tough-minded look at the ways in which doctors and patients interact, and at the profound problems facing modern medicine.

HOW TO READ THE BIBLE: A Guide to Scripture, Then and NowBy James L. Kugel. (Free Press, $35.) In this tour through the Jewish scriptures (i.e., the Old Testament, more or less), a former professor of Hebrew seeks to reclaim the Bible from the literalists and the skeptics.

HOW TO TALK ABOUT BOOKS YOU HAVEN’T READBy Pierre Bayard. Translated by Jeffrey Mehlman. (Bloomsbury, $19.95.) A French literature professor wants to assuage our guilt over the ways we actually read and discuss books.

IMPERIAL LIFE IN THE EMERALD CITY: Inside Iraq’s Green ZoneBy Rajiv Chandrasekaran. (Knopf, $25.95.) The author, a Washington Post journalist, catalogs the arrogance and ineptitude that marked America’s governance of Iraq.

THE INVISIBLE CURE: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDSBy Helen Epstein. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) Rigorous reporting unearths new findings among the old issues.

LEGACY OF ASHES: The History of the CIABy Tim Weiner. (Doubleday, $27.95.) A comprehensive chronicle of the American intelligence agency, from the days of the Iron Curtain to Iraq, by a reporter for The New York Times.

LENI: The Life and Work of Leni RiefenstahlBy Steven Bach. (Knopf, $30.) How Hitler’s favorite director made “Triumph of the Will” and convinced posterity that she didn’t know what the Nazis were up to.

LEONARD WOOLF: A BiographyBy Victoria Glendinning. (Free Press, $30.) Glendinning shows Virginia Woolf’s accomplished husband as passionate, reserved and, above all, stoical.

A LIFE OF PICASSO: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932By John Richardson. (Knopf, $40.) The third, penultimate installment in Richardson’s biography spans a dauntingly complicated time in Picasso’s life and in European history.

LITTLE HEATHENS: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great DepressionBy Mildred Armstrong Kalish. (Bantam, $22.) Kalish’s soaring love for her childhood memories saturates this memoir, which coaxes the reader into joy, wonder and even envy.

LONG WAY GONE: Memoirs of a Boy SoldierBy Ishmael Beah. (Sarah Crichton/-Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22.) A former child warrior gives literary voice to the violence and killings he both witnessed and perpetrated during the Sierra Leone civil war.

THE NINE: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme CourtBy Jeffrey Toobin. (Doubleday, $27.95.) An erudite outsider’s account of the cloistered court’s inner workings.

THE ORDEAL OF ELIZABETH MARSH: A Woman in World HistoryBy Linda Colley. (Pantheon, $27.50.) Colley tracks the “compulsively itinerant” Marsh across the 18th century and several continents.

PORTRAIT OF A PRIESTESS: Women and Ritual in Ancient GreeceBy Joan Breton Connelly. (Princeton University, $39.50.) A scholar finds that religion meant power for Greek women.
RALPH ELLISON: A BiographyBy Arnold Rampersad. (Knopf, $35.) Ellison was seemingly cursed by his failure to follow up “Invisible Man.”


THE REST IS NOISE: Listening to the Twentieth CenturyBy Alex Ross. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30.) In his own feat of orchestration, The New Yorker’s music critic presents a history of the last century as refracted through its classical music.

SCHULZ AND PEANUTS: A BiographyBy David Michaelis. (Harper/ Harper-Collins, $34.95.) Actual “Peanuts” cartoons movingly illustrate this portrait of the strip’s creator, presented here as a profoundly lonely and unhappy man.

SERVICE INCLUDED: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping WaiterBy Phoebe Damrosch. (Morrow, $24.95.) A memoir about waiting tables at the acclaimed Manhattan restaurant Per Se.

SOLDIER’S HEART: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point. By Elizabeth D. Samet. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.) A civilian teacher at the Military Academy offers a significant perspective on a crucial social and political force: honor.

STANLEY: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest ExplorerBy Tim Jeal. (Yale University, $38.) Of the many biographies of Henry Morton Stanley, Jeal’s, which profits from his access to an immense new trove of material, is the most complete and readable.

THE STILLBORN GOD: Religion, Politics, and the Modern WestBy Mark Lilla. (Knopf, $26.) With nuance and complexity, Lilla examines how we managed to separate, in a fashion, church and state.

THOMAS HARDYBy Claire Tomalin. (Penguin Press, $35.) Tomalin presents Hardy as a fascinating case study in mid-Victorian literary sociology.

TOO CLOSE TO THE SUN: The Audacious Life and Times of Denys Finch HattonBy Sara Wheeler. (Random House, $27.95.) The story of the man immortalized in “Out of Africa.”

TWO LIVES: Gertrude and AliceBy Janet Malcolm. (Yale University, $25.) Sharp criticism meets playful, absorbing biography in this study of Stein and Toklas.

THE WHISPERERS: Private Life in Stalin’s RussiaBy Orlando Figes. (Metropolitan, $35.) An extraordinary look at the gulag’s impact on desperate individuals and families struggling to survive.

THE YEARS OF EXTERMINATION: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945By Saul Friedländer. (HarperCollins, $39.95.) Individual testimony and broader events are skillfully interwoven
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