Chosen from the nearly 9,000 reviews, PW's 101 Best Books of 2013 span all the adult genres -- nonfiction; fiction; poetry; religion; mysteries and thrillers; cookbooks and lifestyle; health; parenting; crafts and hobbies; comics and graphic novels; science fiction, fantasy and horror; and romance and erotica.
The top 10 books, which PW does not rank, include the novels The Good Lord Bird by James McBride (Riverhead), The Silence and the Roar by Nihad Sirees (Other Press), Sea of Hooks by Lindsay Hill (McPherson & Co.), The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara (Doubleday) and A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra (Random/Hogarth).
Nonfiction titles in the top 10 include Dirty Wars by Jeremy Scahill (Nation Books), Lost Girls by Robert Kolker (Harper), Miss Anne in Harlem by Carla Kaplan (Harper), Going Clear by Lawrence Wright (Knopf) and Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward (Bloomsbury).
This year’s selection “rewards the famous as well as the undiscovered,” according to PW v-p and reviews editor Louisa Ermelino. She added that PW “avoids popularity contests, aiming instead for a wide-reaching spectrum of books,” noting that the top 10 includes a translation from the Arabic, The Silence and the Roar, from the independent publisher Other Press.
