The House of Meetings
Martin Amis (Knopf)
Angry Martin wrote the hell out of this novel—a Soviet gulag survivor's memoir to his daughter—and if by the end you aren't at least a little in love with a brute who “raped [his] way across what would soon be East Germany,” I'll buy you a bowl of borscht. —Jonathan Segura
The Archivist's Story
Travis Holland (Dial)
Moscow 1939; Soviet Russia in all its totalitarian glory. Two pages in, and I'm walking the snowy streets of Moscow filled with paranoia and the terror of life under Stalin. This first novel, with its flawed hero assigned to authenticate a manuscript confiscated from the imprisoned Isaac Babel, has the clout of those 19th-century Russian classics. —Louisa Ermelino
Dolce Italiano: Desserts from the Babbo Kitchen
Gina DePalma (Norton)
DePalma's Bittersweet Chocolate and Hazelnut Biscotti are amazing, and the Honey and Pine Nut Tart is delicious. But I knew this was my favorite cookbook of the year when I brought in a container of the Toasted Almond Gelato and my PW colleagues wiped it out before I could even have a taste. —Lynn Andriani
How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read
Pierre Bayard, trans. from the French by Jeffrey Mehlman (Bloomsbury)
If you haven't read this brief treatise on not reading, well, don't bother. All you need to know in order to talk about it is that French academic Bayard is smart, witty, absurd and astute in targeting both our pretensions and insecurities about appearing well read. —Sarah F. Gold
Heartsick
Chelsea Cain (St. Martin's Minotaur)
This suspense novel is the real deal—plenty of thrills, chills and, oh, yes, suspense, with an intense un-put-downable factor. The character development is unusually fine, and the twisted, creepy plot stays with you long past the final page. —Dick Donahue
The Best of the Best, Volume 2: 20 Years of the Best Short Science Fiction Novels
Edited by Gardner Dozois (St. Martin's Griffin)
This phenomenal anthology not only makes for nonstop enjoyable reading, with selections varying from the merely excellent to the truly magnificent, but also celebrates the frequently and unfairly overlooked short novel, which has quietly served as the backbone of speculative fiction since the pulp era. Anyone who wonders why the Hugos and Nebulas include a separate award for novellas need look no further than these exemplars of the form. —Rose Fox
Michael Tolliver Lives
Armistead Maupin (HarperCollins)
After 18 years, Maupin penned a seventh novel in his Tales of the City series and proved that you can go home again. It's tricky to try to pick up characters almost 20 years later (ask anyone who saw Mary Tyler Moore and Valerie Harper in the TV movie Mary and Rhoda), but Maupin proves he is still the master of mixing raunchy humor with heartwarming sentiment in a delightful rumination on love, life and family (both biological and “logical”). —Kevin Howell
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
Ishmael Beah (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
In sparse, affectless prose, Beah recounts his life as a child soldier during Sierra Leone's civil war of the 1990s—a tale that is harrowing, memorable and ultimately hopeful. Jon Stewart had it right: “This book hurt my heart.” —Robin Lenz
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You
Peter Cameron (Farrar, Straus & Giroux/Frances Foster)
Usually the invocation of Catcher in the Rye in praise of a coming-of-age novel telegraphs (to me, at least) that somebody hasn't read much YA (or hasn't read Catcher). But this time the flap copy doesn't lie—the narrator speaks in a voice you can't forget, and no matter how intractably alienated he seems to feel, Cameron gives you so many excuses to laugh that you too can shoulder his pain. —Elizabeth Devereaux
Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves
Sharon Begley (Ballantine)
This fascinating book highlights research on Buddhist monks that shows how the practice of meditation physically alters the brain. —Lynn Garrett
Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution
Pascale Casanova (Verso)
Casanova proposes a radical but well-reasoned new reading of the Nobel laureate, liberating Beckett from the existential, theater of the absurd camp by focusing on his diligent, career-long effort to produce truly abstract texts. Casanova argues that this effort culminates in the late text, “Worstward, Ho!” It's a fascinating thesis and Casanova makes a spirited and convincing case, though a “literary revolution” hardly ensued, there being nowhere to go, “nohow on.” —Michael Coffey
An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It
Al Gore (Rodale)
Whether you believe in global warming or not, An Inconvenient Truth will inspire. I was enthralled with the marriage of the practical, making an opportunity of a bad situation, and the imperative to “do the right thing.” Ignoring problems doesn't make them go away, and taking responsibility matters. Everyone can take something away from this book and change their lives, and the world, for the better. —Ted Olczak
Away
Amy Bloom (Random)
I'm not the biggest fan of Bloom's essays on gender and sexuality, and I skipped her previous fiction, Come to Me. But Away lived up to all the word-of-mouth hype it has been getting in my corner of the world: warm, funny, lusty and one of the most moving novels I read all year. —Sara Nelson
The Savage Detectives
Roberto Bolaño, trans. from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Having read the short stories in the New Yorker and one or two of the shorter books (Distant Star; Amulet; etc.) did not prepare me for this novel, which fuses youth, sex, poetry and politics in the catalytic converter of a Chevy Impala driven out of 1975 Mexico City. The 20 years that follow are something like The Canterbury Tales as elegy for 20th-century Latin America. Wimmer deserves an award for this one. —Michael Scharf
The Collected Poems
Zbignew Herbert (Ecco)
This colossal book finally makes clear to American readers the reasons why this late Polish poet is a major 20th-century figure. What makes it even better is the chance to see a panoramic view of Herbert's intimate, mischievous imagination, as comfortable in pseudoconfessional lyrics as in war-torn fables. These poems are as fun as they are haunting. —Craig Morgan Teicher
The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible
A.J. Jacobs (Simon & Schuster)
There aren't many religion books I would actually read on the beach, but this quirky, unexpected memoir was funny and wise enough to make me bring it on vacation. —Jana Riess
The Troubled Roar of the Waters: Vermont in Flood and Recovery, 1927—1931
Deborah Pickman Clifford & Nicholas R. Clifford (Univ. of New Hampshire)
As a fan of H.P. Lovecraft (1890—1937), I eagerly sought out this scholarly study of “the historic and unprecedented Vermont floods of November 3, 1927,” the starting point for “The Whisperer in Darkness,” Lovecraft's great tale of alien intrusion. While the authors mention “Whisperer” only in passing, their sober and incisive assessment of this natural disaster and the state's response to it provides plenty of context—social, cultural and political—for Lovecraft's supernatural shenanigans. —Peter Cannon
Photo by Sammy Davis, Jr.
Burt Boyar (Harper Entertainment)
Imagine flipping through a decade's worth of candid photos of your closest friends—except your friends are Jerry Lewis, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Nat King Cole, Kim Novak, Marilyn Monroe and Martin Luther King Jr. Compiled by Davis biographer Boyar, this is a moving collection of photos taken by the entertainer “who did it all.” —Mark Rotella
On Chesil Beach
Ian McEwan (Doubleday)
This story of two virgins dealing with wedding night jitters has more tension than any crime thriller. McEwan masterfully packs universal themes of desire, fear and regret into this slim book. —Karen Holt
The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
Dinaw Mengestu (Riverhead)
Mengestu's debut novel captures the immigrant experience through an aging Ethiopian refugee living in Washington, D.C., telling a deceptively simple story about how hope—in the form of a precocious but likable little girl and her aloof mother—revives the narrator's depressed spirit even as it fails his heart. —Elyssa East
Down the Nile: Alone in a Fisherman's Skiff
Rosemary Mahoney (Little, Brown)
Mahoney is one of the best American writers alive today. In Down the Nile, Mahoney takes the reader on an adventure into Egypt and gives a unique look into the Arab/Muslim psyche that Americans are rarely exposed to. Mahoney shares her fears and triumphs as she battles Egyptian taboos against women, especially one brave enough to navigate the Nile alone. —Dermot McEvoy
The Missing
Sarah Langan (Harper)
This year I said good-bye to the Mass Market reviews beat, and gems like Sarah Langan's sophomore effort are the main reason I was reluctant to give up the post. Though it owes a debt to Stephen King (beginning with its smalltown Maine setting), this plague o'zombies epic matches King's best for vivid characters, creeping dread, over-the-top gore, twisted sex and general mayhem. Even better, it expands on the world established in her 2006 debut (The Keeper) and promises much more to come. —Marc Schultz
Shooting War
Anthony Lappe with art by Dan Goldman (Grand Central)
By turns prescient, horrific and bleakly hilarious, this graphic novel re-creates the mess of the Iraq war with chilling verisimilitude. It's the story of Jimmy Burns, a hipster/video blogger catapulted to fame for his coverage of the terrorist bombing of a Brooklyn Starbucks, who gets an offer to be a real war correspondent. Besides showing us once again that war is truly hell, Lappe and Goldman convincingly use Dan Rather and John McCain as characters and end the book with a devilishly clever Jihadist/cyberpunk twist. —Calvin Reid
Shortcomings
Adrian Tomine (Drawn & Quarterly)
Tomine comes of age as an author in this discomfiting graphic novel about an aging Gen-X slacker with female woes that drag him from San Francisco to Brooklyn. Tomine delivers a lacerating take on race and identity in America. It doesn't hurt that the whole thing looks as good as it reads. —Rachel Deahl
The Unforgiving Years
Victor Serge, trans. from the French by Richard Greeman (New York Review Books)
What were those Communist revolutionaries really thinking in the 1930s and '40s? Serge's novel of intrigue shows them struggling to reconcile idealism with the realities of Soviet power. Sophisticated meditations on the ends and means of social and political revolution bring us to the heart of personal responsibility (“How did we—insurgent, united, uplifted, and victorious—bring about the opposite of what we wanted to do?”) amid vibrant descriptions of cities in war and peace. —Sonia Jaffe Robbins
Bookhunter
Jason Shiga (Sparkplug Comics)
Card catalogues meet CSI when a team of book detectives must track down a missing book in this tour de force of hard-boiled minimalism. Shiga uses the actual theft of a rare book from the Oakland Public Library in 1973 as the basis for a suspenseful, always surprising graphic novel. —Heidi MacDonald
Freak Show
James St. James (Dutton)
Every high school should have someone like St. James's fabulously manic hero, Billy Bloom, who is unabashedly true to himself—in this case, through elaborate drag personae and equally over-the-top narration. This Cinderella story struck me as far more than a simple gender bender: it's a portrait of real courage. —John Sellers
Out Stealing Horses
Per Petterson, trans. by Anne Born (Graywolf)
Norwegian Petterson's elegant, sparse prose perfectly evokes a long-ago summer in the woods where boys become men, losing fathers, friends and innocence along the way. There's nothing forgiving about this melancholy landscape, but it makes for a strangely cathartic read. —Jordan Foster
