In all likelihood, posterity will view 2008 as an iconic American year—not unlike, say, 1929 or 1968, for which the numbers themselves convey a deeply complex national experience. At year’s end, we asked PW staffers to choose one book they read during this tumultuous, historic year that they would care to recommend or simply praise. At Publishers Weekly we reviewed more than 6,000 titles last year; here are 27 that we thought worth another mention.
Joker
Brian Azzarello and Lee Bermejo (DC Comics)
Although created before the release of the hit film The Dark Knight, this graphic novel is both eerily reminiscent of Heath Ledger’s performance and utterly impressive in its own right. Relentlessly malevolent and morbidly funny, the Azzarello/Bermejo Joker is a brilliantly creepy evocation of Batman’s worst enemy. Not for the kiddies.
—Calvin Reid
Watching the Spring Festival
Frank Bidart (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Bidart’s poems are intense to the point of nearly setting the paper they’re printed on aflame. Nothing short of paying superhuman, all-consuming attention to one’s own thoughts tells as much about what it’s like to live inside a contemporary mind.
—Craig Morgan Teicher
In the Land of No Right Angles
Daphne Beal (Anchor)
A naïve young American photographer who spent a year traveling through Nepal returns several years later to find that the country and the people she loved have changed, and so has she. Debut author Beal’s lush descriptions and haunting tale capture the beauty and ambiguity of a very foreign land. —Robin Lenz
The Hunger Games
Suzanne Collins (Scholastic)
Imagine Survivor, with kids, televised in real time with the entire country watching. And instead of being voted off the island, you’re locked in a death match till the last kid is left standing. For a sheer thrill ride that’s bound to hook teens and adults, and for its mordant social commentary, this novel gets my vote. —Diane Roback
Masterpiece
Elise Broach, illus.by Kelly Murphy (Holt/Ottaviano)
Everything I like best in a middle-grade novel is here, in just about perfect balance: secret friendships, miniature worlds awaiting discovery, mysteries wrapped around real-life art and artists, and a main character unusually deserving of the adventure he finds. —Elizabeth Devereaux
The 19th Wife
David Ebershoff (Random)
As the great-grandson of a polygamous Mormon, I relished this dual saga, which alternates between the present-day story of a son’s efforts to prove his mother innocent of his polygamous father’s murder and the historical tale of Eliza Young, one of Brigham Young’s real-life wives, the only one to divorce him. While the author takes almost as much care as Wallace Stegner in Mormon Country to present the Latter-Day Saints fairly, he makes clear the church’s antigay bias. —Peter Cannon
Atmospheric Disturbances
Rivka Galchen (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Waking one day to find that his young Argentinean wife, Rena, has been replaced by an exact duplicate, an introspective New York psychiatrist sets out on a quixotic quest to find the original. Joined by a patient who believes he can control the weather, our middle-aged narrator travels to Buenos Aires, gleaning strange clues from dubious characters and complicated meteorological research. Galchen’s remarkably assured debut is not just funny, passionate, idiosyncratic and original, but her observations on love and memory prove wise beyond her years.—Marc Schultz
Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood
Mark Harris (Penguin Press)
A sensationally entertaining film history that is compulsively readable and filled with juicy, revelatory anecdotes from brand-new interviews with the participants. Attention, thrifty film buffs: this irresistible, beautifully researched gem comes out in paperback on January 27.
—Kevin Howell
Obama’s Challenge: America’s Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency
Robert Kuttner (Chelsea Green)
In readable, persuasive prose, Kuttner explains how transformative presidents—Lincoln, FDR, and LBJ—lead. Then he offers the many teachable moments President Obama can use to transform the U.S. into a country with health care for all, good jobs with good wages, secure financial markets and an understanding that good tax policy supports government that works for everyone, not just the rich. —Sonia Jaffe Robbins
The Private Patient: An Adam Dalgliesh Mystery
P.D. James (Knopf)
At 88, Dame James suggests that The Private Patient might bring the Dalgliesh series to a close. Should this be true, then it is a profoundly fitting and satisfying end. The inspector, like his creator, seems to have reached a marvelous milestone in his life, where wisdom, acceptance and a sense of well-being are in mutual agreement at the end of this complex and fully realized tale. —Wendy Werris
Shadow Country
Peter Matthiessen (Modern Library)
Matthiessen’s reworking of three previous novels into one magisterial epic, ostensibly about the settling of the rugged Everglades in the early 1900s, is perhaps our greatest fictional meditation on the American character. The central figure, Edgar Watson, is literally red, white and blue—his fiery auburn hair, white skin and bright blues eyes become the image of American charm, utter ruthlessness and pioneering genius, the legacy of which we are still untangling today. —Michael Coffey
Redeemed: A Spiritual Misfit Stumbles Toward God, Marginal Sanity, and the Peace That Passes All Understanding
Heather King (Viking)
King, who told of her battles with booze in Parched, returns with her tale of finding true meaning in her life through her conversion to Catholicism. Her quixotic quest is devout, heart-wrenching and, at times, laugh-out-loud funny. —Dermot McEvoy
To Siberia
Per Petterson, trans. by Anne Born (Graywolf Press)
The author of Out Stealing Horses explores the lost innocence of a child and a country on the eve of Germany’s invasion of Denmark, and its aftermath, in deceptively simple, poetic prose. The narrator, an unnamed 60-year-old woman, looks back on the older brother she adored, their grandfather’s suicide, their piano-playing mother’s harsh Christianity, the chilling cold and their very different dreams of escape, hers to Siberia. —Judith Rosen
Day
A.L. Kennedy (Knopf)
The book—about former RAF tail-gunner Alfred Day, who relives his WWII POW experience years later on a movie set—is dark and sad and uncomfortable and all that great stuff, but the kicker here is Kennedy moonlights as a stand-up comic. Or maybe everyone except me knew that.—Jonathan Segura
Occupational Hazards
Jonathan Segura (Simon & Schuster)
The audacious debut novel by PW’s deputy reviews editor follows beat reporter Bernard Cockburn through the gritty streets of Omaha, Neb. This cross between dark comedy and present-day noir will render readers laughing through discomfort. Segura’s characters are genuine badasses—people you’d never want to meet in an empty dive but can’t stop reading about. —Juan Martinez
An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination: A Memoir
Elizabeth McCracken (Little, Brown)
Could the story of the death of a child only days before his birth be considered a must read? In this case, a resounding yes. McCracken takes the tragedy and turns herself inside out in the telling, with humor, pathos and joy.—Louisa Ermelino
Outliers: The Story of Success
Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown)
So unlike me to pick a nonfiction favorite, but this discussion of success—why some have it and some don’t—has both the surprise and the inevitability of the best novels. It tells you what you probably always knew, except that you never thought of it quite this way before. —Sara Nelson
Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin
Kenny Shopsin and Carolynn Carreno (Knopf)
Four words (actually three and a half): mac ’n cheese pancakes. Also, this is one of the most fun cookbooks I’ve read in a long time. Oh, and it looks fantastic, too. —Lynn Andriani
The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life
Alice Schroeder (Bantam)
Not a step-by-step business book, but a refreshing down-to-earth business biography as told by Schroeder. Buffett’s fascinating and principled philosophy that propelled every aspect of his life to become our nation’s wealthiest businessmen is a page-turner. —Ted Olczak
The Gargoyle
Andrew Davidson (Doubleday)
True love transcends the boundaries of time and existence, as Davidson weaves together stories within the story of a patient in a Los Angeles hospital burn unit who is befriended by a possibly schizophrenic sculptor, who reveals their past lives as doomed lovers, beginning in medieval Germany, and continuing down through the centuries, all the way to the present. —Claire Kirch
Half a Crown
Jo Walton (Tor)
I rarely cry over books, but I was sobbing by the time I reached the end of this powerful, heart-wrenching tale of a Nazi-influenced 1960s London, jointly narrated by a gay police detective blackmailed into entering politics and a young woman on the verge of her debut. The combination of a stark warning against the temptations of fascism and a charming English coming-of-age story is certainly unorthodox, but Walton pulls them together in vivid moments of love and loss, secrecy and faith that would ring true in any real or imagined setting. —Rose Fox
Cat Eyed Boy
Kazuo Umezu (Viz)
The mysterious Cat Eyed Boy narrates disturbing tales of unrepentant monsters, aliens and eerie forces. Yet Japanese horror master Umezu makes it clear that sometimes ordinary people are the greatest horror of all.—Heidi MacDonald
Reborn: Journals and Notebooks 1947—1963
Susan Sontag (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Enigmatic, epigrammatic and astounding in its candor, the first volume of Sontag’s private journals is a stunning self-portrait of the artist as a young woman. These records of a keenly self-aware intellectual, emotional and erotic flowering are a literary feast. —Parul Sehgal
Breath
Tim Winton (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
For a surfer, the average ride on a wave—the high—lasts mere seconds. And for two loner Australian boys, that thrill is taken to exceedingly dangerous, transformative levels when they meet a reclusive surfer in his 30s and his wife. Like that wave, the book’s ride is relatively brief but immensely powerful. —Mark Rotella
Sarah’s Key
Tatiana de Rosnay (St. Martin’s Griffin)
A haunting, riveting novel about the 1942 roundup by French police of Parisian Jews, described by 10-year-old Sarah, juxtaposed with the story of an American journalist living in France assigned to do a story on the 60th anniversary. This book grabs your heart in the opening chapter, and its scenes and characters stay with you long after you finish. —Daisy Maryles
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
David Wroblewski (Ecco)
In a PW interview, debut author Wroblewski said he wrote this stunning work “to learn how to write a novel.” Go to the head of the class, sir. Reviews have calledSawtelle an elaborate boy-and-his-dog story and have noted similarities to Hamlet.But in fact it’s sui generis, a haunting family saga that doesn’t relax its grip until the final emotion-packed pages. —Dick Donahue
