PW Best Books 2011

Check out our Best Books Web app for a fun and interactive version of this year's best books, featuring reviews, author interviews and more. And click here for our 40 top children's books.

We all love numbers, rankings, and lists; herald the best of anything, and we're seduced. After Bo Derek walked down the beach in her blonde cornrows, it was all about being a "10." At PW, we get to pick our "10," the books published this year that stayed with us, that we talked up, handed around, and of course argued about among ourselves. This year we were quiet: we weren't drinking, we didn't come anywhere near to blows, and Rose Fox, our fantasy, science fiction, and romance editor, got her slot in the Top 10 with Maureen McHugh's After the Apocalypse, a wild and wicked story collection taking on the future. We didn't, however, abandon the famous (the National Book Awards took care of them). The reviews staff was generally crazy for Eugenides's The Marriage Plot (our newest editor, Jessamine Chan, went to Brown, but she didn't tell us until later), and Ann Patchett's bestselling State of Wonder got on for being just terrific, while Tina Fey (Bossypants) is our celebrity who can write (and part of a backstory that we won't reveal). We paid tribute to the big guns taking on the big guns: Robert Massie's Catherine the Great, Paul Hendrickson's Hemingway's Boat, and Christopher Hitchens being himself in Arguably, his collected essays. But we also reached out with Donald Ray Pollock's heart-racing The Devil All the Time, Ali Smith and her disconcerting party guest (There but for the) and Kenyan Binyavanga Wainaina's coming-of-age, One Day I Will Write About This Place.

—Louisa Ermelino

Like many of the heroines of the Victorian novels she favors, Madeleine Hanna, Brown University class of 1982 English major, must choose between men: the hungry wanderer Mitchell Grammaticus or the brilliant but troubled Leonard Bankhead. Madeleine goes with the latter, sidelining her own intellectual pursuits in favor of riding a manic depressive's roller-coaster through the dawn of semiotics, post-structuralism, identity politics, and psychopharmacology. A coming-of-age novel that's as unapologetically erudite as it is funny, fun, and profound.

Take a man from Ohio who's worked blue collar, send him for an M.F.A., and set him loose. Pollock, whose debut collection, Knockemstiff, was a knockout, strikes again with a terrifying cast of rural characters: the haunted WWII veteran, the husband and wife serial killers who target young men along the Interstate, the predatory revival preacher and his wheelchair-bound guitar-playing cousin, all tied together with violence, sin, and gorgeous prose into a mesmerizing slice of Americana.

by Ann Patchett (Harper)

The best two female adversaries in recent memory cut a swath through the Amazon rain forest in Patchett's exotic, intelligent, ambitious, and engaging novel. A straitlaced, sincere research scientist from Minnesota is sent to find and assess the progress of the unorthodox septuagenarian doctor who's gone native while on a fact-finding mission to extend female fertility.

by Maureen McHugh (Small Beer)

Incisive, contemporary, and always surprising, McHugh's second collection confronts near-future life with an ironic and particular eye. Her characters live with zombies, struggle to make ends meet on the Arizona–Mexico border, and cope with China's descent into capitalism in stories that stretch the boundaries of imagination.

by Tina Fey (Little, Brown/Reagan Arthur)

We know Fey's wit from her writing (and acting) in SNL, 30 Rock, and whatever movie she stars in, but she adds to her wit a disarmingly frank and uncensored account of her life, stitching together the serious and the comic.

by Robert K. Massie (Random)

Pulitzer-winning biographer Massie—of Nicholas and Alexandra and of Peter the Great—now relates the life of a German princess, Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst, who became Empress Catherine II of Russia. Once again Massie delivers, with this masterful, intimate, and tantalizing portrait of a majestic monarch.

by Ali Smith (Pantheon)

One night at an unruly dinner party, a guest named Miles goes upstairs, locks himself in the spare bedroom, and refuses to come out—for months. Smith uses this absurd bit of theater to explore some serious issues, privacy (reference is made to the U.K.'s carpet of CCTV cameras) and authenticity among them. But it's the author's effortlessly inventive form (narration comes from four different characters, none of whom knows Miles well), and her playful, breathlessly ebullient style that make this book a gem.

by Paul Hendrickson (Knopf)

There's never been a biography quite like this one. Hendrickson covers Papa's rise and fall by focusing on his most steadfast companion: his boat, Pilar. She was the stage on which Hemingway fished, brawled, wrote his novels, ranted about his poor reviews, raised his sons, and seduced other men's wives. The stories are rich with contradiction and humanity, and so raw and immediate you can smell the salt air.

by Binyavanga Wainaina (Graywolf)

A Kenyan Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, this sublime word-drunk memoir from the Caine Prize–winning author describes a coming-of-age rent by political troubles and suffused by a love affair with language.

by Christopher Hitchens (Hachette/Twelve)

As a political, cultural, and literary critic, Hitchens stands alone, as demonstrated by this major collection of mostly recent essays and reviews covering a range of topics, from America's founding fathers to the state of the English language. You don't always have to agree with this fearless polemicist to appreciate his erudite mind.

FICTION

The Wandering Falcon

Jamil Ahmad (Riverhead)

Born in Punjab in 1931, Ahmad wrote the pages that would become his delayed debut while working for the Pakistani Civil Service at outposts in the remote Federally Administered Tribal Areas where Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan meet. Hidden away for 30 years and unearthed by his family, the novel is a captivating wonder that illuminates the harsh difficulties of life in this region.

The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine

Alina Bronsky, trans. from the German by Tim Mohr (Europa)

Over three decades behind the Iron Curtain, a “perfect” (read powerful and relentless) Tartar matriarch narrates the hilarious and tragic story of her efforts to control her daughter and granddaughter as they attempt to flee her influence.

The Sisters Brothers

Patrick DeWitt (Ecco)

The Commodore wants Hermann Kermit Warm dead. And brothers Eli and Charlie Sisters, loving, bickering, and feared, are given the job for one reason: they are very good at killing. This darkly comic, expertly crafted picaresque western tracks their unsteady progress atop loyal horses Nimble and Tub (poor Tub), as gold fever grips the west and the brothers struggle to stay sober, ride side-by-side, and complete their dirty job.

Say Her Name

Francisco Goldman (Grove)

Goldman, whose young wife, Aura, like the Aura of the story, died an untimely death after a tragic surf accident on Mexico’s western coast, calls his book fiction, an audacious and brilliant choice. A New Yorker excerpt solidified it as a “grief novel,” but it’s much more: a tender revelation of May-December love and marriage and the coincidences and arbitrariness of life.

Volt

Alan Heathcock (Graywolf)

In eight tough, tight stories, Heathcock descends into an unforgiving world of hardship and hurt. Recalling Daniel Woodrell’s Ozarks and Donald Ray Pollock’s Knockemstiff County, these tales unfold with Heathcock’s very own grim economy, which can find a man’s life altered terribly in the span of a single paragraph.

The Stranger’s Child

Alan Hollinghurst (Knopf)

The Booker Prize–winning author’s new novel covers a century and traces a love triangle torn from the pages of Brideshead Revisited, though at least one side of the triangle is addressed more directly than Waugh did in his classic tale. With ambition and scope Hollinghurst uses a “love in wartime” narrative to explore the deep and wildly complicated connections between memory and what passes for history.

Train Dreams

Dennis Johnson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

This astoundingly assured, pared down, and self-contained gem traces the life of Robert Grainer, a hard, unlucky man who earns his living with his hands as the 20th century unfolds. By pursuing Grainer over several decades of ups and downs, Johnson tracks America’s crawl to the top.

Changó’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes

William Kennedy (Viking)

Writers turn to important moments in history for their fiction all the time, but Kennedy has borne personal witness to the epic moments he writes about in Changó. Set during the Cuban revolution as well as on the day that Robert Kennedy was shot, the seventh book in the Albany cycle showcases a writer in his 80s working at the top of his game.

The Night Circus

Erin Morgenstern (Doubleday)

An enchanting, extravagantly imaginative debut with a traveling night circus as the setting for the progeny of two magicians to compete and, thickening the plot, fall in love. The secret is, the magic is real.

The Call

Yannick Murphy (Harper)

Boldly and playfully told in the form of a rural veterinarian’s bullet-pointed log that shouldn’t be anywhere near as sustainable as it is, Murphy’s novel is effortless and absorbing. Almost daily calls—“a woman needs her horse’s teeth floated”—bring work, healing, food, errands, death, travel, and contemplation on manure, the efficacy of ponchos, time travel, and more. Life unfolds along pretty quotidian lines until the vet catches a glimpse of strange objects in the sky on his way from giving a sheep its shots.

The Tiger’s Wife

Téa Obreht (Random)

An escaped zoo tiger and a man who seems impervious to death stalk the impressive debut of “20 under 40” youngster Obreht, in which Natalia Stefanovi, a doctor living in an unnamed country much like the author’s native Croatia, crosses the border in search of answers about her late beloved grandfather, also a doctor.

Scenes of Village Life

Amos Oz (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

In interlocking stories that ask as many questions as they answer, Oz shows the moral decay of an Israeli pioneer village that has devolved into a playground of the nouveau rich.

Cain

José Saramago (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

In his masterful final novel, Nobel Prize–winner Saramago (1922–2010) sends the biblical Cain on adventures through the stories of the sacred book, all the while arguing with his God. A thunder bolt, and pure Saramago.

Luminarium

Alex Shakar (Soho)

Dense, thoughtful, and humorous, Shakar’s first novel is an alternate history that slyly showcases the ridiculousness of life right now. The tale is framed around two brothers—one brilliant and comatose, the other adrift after their tech startup was wrestled away. This enticing stew envelops ideas of spirituality, virtual reality, disaster simulation, utopia, and, yes, September 11, 2001.

Someday This Will Be Funny

Lynne Tillman (Red Lemonade)

With these formally inventive and linguistically nimble stories, Tillman tackles the strangeness of sex and love (and news events including, surprisingly, Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings) with considerable intellect and sly humor.

I Married You for Happiness

Lily Tuck (Grove)

A woman looks back on a long marriage as she spends the night at the bedside of her newly dead husband. Tuck brings together the tenderness and the conflicts of love and conjoined life in a beautiful frame of memory.

Leche

R. Zamora Linmark (Coffee House)

A wildly energetic and irreverent view of the modern-day Philippines as seen through the eyes of a native son who returns after 13 years in the U.S.

POETRY

Touch

Henri Cole (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

The stunningly intimate expression of a master poet confronting lost love, lost loved ones, and the dangers of loving, in the sonnet form he’s made his own.

Space, in Chains

Laura Kasischke (Copper Canyon)

Never before have poems of motherhood and domesticity—among many other things—seemed so strange, sharp, and haunting.

The Cold War

Kathleen Ossip (Sarabande)

Essayistic poems and poetic essays come together in this collection, which takes stock of dire political and personal situations in the age of information overload.

Life on Mars

Tracy K. Smith (Graywolf)

Riffing on David Bowie, Smith’s poems keep waking up into a world not their own that’s also home.

Devotions

Bruce Smith (Univ. of Chicago)

Everywhere he looks in these powerful, extemporaneous poems, Smith finds, if not God, something holy in the most profane sense of the word.

MYSTERY/THRILLER

The End of Everything

Megan Abbott (Little, Brown/Reagan Arthur)

This psychological thriller charts the friendship of two 13-year-old girls in pre-cellphone suburban America, one of whom disappears a few weeks before their eighth-grade graduation.

Started Early, Took My Dog

Kate Atkinson (Little, Brown/Reagan Arthur)

Semiretired PI Jackson Brody returns to his Yorkshire hometown to trace the biological parents of a woman adopted in the 1970s, but finds only questions in this intensely plotted, multilayered novel.

Revenger

Rory Clements (Bantam)

John Shakespeare, the playwright’s older brother and spy, seeks the truth behind the mysterious disappearance of the colonists of Roanoke, Va., in this first-rate Tudor historical full of intricate plots.

Hurt Machine

Reed Farrell Coleman (Tyrus)

Razor-edged contemporary whodunits don’t get much better than Coleman’s seventh Moe Prager mystery, in which the Brooklyn PI, recently diagnosed with cancer, looks into the stabbing murder of his ex-wife’s estranged sister.

A Simple Act of Violence

R.J. Ellory (Overlook)

A must-read for noir fans, this crime thriller charts the efforts of Det. Robert Miller to catch a serial killer strangling women in an upscale Washington, D.C., neighborhood.

Field Gray

Philip Kerr (Putnam/Marian Wood)

Set in 1954 with flashbacks to the 1930s and ’40s, Kerr’s outstanding seventh Bernie Gunther novel finds the tough, wisecracking Berlin cop under interrogation by the U.S. authorities for his role in saving the life of the future East German spy master, the real-life Erich Mielke.

The Most Dangerous Thing

Laura Lippman (Morrow)

Childhood friends, long since splintered off, uneasily reunite after the death of one of their own, in this unsettling stand-alone from Lippman, who sets the action in the Baltimore suburb where she grew up.

A Trick of the Light

Louise Penny (Minotaur)

Chief Inspector Gamache of the Québec Sûreté and his team look into the mysterious death of a woman—found with a broken neck in the garden of artist Clara Morrow—in this subtle seventh entry in this acclaimed traditional series.

Two for Sorrow

Nicola Upson (Harper)

Upson upsets readers’ expectations with a surprise three-quarters into her psychologically rich third Josephine Tey mystery, in which the author of The Daughter of Time draws inspiration for her novel-in-progress from the 1903 execution of two women convicted for murdering babies.

ROMANCE

The Secret Mistress

Mary Balogh (Delacorte)

This delectable Regency reminds readers why Balogh is one of the foremost romance novelists of our time. An adorable pairing of a breathless, insecure debutante and a noble but nerdy earl is elevated by well-drawn secondary characters and abundant, colorful period details.

No Proper Lady

Isabel Cooper (Sourcebooks Casablanca)

A warrior from the future travels to Victorian England, where she falls in love with a magician who can help her destroy the demons that plague her dystopian time. Cooper’s synergy of science fiction and historical romance could—and, we hope, will—spawn an entire new subgenre.

Scandalous Desires:

A Maiden Lane Novel

Elizabeth Hoyt (Grand Central)

In Hoyt’s third novel of passion and drama in the 18th-century London slums, a widow who runs a foundling home helps a notorious pirate rediscover his ability to love. Historical accuracy, including an unflinching look at poverty and politics, sets this series well above its fellows.

Angel’s Rest:

An Eternity Springs Novel

Emily March (Ballantine)

March (a pseudonym for Geralyn Dawson) breathes new life into the contemporary cozy romance with this sweet but never cloying tale, set in a small town where romance is bolstered by true friendship and community.

Fitzwilliam Darcy, Rock Star

Heather Lynn Rigaud (Sourcebooks Landmark)

Rigaud’s entertaining fan fiction for Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice deserves its promotion to paperback. Austen fans looking for something new will thrill to see familiar characters in a modern setting with a pounding backbeat and electrified vibe.

SF/FANTASY/

HORROR

Zoo City

Lauren Beukes (Angry Robot)

Beukes’s smashing second novel is set in a near future where perpetrators of terrible crimes acquire strange powers and magical animal companions. The seamless inversion of one of fantasy’s best-loved tropes is perfectly suited to the gritty Johannesburg setting and haunted, compelling heroine.

Triptych

J.M. Frey (Dragon Moon)

Debut author Frey knocks it out of the park with a remarkable tale of alien refugees, time travel, intrigue, the pervasive madness of grief, and love that transcends culture, gender, and species. Classic science fiction elements are smoothly updated for a modern audience.

Unpossible

Daryl Gregory (Fairwood)

The knockout debut collection for fabulist Gregory, whose novels are often unjustly overlooked, proves that short stories make equally good homes for his quiet prose and twisted imagination, as well as the strange notions and subtle terrors he mines from the deepest crannies of the human psyche.

Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan, Vol. 1

Caitlín R. Kiernan (Subterranean)

This hefty, astonishing collection showcases the best of Kiernan’s consistently excellent and relentlessly unclassifiable short fiction, and makes many accessible to those unfortunate readers who haven’t been following Kiernan’s career from the beginning.

Erekos

A.M. Tuomala (Candlemark & Gleam)

When a witch turns her beloved dead sister into a zombi[sic], the local king insists that she raise him an army of the undead. This deeply moral story of love and war boasts ominous, deliberate pacing and richly poetic prose.

COMICS

Zahra’s Paradise

Amir and Kahlil (Roaring Brook/First Second)

An Iranian blogger goes missing and his family enters a hellish twilight zone of obfuscation in a story that captures the uncertainty of living under religious dogma.

Day Tripper

Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon (DC/Vertigo)

Using a series of important events in the life of one man, this stunning work repeatedly uses his death at the end of each of these events to propel the readers into a new and illuminating excursion through another aspect of the man’s life.

Hark! A Vagrant!

Kate Beaton (Drawn & Quarterly)

Jane Austen, the Great Gatsby, and Napoleon are all satirized with a knowing line in this very funny collection from the acclaimed Web comic.

The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media

Brooke Gladstone and Josh Neufeld (Norton)

Host of NPR’s On the Media, Gladstone uses a cartoon persona to take the reader on a thoughtful and entertaining excursion through the history of the media from ancient Rome to the rise of digital technology.

Love and Rockets: New Stories #4

Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez (Fantagraphics)

Even in a long career of masterpieces, Jaime’s story about missed opportunities for happiness is a revelation, while Gilbert continues to cement his place as the Jorodowsky of comics with a vampire tale.

Infinite Kung Fu

Kagan McLeod (Top Shelf)

The traditional martial arts saga gets a lively comics updating with this tale of Lei Kung, who must defeat the heads of the emperor’s five armies to free a land.

Finder: Voice

Carla Speed McNeil (Dark Horse)

In this epic work of science fiction, Rachel Grosvenor, an outcast in a world ruled by a complex network of clans, looks to find a place for herself by attempting to join a very exclusive clan.

Big Questions

Anders Nilsen (Drawn & Quarterly)

A massive meditation on the meaning of life unfolds as a flock of cartoon birds deal with the questions raised when an unexploded bomb lands among them.

Farm 54

Galit & Gilad Seliktar (Fanfare Ponent Mon)

Created by a brother and sister team, these three haunting, semiautobiographical stories follow a young Israeli girl as she grows up in the 1980s and later during her military service in the occupied territories.

Habibi

Craig Thompson (Pantheon)

Two escaped slaves find themselves prisoners of others’ desires in a sea of Islamic-inspired calligraphy and lines in this lyrical fantasy.

NONFICTION

The Convert: A Parable

of Islam and America

Deborah Baker (Graywolf)

Pulitzer finalist Baker (In Extremis) unravels the often contradictory life of an American woman who became one of the pre-eminent voices of Islamic revivalism, in this stellar biography (an NBA finalist) that doubles as a meditation on the fraught relationship between America and the Muslim world.

The Anatomy of a Moment

Javier Cercas (Bloomsbury USA)

Novelist Cercas wields his considerable narrative skills in deconstructing a failed coup in Spain in 1981. From 35 minutes of TV tape of the attempted coup, Cercas profiles crucial figures, re-creates Spanish history back to the Civil War, and pulls apart the threads of Spain’s burgeoning democracy.

The Beautiful and the Damned:

A Portrait of the New India

Siddhartha Deb (Faber and Faber)

Deb offers a powerful rejoinder to the feel-good narratives about India’s economic ascent in these gritty profiles of growing numbers of destitute farmers, factory workers, and migrants—the casualties of India’s economic “miracle.”

Blue Nights

Joan Didion (Knopf)

In this subtly crushing memoir about the untimely death of her daughter, Quintana Roo, in 2005, Didion, as she did in The Year of Magical Thinking, turns face forward to the harsh truth: “When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.”

Townie: A Memoir

Andre Dubus III (Norton)

Dubus shuffled and punched his way through a childhood and youth full of dysfunction, desperation, and determination, and in this gritty and gripping memoir, he bares his soul in powerful and page-turning prose.

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

Stephen Greenblatt (Norton)

In this delightful and erudite account, Greenblatt relates how an eccentric humanist’s treasure hunt for a lost Latin text led to the birth of the Renaissance.

Life Itself: A Memoir

Roger Ebert (Grand Central)

From one of our most important cultural voices and the Pulitzer Prize–winning film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times comes this memoir of his life writing about movies.

A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War

Amanda Foreman (Random)

Foreman presents the most original and elegantly written take on the Civil War in its sesquicentennial year, from diplomatic maneuvers to British volunteers for both North and South.

Tiger, Tiger

Margaux Fragoso (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

In this gut-wrenching, disturbing memoir of sexual abuse, Fragoso explores with unflinching honesty the ways in which pedophiles can manipulate their way into the lives of children.

Love and Capital: Karl Marx and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution

Mary Gabriel (Little, Brown)

Gabriel offers a magisterial account of the lives of Karl Marx and his wife, Jenny von Westphalen, remarkable for the ease with which it moves between the domestic and the political spheres.

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

James Gleick (Pantheon)

With his ability to synthesize mounds of details and to tell rich stories, Gleick ably leads us on a journey from one form of communicating information to another, beginning with African tribes’ use of drums and moving through scientists like Samuel B. Morse, who invented the telegraph.

Blood, Bones, and Butter

Gabrielle Hamilton (Random)

Owner and chef of New York’s Prune restaurant, Hamilton fashioned this frankly written, addictive memoir of her unorthodox trajectory to becoming a chef.

A Book of Secrets: Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers

Michael Holroyd (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Novelist Violet Trefusis and Rodin’s muse Eve Fairfax are among the women, masterfully portrayed by Holroyd, who had the misfortune of being entangled in the life of Ernest Beckett, second Baron Grimthorpe.

Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History

Robert Hughes (Knopf)

A captivating history of Rome filtered through the lens of its art and architecture as seen by celebrated art critic Hughes.

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin

Erik Larson (Crown)

Larson’s narrative skills bring to life a fascinating panoply of characters and the terror closing in on Berlin with Hitler’s rise to power.

Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World

Michael Lewis (Norton)

Lewis’s offbeat travelogue examines the recent global financial crisis, dissecting how the unique culture and history of each locale he visits (Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Germany, California) contributed to its response to the boom and bust.

1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

Charles C. Mann (Knopf)

The “intercontinental “Columbian Exchange” is the focus of Mann’s compelling and eye-opening study of the way Columbus’s serendipitous discovery of the New World changed the whole world.

Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention

Manning Marable (Viking)

Marable’s posthumous epic draws on FBI and NYPD files and interviews with members of the Nation of Islam to enrich—and complicate—our notion of the iconic civil rights leader.

Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography

Errol Morris (Penguin Press)

Acclaimed documentary filmmaker Morris revisits historical but still passionately alive controversies in photography (like accusations of photographers working for the Depression-era Farm Security Administration staging scenes). His powerful account puts him in the plot of a detective novel: he’s a Hercule Poirot of the photographic world searching for the convolutions between art and truth telling.

Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend

Susan Orlean (Simon & Schuster)

Orlean follows up her bestselling The Orchid Thief with another tale of dedication in the face of adversity, disbelief, even common sense—this one centering on Rin Tin Tin, the German shepherd responsible for a film and TV dynasty.

The Long Goodbye: A Memoir

Meghan O’Rourke (Riverhead)

In this eloquent, somber memoir about the death of her mother and grieving aftermath, poet and journalist O’Rourke ponders the eternal human question: how do we live with the knowledge that we will one day die?

Life

Keith Richards, with James Fox (Little, Brown)

This bold, candid memoir from Stones guitarist Richards traces his trajectory from boyhood in England through the formation of the Stones to the band’s rise to world domination.

The Psychopath Test

Jon Ronson (Riverhead)

In this engrossing exploration of psychiatry’s attempts to understand and treat psychopathy, Ronson embarks on a tour of the “madness business,” interviewing possible psychopaths in asylums and corporate boardrooms to reveal the difficulties in diagnosing and treating the disorder. Droll, disturbing, and unforgettable.

The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity

Jeffrey D. Sachs (Random)

Economist Sachs surveys an America where the rich get richer and the rest grow poorer—and makes a compelling case for an activist state that redistributes wealth and makes life fairer and more productive for everyone.

Charles Dickens: A Life

Claire Tomalin (Penguin Press)

Readers will come away with a new understanding of the quintessential Victorian novelist in all his multiplicity and self-contradictions in Tomalin’s rich, penetrating portrait.

The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt

Toby Wilkinson (Random)

This authoritative history darkens our view of the glittering land of the pharaohs with its account of the brutality that sustained their rule.

LIFESTYLE

Cook This Now

Melissa Clark (Hyperion)

Veteran cookbook author, James Beard recipient, and New York Times food columnist, Clark presents readers with 120 recipes organized by season and month inspiring use of fresh ingredients and a flexible attitude, making this a solid addition to any kitchen cookbook shelf.

Mourad: New Moroccan

Mourad Lahlou (Artisan)

Lahlou, chef and owner of the San Francisco restaurant Aziza, provides an entertaining and appetizing guide to Moroccan dishes and Morocco’s culture, and will introduce many readers to this intensely flavorful cuisine.

Serious Eats: A Comprehensive Guide to Making and Eating Delicious Food Wherever You Are

Ed Levine and the editors of Seriouseats.com (Clarkson Potter)

Distilling the essence of the world’s largest online community of food enthusiasts into a readable book is not easy, but this entertaining, handy debut from the creators of seriouseats.com manages to do just that. Part cookbook, part travel guide, it covers the best in American grub.

The Art of Living According to Joe Beef

Frederic Morin, David McMillan, and Meredith Erickson (Ten Speed)

Morin and McMillan, chefs and co-owners of Joe Beef, a modern French restaurant in Montreal, team up with freelance writer Erickson to create a savvy page-turner full of meats, oysters, and irreverence.

Essential Pepin: More Than 700 All-Time Favorites from My Life in Food

Jacques Pépin (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

One of the great cookbook masters of the world, Pépin has put together what might be considered his opus, offering more than 700 of his best French and French-accented dishes from decades of cooking and teaching.

The Knitter’s Life List: To Do, to Know, to Explore, to Make

Gwen W. Steege (Storey Publishing)

From sheep to knits, fiberista Steege’s book is authoritative, opus-y, good for novices and experienced alike, and fun, too. Not ba-a-a-d.

RELIGION

A Good and Perfect Gift: Faith, Expectations, and a Little Girl Named Penny

Amy Julia Becker (Bethany House)

Unexamined faith is not worth having, and Becker asks the right heartfelt questions after her first daughter is born with Down syndrome, in a beautifully written and unsentimental reflection.

Love Wins

Rob Bell (HarperOne)

This attention-getter of a book ignited a heated popular conversation about whether God saves people like Gandhi or sends him and billions of other non-Christians to a fiery and painful place in the afterlife.

Fire Monks: Zen Mind Meets Wildfire at the Gates of Tassajara

Colleen Morton Busch (Penguin)

Spiritual insight is good, but well-written spiritual insight is better. Busch’s narrative of real people taking real risks to meet the unmanageable is absorbing and exemplary.

Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World

James Carroll (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Carroll brings his powers of observation, intellect, and passion to the city that epitomizes both faith and conflict, incisively raising, and answering, the question of sacred violence that haunts not only history but also contemporary life.

Conversions: Two Family Stories from the Reformation and Modern America

Craig Harline (Yale Univ.)

History as it should be written: with feet deep in research and a head for individual story. Harline finds parallels in lives lived centuries apart as he narrates historical particulars and differences.

The God Upgrade: Finding Your 21st-Century Spirituality in Judaism’s 5,000-Year-Old Tradition

Jamie S. Korngold (Jewish Lights)

Tradition and heritage provide a rock-solid basis for contemporary faith, says a 21st-century rabbi as she argues for an update of God beyond one who keeps score.

Between Heaven and Mirth: Why Joy, Humor, and Laughter Are at the Heart of Spiritual Life

James Martin (HarperOne)

If religion is both violent and without humor, there really is no hope. Blessedly, the occasional chaplain of The Colbert Report saves the Christian tradition from soul-stifling joylessness. Read and lighten up.

As Far as the Heart Can See: Stories to Illuminate the Soul

Mark Nepo (HCI)

Inner life gets made fun of by those who don’t have one. The rest of us can read Nepo, whose stories aren’t always nicey-nice but prod us, like a good companion, along the way.

Flunking Sainthood: A Year of Breaking the Sabbath, Forgetting to Pray, and Still Loving My Neighbor

Jana Riess (Paraclete)

Saints: they are so annoying. Reiss discovers this, and that God permits, and loves, goofups and shortcuts in her year of repeatedly failing at spiritual disciplines. As we said earlier: read and lighten up.

A Public Faith: How Followers of Christ Should Serve the Common Good

Miroslav Volf (Brazos)

The gifted Christian theologian answers a pressing question in a pluralistic culture, arguing that nonexclusionary theological truth is not only possible but also socially healthy.