Our 50 Favorite Books of the Year

Some of the Literary Hub staff’s least favorite things of 2019, based on an impromptu poll*: wildfires, Star Wars corporate branding tie-ins, Poet Twitter, YA Twitter, Stupid Question Twitter, that tweet about someone being at capacity, Facebook, quickly changing pant styles, Kendall’s rap, The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the shoes that the teens wear, everything about Jeffrey Epstein, our staff soccer game being cancelled this week, the American health care system, “Bandersnatch,” Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Green Book winning Best Picture, Joe Biden, Donald Trump, the death of that cat yesterday, Kemba leaving the Hornets, the iPhone with three cameras, McDonald’s refusing to carry plant-based patties, the replacement of millennial pink with melodramatic purple.

Some of the Literary Hub staff’s favorite things of 2019: the books below.

*Not all staff members co-sign all items listed.

Leigh Bardugo, Ninth House (Flatiron)

Bardugo’s first foray into adult fantasy is a meaty, satisfying novel that reimagines (I hope) Yale’s secret societies as houses of magic—Skull and Bones holds prognostications where they sift through the guts of unwitting “volunteers,” Manuscript (real life alumni: Jodie Foster, Zoe Kazan, Anderson Cooper) specializes in glamours and mirror magic—and sets a girl who can see the ghosts who may disrupt their rituals down in their rarefied midst. Only things—the societies, the girl, New Haven itself—are not as they seem, and when a local girl is murdered, it all begins to unravel. It’s basically The Secret History cut with horror, and it is very, very good. Fortunately, the ending points to a sequel, so I’ll be waiting with bated breath.

–Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Yūko Tsushima, tr. Geraldine Harcourt, Territory of Light (FSG)

Originally published in 1979 in monthly installments, Territory of Light is a novel that seems to be in direct conversation with so many modern contemporary novels about motherhood. The story follows a young woman, recently divorced, who moves into a new apartment in Tokyo with her young daughter. The episodic chapters are intimate, claustrophobic reminders of how much can change in a year. The mother-child relationship is both beautiful and painful, calling to mind Days of Abandonment (but less Italian) or Jenny Offill’s Department of Speculation. Tsushima explores in the lives of women without sentimentality or self-pity, and with a honesty that is eeriely modern. It is a quiet and powerful book.

–Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Robert Macfarlane, Underland (W. W. Norton)

Throughout the history of humankind, Robert Macfarlane writes, people have buried “that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save.” Underland is a stunning exploration of what lies beneath the surface of the earth—from the catacombs of Paris to an underground river, nuclear waste, and elements long encased in ice—and the often-volatile human relationship to the subterranean world. Following Macfarlane on his journeys there can be harrowing, both physically—his passages on caving inspired no envy in me!—and intellectually, as he points out the ways in which global warming is irrevocably changing the underground landscape. But to accompany him there, and witness these scenes as he does, is still a privilege.

–Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Philippe Lançon, tr. Steven Rendall, Disturbance (Europa)

I must imagine that Philippe Lançon’s Disturbance (trans. Steven Rendall), an unsurprising critical success in France, must take on new meaning for readers in the United States. In 2019, the mass shootings in Dayton, El Paso, and Midland-Odessa seemed to be competing with ongoing political scandals for spots in the nightly news cycles. It felt even more difficult to parse individual stories of survival from a glut of information. Lançon, an author and journalist who still writes a column for the satirical publication Charlie Hebdo, writes of the horrific 2015 attack on the paper’s staff, when he himself suffered life-altering injuries, and the incident’s aftermath. Disturbance is written with almost scientific clarity. Lançon is less interested in the terrorists’ backgrounds than in an intimate, disquieting portrait of a permanently fractured self, divorced from the rest of the world even as he somehow manages to persist within it. Lançon’s story restores the place of humanity in the survivor’s life.

–Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Anthony McCann, Shadowlands: Fear and Freedom at the Oregon Standoff (Bloomsbury)

In January 2016, Ammon Bundy stood in front of a crowd of heavily armed American “patriots” in Burns, Oregon and proposed an insurrection. Specifically, Bundy—son of Nevada rancher Cliven, infamous for his 2014 grazing rights standoff with federal authorities—was calling for an occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. The story that follows—deftly told by poet-turned-reporter Anthony McCann in Shadowlands: Fear and Freedom at the Oregon Standoff is older even than America itself, equal parts natural history, true crime potboiler, and spiritual reckoning.

With a poet’s eye and a historian’s rigor, McCann gives an engaging account of a century-and-a-half of conflict in a territory that’s seen its fair share, from 19th-century Mormon pioneers clashing over grazing land to the infamous rise and fall of the cult city of Rajneeshpuram in the 1980s. Then, as now, none of the players—save the Northern Paiute, who’ve been on the land for a thousand years—come across all that well. McCann is as thorough as he is thoughtful in giving equal time to all involved, from the bemused (and eventually horrified) locals of Harney County to the environmentalist counter-protesters to the unlikely carpetbagging coalition of libertarians, militiamen, and “citizens of Heaven” who come armed with semi-automatics and pocket Constitutions, brandishing both with abandon.

What sets Shadowlands apart from so much reporting on the far right fringe is the way McCann creates fully rendered, deeply sympathetic portraits of the drama’s main characters, while reserving the right to judge their decisions. In resisting the journalist’s default impulse toward apolitical objectivity, McCann acknowledges the full humanity of his subjects, their dignity and their hopelessness, and, most importantly, their mistakes.

–Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House (Grove)

Sarah M. Broom’s National Book Award-winning debut is a history. It is a history of self, of family, of place, of disaster, and of structural injustice. It is both expansive and deeply personal, local (the book’s home, like Broom’s, is New Orleans) and far-flung. Though it has an unremarkable page count, The Yellow House is a huge book. Thanks to Broom’s prose—lovely, lyrical, but not florid—I tore through this book in less than a weekend, but it has lodged itself in me as few books do.

–Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Kathleen Alcott, America Was Hard to Find (Ecco)

For my money one of the most brilliant and under-appreciated novels of 2019, I’m genuinely baffled as to why Kathleen Alcott’s epic, haunting reimagining of the Cold War era hasn’t appeared on more Best of the Year lists or award shortlists. America Was Hard to Find is the story of Fay Fern, an uneasy child of privilege turned radical, and of Vincent Kahn, a fighter pilot who becomes the first man to walk on the moon, but it’s also the story of Wright, the lost boy born of their short-lived affair and the slow-breaking heart of this lyrical, devastating book. Thrillingly ambitious in its scope, achingly intimate in its psychological portraiture, it’s a Pulitzer-worthy work of American fiction.

–Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Lisa Lutz, The Swallows (Ballantine)

Lisa Lutz’s new stand-alone cements her place in the crime writing pantheon, and is as timely as it is well-written.  The Swallows takes place in an elite private school, where a new teacher discovers a secret website filled with rather uncouth statements about female students. Of course, the novel’s independent schoolgirls are going to accept such a status quo for long, and The Swallows quickly turns into one of the best revenge narratives you’ll ever read.  Like the movie Teeth, this one is recommended for all feminists—and should be required reading for all men.

–Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Steph Cha, Your House Will Pay (Ecco)

Cha’s Your House Will Pay was one of the year’s most ambitious crime novels, an electric depiction of racial tensions and civil unrest in 1990s Los Angeles. It begins with the respective stories of two families and returns time and again to the texture of their everyday lives, but meanwhile radiates outward to show the violent aftermath of a fateful encounter one night in Los Angeles. Your House Will Pay manages to be both an intimate, closely observed snapshot of a moment in time and also a novel of ideas, politics, and deeply felt emotion.

–Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee,

This is the rare BIG HISTORICAL BOOK that balances human intimacy with grand ambition. Conceived in response to Dee Brown’s 1970 classic, Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee—a necessary and seminal revisionist project that brought to the mainstream the reality of Indigenous suffering at the hands of white Europeans—Treuer, who is Ojibwe, uses the eponymous massacre as a starting point to construct a hopeful counter-narrative of Native life that, though rife with injustice and depredation, resists being confined to dimensions of suffering. Gripping narrative laid over a foundation of impressive historical reach.

–Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Sandra Newman, The Heavens (Grove)

In Newman’s latest, she pulls off a nearly impossible feat: she convincingly presents us with a world, and then changes it—degrades it, really—as the novel goes on. That is, she bends reality for her characters and for the reader in a way that I would have thought much too difficult and confusing to attempt. This is a strange and moving book, unlike any I’ve read before, one that seeks to understand human experience, and time, and—I’m sorry, but it’s true—love in the face of these. By the way, it’s also, even when it gets fairly tragic, a hell of a lot of fun, especially if you’re the kind of reader who likes to encounter Shakespeare in her time travel.

–Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall (FSG)

There is a particular male obsession with life in “purer” times, a nostalgic yearning for the independence of the old frontier, say, or the freedom and adventure of the high seas. This longing, of course, is in fact a very self-interested desire for the absolute power of patriarchy, for a time when men were as sovereigns over their families, their decisions questioned at great risk of violence. And so the main character of Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall, Silvie, finds herself cast in a slow summer pantomime of Iron Age life, led by her domineering father—an amateur anthropologist—into the rural wilds of southern England alongside her timorous mother and a few student volunteers. But this is no pastoral idyll. Underslept, underdressed, and underfed—as might happen when one is forced to adhere to a 5,000-year-old lifestyle—Silvie drifts along on eddies of dread, the doomed heroine of some endless folk song, each verse tinged with more horror than the last. Moss is a master of coiled and uncoiling tension, and the ancient England she lets surface here is anything but pure.

–Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other (Grove)

Girl, Woman, Other is breaking all the rules. First off, it was so impressive to the Booker Prize judges that they decided to split this year’s win. Second, it’s a novel told in verse. Four hundred and fifty-two pages of prose poetry dedicated to the stories of black British women and one non-binary individual. It beautifully tells the story of twelve overlapping lives, subtly shifting perspectives in a way that might be confusing if sculpted with less artful, less masterful hands. It reads like theatre of testimony. There’s a blatant truth to the way characters discuss race, the way Carole had a hard time dating black men at university because they tended to go for light-skinned women “not that she’s blaming them, it’s what they have to do to get on, to reduce the threat they’re supposed to be in society.” In the mouths of these characters, Bernardine Evaristo is able to talk about the push-and-pull of alliance that comes with growing up in an immigrant family, the way a daughter might fault her father “when in fact he’d done nothing wrong except fail to live up to her feminist expectations of him.” Girl, Woman, Other is a powerful story of intersecting identities, the things that are taken from us and the things we willingly sacrifice for those we love. There is an incredible care afforded to each of these characters, even when unimaginably terrible things happen to them, and their voices will stay with you long after you’ve devoured these pages.

–Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias (Graywolf)

Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias is a thoughtful, very multi-faceted assemblage of experiences, all concerning the illnesses she has lived with (which range from the psychological to the physiological). The essays are all shards, each presenting a full, different aspect of not simply “having” but “living” with these conditions. They are non-linear, and sometimes, the sense of time is scrambled or rearranged. Some of the essays are highly personal and nostalgic, while others verge on the clinical (though Wang largely steers clear of talking about medicine in a generalized way). These essays are her stories—each revealing a searing, independent truth about living with mental illness today, and the huge toll it takes on the spirit, even amidst occasional triumphs.

–Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys (Doubleday)

Here’s a secret for you: I thought The Nickel Boys was even better (more personal, and more harrowing) than his much beloved previous novel The Underground Railroad. Don’t tell anyone, internet.

–Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Toi Derricotte, I: New and Selected Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press)

In many ways, we’re living in the world Toi Derricotte created. Two decades ago, with Cornelius Eady, she launched Cave Canem and made it one of the most effective enlarging spaces American literature has ever seen. It is one of the major reasons the US is in the middle of explosion of black poetics, so many of whom are graduates of or touched by Cave Canem. Terrence Hayes, Claudia Rankine, Jericho Brown, Tracy K. Smith, Ross Gay, Kevin Young, Nikky Finney, Gregory Pardlo, Tyehimba Jess, Tina Chang, Major Jackson, Patricia Smith, Harryette Mullen, Adrian Matejska and so many more. But she has built this world with her work, too, first, and it’s a glorious thing to have such a generous selection of her poems together in one book. The new poems alone ought to win her a Pulitzer. Lit Hub ran one back in March, you can read it here, but buy this book for cold dark winter months when you need to be held by a few words. No one can do that quite like Derricotte.

–John Freeman, Executive Editor

Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure (Doubleday)

This is a feral fable about three young women raised to fear men—and in fact any outsiders to their strange cloistered island, where they live in simplicity with their parents. Simplicity, except for the supposedly immunizing rituals the girls are forced to undertake, for their own good, which stray from cruel to violent to merely uncomfortable. But when their father disappears and two strange men appear, the girls will be shaken loose from the life they have known, and the girls will fight back.

–Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Karen Russell, Orange World and Other Stories (Knopf)

I should probably preface the following with a disclaimer: I doubt Karen Russell could write anything I wouldn’t love. A most memorable moment of 2019 was when my mother called me to tell me she had picked up the orange book I left on the coffee table and that it was eerie and interesting and that she ended up devouring it (before I had even finished reading it myself). This is the power of Karen Russell: no matter a person’s taste, if you come across her writing, it will magnetize you because it is so undeniably good. In whimsical and calculated Russell-fashion, the prose of Orange World stuns and lures you into its universe, where young men are trapped in lavish—and cursed—ski resorts on a mountain, and the spirits of trees can transfer into women’s bodies, and where Madame Bovary’s dog has a second chance at a good household. I have found that I come to a Russell book with the giddiness of a toddler: not knowing what I will find but certain that it will be fantastic.

–Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Miriam Toews, Women Talking (Bloomsbury)

A wry, scorching, utterly enthralling novel based on a horrendous true story. In an isolated Mennonite colony, for over two years, more than one hundred women and girls have been drugged and sexually assaulted in the night. When it’s discovered that their violators are a group of men from within their own community, and that these men may never receive true justice inside the colony’s archaic patriarchal system, eight of the women gather in a hay loft to decide whether to leave the only home they’ve ever known. Toews packs so much drama, humor, sorrow, rage, and humanity into this slim, structurally compressed work, which favors profundity or luridness, patiently allowing these women to find their voices and claim a sense of agency over their lives. A masterful achievement.

–Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Lara Prior-Palmer, Rough Magic (Catapult)

Regardless of her ability as a storyteller, Lara Prior-Palmer would have always had an incredible story to tell: as the youngest person to finish—not to mention the first woman to win—“the world’s longest, toughest horse race,” the ten-day Mongol Derby, hers would be a memorable memoir no matter what. Luckily for us, Palmer-Prior turned out to have a voice almost as unique as the race she won, which is organized based on the messenger system used by Genghis Khan, in which Mongol ponies are ridden across the forbidding Mongolian steppe in arduous relays. At once humble and humorous, Palmer-Prior benefits—as both writer and rider—from not quite grasping the enormity of her aspirations, and pulls off a victory (and story) for the ages.

–Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Nina Revoyr, A Student of History (Akashic)

Revoyr’s latest noir tells a story that’s somewhere between Sunset Boulevard and the darker regions of The Great Gatsby. Rick Nagano is a Los Angeles graduate student who, through a few chance opportunities, comes into the employ of one of the city’s oldest, richest, and most secretive families, trusted with the memoirs of its reigning matriarch. Transgressions ensue, as Rick begins to penetrate a new social strata and sees a hidden, monied Los Angeles. Revoyr is a subtle observer of human foibles and social structures, and the result is one of the most insightful, and the most entertaining books of the year.

–Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

Olga Tokarczuk, tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (Riverhead)

After Olga Tolarczuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature earlier this year, we saw endless recommendations for her novel Flights, which came out last year. Flights is a brilliant novel, but it’s long and dense and perhaps not the easiest entry to a writer whose oeuvre we will be reading for many years to come. In DYPOTBOTD, an elderly vegetarian seeks to discover who is murdering the windbags who run a small Polish town. It is not as wide-sweeping a novel, but it’s a dark and fun mystery, a feminist comedy, plus a primer on existentialism and animal rights. It’s the mix of high and low, humor and darkness that makes Tolarczuk such a remarkable chronicler of range of human emotions. And because it’s a mystery, it’s also a fun read, and after this year, don’t you want to read something sort of fun about murder?

–Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive (Knopf)

Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive was inspired by her time spent volunteering at the federal immigration court in New York City, working as an interpreter for undocumented, unaccompanied migrant children who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Written concurrently with her essay Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions (a nonfictional exploration of the same topic), Luiselli’s novel offers a heartbreaking, necessary gambit, based on a road trip she took with her husband and children, across America, while they (both Mexican citizens) waited for their own Green Card applications to be processed. In the novel, a mother and father and two children are taking a trip across the country when they hear on the radio about the thousands of immigrant children trying to cross the border by themselves and being detained by the government or lost in the desert. It is a beautiful, heartbreaking book, one which is determined not to let these children be robbed of their innocence or their humanity, by a cruel bureaucracy laboring to make them feel unwelcome.

–Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Hugh Ryan, When Brooklyn Was Queer (St. Martin’s)

With When Brooklyn Was Queer, Hugh Ryan excavates a deep history of the lives that queer people created for themselves at the outskirts of society: the alternative economic and community systems that supported them, the ways they connected with each other, and the legacy they created for future generations. This was no small task, with no shortage of research-related challenges, among them the fact that many queer people whose identities were repressed or hidden left few records of their existence or details of their lives. With that in mind, the history that Ryan produces is momentous, not to mention entertaining and incredibly moving.

–Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Maria Gainza, tr. Thomas Bunstead, Optic Nerve (Catapult)

Optic Nerve is an elliptical, elegant debut that conjures Rachel Cusk and W. G. Sebald and even Jenny Offill, but is also a magic all of its own. It is mostly about an Argentinian woman named María looking about and thinking about art, and sometimes about her desires, or her family. I know you’re skipping ahead, and honestly I can’t really explain, but trust me when I say that it’s breathtaking.

–Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Ruth Ware, The Turn of the Key (Gallery/Scout Press)

In Ware’s ode to Henry James’ Turn of the Screw, a young woman arrives at a mysterious manor to begin a new job as nanny to the scions of a wealthy family. She’s immediately turned off by the intrusive creepiness of the decked-out smart house, and things quickly go from bad to worse with her new employers and disobedient charges, but nothing could prepare either Ware’s protagonist or her readers for the final twist at the end. Ware has carved out a place for herself as the millennial voice for the traditional mystery revival, and I know I say this about every Ruth Ware book, but this is her best one yet!

–Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Nicholas Buccola, The Fire Is Upon Us (Princeton University Press)

I don’t know how I came across the YouTube video of the 1965 Cambridge Union debate between James Baldwin and National Review founding editor William F. Buckley Jr. years ago. I am almost certain it was accidental, and what a happy accident that was. The claim framing the debate was this: “The American dream is at the expense of the American Negro.” What followed, as Nicholas Buccola sums up in The Fire Is Upon Us, both a history of the debate and a dual intellectual biography, was one of the 20th century’s most remarkable explications of racist and anti-racist ideologies. While I understood Baldwin’s arguments intuitively, it was Buckley, a conservative of a bygone age, that I struggled most to understand. Buckley’s conservatism in many ways laid the groundwork for the fading, idealized version of the Republican Party that “civil discourse” advocates are mourning today in the United States. The Fire Is Upon Us makes a compelling case for why Baldwin and Buckley were who they were and, in doing so, serves as a good starting point for understanding the nature of the present partisan divide.

–Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Helen Oyeyemi, Gingerbread (Riverhead)

Helen Oyeyemi is a master teller of fairy tales. You might have heard of Boy, Snow, Bird, her retelling of “Snow White,” or Mr. Fox, her retelling of the eponymous British tale (known also to Americans as “The Robber Bridegroom”). Gingerbread, however, the author says, departs from her previous work: “This one’s about gingerbread.” Regardless, any Oyeyemi story will be made of intricate plot-webbing, history, and cultural heritage; it will be brimming with prose that is as thoughtful as it is amusing. It is impossible not to notice the sheer glee with which Oyeyemi writes and creates her worlds. Now, it wouldn’t be an Oyeyemi story if the plot were easy to explain, and I think I won’t even try, because I’d prefer to demonstrate the pleasure of reading this book by the following quote, spoken right before Harriet, chief baker of gingerbread, lapses into a story of her childhood. “What are they going to do if this bedtime story has a ‘it was all a dream’ interlude? That truthfully refers not just to the tale and its teller, but to all those to whom the tale is being told? Suppose we’re not even character-characters but figments of another character’s imagination,” one says. “I’d be humiliated,” another says. And the response may just account for Oyeyemi’s own fascination with fairy tales: “We still have our side of the story!”

–Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Albert Woodfox, Solitary (Grove)

Over a quarter of the world’s population in prisons are incarcerated in the U.S. Many of them horrid conditions. An unconscionable number in solitary confinement, like Albert Woodfox, the former Black Panther and member of the Angola 3, who spent longer than any other American in that isolation. That he emerged with his mind is an astonishment, but less so once you’ve read Solitary, his extraordinary memoir. What a mind this man possesses, capable of seeing at and around things at once. His book should be to prison what Night was to the conditions Elie Wiesel described in his memoir of the Holocaust: a psalm of memory, a testimony and a powerful call to action. “It’s a hell of a feeling to stand when you know you’re going to be beaten,” Woodfox writes on those years, when he and other prisoners would stand up for prisoners being abused. “You know there will be pain but your moral principles won’t let you back down.”

But there’s more to this book than defiance. To describing the processes of prison life. Bit by bit, it describes the ways we remain human when so many different avenues for humanity are shut down. For Woodfox, helping another man was that key. “My proudest achievement in all my years in solitary was teaching a man how to read,” he writes in Solitary. “His name was Charles. We called him Goldy because his mouth was full of gold teeth. The first time I heard Goldy read a sentence out of a book I told him how proud I was of all he’d learned. He thanked me and I told him to thank himself. ‘Ninety-nine per cent of your success was because you really wanted to read,’ I said. Within a year he was reading at a high school level. The world was now open to him.”

–John Freeman, Executive Editor

Rachel Ingalls, Binstead’s Safari (New Directions)

If you don’t know Rachel Ingalls, you really ought to. Sadly, the American-born, Britain-based feminist writer died earlier this year, but New Directions has recently reissued two of her (severely underappreciated) novellas. One of these novellas is Binstead’s Safari, a deceptively slim, sinister gem of a novel. We meet Binstead, a woman trapped in a terrible marriage to a dull academic with delusions of grandeur (a real Casaubon character). At the start of the story, she’s decided to accompany her lying, cheating, no-good husband on a trip, first to London and then onto Africa. Her husband is working on a book (of course) about the mythology around lions. But the trip proves to be far more fruitful and life-altering for Binstead, who for the first time strikes out on her own adventures and affairs. I’m just going to leave you with this: “The sound of his voice came to her hardly as part of the exterior world, but as though inspired within herself, like the beat of a second heart.” Savor it.

–Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Téa Obreht, Inland (Random House)

As I have previously written: This is a lush, wide-ranging, and fully American novel, a revisioning of a classic Western, imbued, as all the best revisionings are, with many of the satisfactions of the trope, but presented alongside a set of new and better ones. For instance, for a Western, it’s not particularly violent—or not as violent as you’d expect, though what is there was so well-written as to make me gasp—and instead we get the aftermath: the ghosts. Ghosts are everywhere in this novel, reminding us that every place and time has its own history, its own victims, its own way of self-consideration, and Obreht’s deft use of time and space between and within the novel’s two narratives makes the book sing. Suffice it to say, if this is a new American myth, I’ll take it.

–Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Nell Zink, Doxology (Ecco)

Nell Zink is the rare writer who manages to strike the perfect balance between wit and zaniness, and her skill in both areas is in full force in Doxology, an ambitious and delightful novel about family, the late-90s music scene in New York, and—yes—9/11. I realize that a zany 9/11 book might be a hard sell, but Zink doesn’t make light of the terror. Instead, she locates its effects within the members of one family, and the result is both sharp and tender. (And it doesn’t hurt that Zink writes sentences so packed with wit that I occasionally found me reading the same one three or four times for the sheer pleasure of it.)

–Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing (Doubleday)

A truly important work on the Northern Ireland Troubles and comfortably my favorite nonfiction book of 2019, Say Nothing is New Yorker journalist Patrick Radden Keefe’s investigation into the notorious abduction and murder of impoverished and widowed mother of ten Jean McConville by the Provisional IRA in Belfast in 1972. Impeccably researched and paced like a thriller, Say Nothing manages to be a vivid and comprehensive overview of the thirty-year conflict, a humane and intimate portrait of some of its key players (including Gerry Adams, Dolours Price, and McConville herself), and a pulsating piece of investigative journalism that sheds new light on one of the most notorious unsolved crimes of the period.

–Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin Press)

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is Ocean Vuong’s first novel. It is framed as a letter written to a mother who cannot read English. (From the get-go: “I am writing to reach you—even if each word I put down is one wor further from where you are.” Doesn’t that just break your heart? As the daughter of an immigrant mother, as a grandchild who doesn’t speak the same language as her grandparents, this really got me. Page one! Okay!) On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is also poetry (the prose has a poet’s touch, and there is a moment a little more than halfway through where the narration breaks and the only way we can be told what happens is through poetry). It is a careful consideration of language (“It’s not fair that the word laughter is trapped inside slaughter.”) It is a way to burrow into unspoken family history, and it is a mirror turned out to the world, asking us to reflect on class and race and the things we owe one another.

–Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier (Doubleday)

I am an OG Kevin Barry fan, down since day one when he published his first collection with the small Irish press (and my old place of employment) The Stinging Fly. Barry’s new book, the story of two Irish criminal biding their time in the Spanish port city of Algeciras, is full of foreboding and of ghosts, not least that of Samuel Beckett, and is continuing proof of this writer’s ability to pack more personality and mordant wit into a single sentence than most writers can manage in a novel. Antiheroes Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond wait for Maurice’s estranged daughter, Dilly; a 23-year-old “dreadlock Rastafari” who is due at the station, either leaving for Tangier or returning from there. From flashbacks to their younger days as drug traffickers when they were friends and/or rivals to the Hibernian habit of drinking away their sorrows at the station bar, the novel runs the risk of feeling claustrophobic. But this slim, dense novel is expansive not only in geography, but in the depth of human emotion, of love and loss, and friendship. By far one of my favorite novels of the year.

–Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Emily Skaja, Brute: Poems (Graywolf)

I first came across Emily Skaja’s poem “Brute Strength,” one of the first in her collection Brute: Poems, in an excellent poetry newsletter by Theresa Sullivan, and it found me again on a day when I needed it, holed up in the poetry section at Three Lives & Company in New York. Skaja’s unsparing, gripping explorations of power, and the effects of abuse, left me breathless; I’ve never read anything that so accurately depicts the feeling that a partner’s violence cannot possibly be real. For anyone who has felt like a “mute woman / written out of my own story,” her speaker’s search for the fearless “witch girl” of childhood resonates, as does the rest of this inventive collection.

–Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Niklas Natt och Dag, tr. Ebba Segerberg, The Wolf and the Watchman (Atria)

This incredibly disturbing trip into the grotesqueries of history is as well-written as it is well-researched, true to not only the detail of the time period but also true to its mores and atmosphere. At the start of Niklas Natt och Dag’s incredibly self-assured debut, a watchman in late 18th-century Sweden discovers a mutilated corpse floating in the local cesspool, and things only get darker from there. Written by a member of Sweden’s oldest living aristocratic family, and infused with a tear-it-all-down mentality, this one is not to be missed.

–Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Jake Skeets, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers (Milkweed)

Jake Skeets’s poems are tender and brutal and hard to turn away from; it’s like someone has spilled an old shoebox of overexposed Polaroids onto the kitchen table and you can’t go to bed, can’t stop drinking, until you’ve fully taken each one in. And as you do, you’ll find “Drunktown”—aka Skeets’s hometown of Gallup, Texas—slowly revealed: its violence, its beat-up beauty, its queerness, its indifference to Indigenous bodies as broken by capitalism (mining) as they are by racism (police). It’s all here in the opening poem, “Drunktown”:

Men around here only touch when they fuck in a backseat
go for the foul with thirty seconds left
hug their sons after high school graduation
open a keg
stab my uncle forty-seven times behind a liquor store.

–Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Don Winslow, The Border (Willam Morrow)

This year’s finale to Don Winslow’s epic series did not disappoint. The Power of the Dog (2005), The Cartel (2015), and now The Border (2019) make up one of the most ambitious works in modern fiction, an epic narrative of the ill-fated War on Drugs and an achievement that rivals Ellroy’s history of the Los Angeles underworld. The Border goes as far as any work of fiction can in explaining how we’ve reached the current quagmire: a region engulfed in violence, the spread of an opioid epidemic, the militarization of police forces across the Americas, and the rise of opportunistic political regimes that capitalize on the suffering. Winslow also delivers on the human moments, with aching portraits of the war’s victims: a young boy from a tough Central American capital, making his way north on the train known as La Bestia; addicts on Staten Island; undercover agents putting in years to make cases, only to see their work bartered away. It’s an astonishingly rich mosaic of humanity.

–Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

Elizabeth Hand, Curious Toys (Mulholland)

From an author who has achieved acclaim for stories of crime, horror, and fantasy, comes a new tale of intrigue and murder. It’s got: lady detectives, old seaside amusement parks, the Gilded Age, silent film, women who disguise as men, and women who look out for other women. In 1915, a fourteen-year-old girl, Pin, disguises as a boy to join a gang that roams around Chicago’s Riverview amusement park. She doesn’t know that she’s in a prime position to observe a serial killer who uses the park as his hunting ground—but when she sees a man bring a girl into the Hell Gate ride and leave alone, she knows something has gone wrong. And only Pin, the invisible girl detective, can catch an invisible killer. But what seems at the outset to be a clever detective story turns out to be something else when Pin meets a man who will become her friend and helper, the real-life writer and artist Henry Darger, whose indirect life goal was to be a kind of “protector of children” (that’s what his tombstone calls him). Pin and Henry are a wonderful, inimitable team. You will yearn to read about their friendship long after the book is done.

–Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Adam Ehrlich Sachs, The Organs of Sense (FSG)

Why didn’t more people read this excellent, endlessly clever and erudite novel this year? You’ve never had more fun with a blind astronomer in your life, and you could never hope to.

–Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House (Graywolf)

I can’t say enough good things about Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir, In the Dream House. It was so beloved amongst a few of my colleagues that when the time came for us to argue over The 10 Best Memoirs of the Decade, three of us just had to gush over it. It is a heart-breaking, gut-wrenching exploration of an abusive relationship, filtered through the lens of genre tropes (i.e. “Dream House as Romantic Comedy, Dream House as A Stranger Comes To Town”). There are footnotes that ground the story in fairytale taboo and queer theory. The subject matter is messy, and so it is fitting that the telling of the tale come to us in raw, experimental bits. It is one of the most honest things I have ever read. You can see Carmen Maria Machado throwing herself into the story, trying to find the language and frame that hasn’t been found yet to discuss abuse in queer relationships, forging the way out.

–Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Susan Choi, Trust Exercise (Henry Holt)

If you haven’t read Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise, you may have heard that it contains a twist—I can’t say more, just read it! At least that’s what I said, irritatingly, to everyone when I recommended it. The more I think about it, though, the more I realize that the word is less “twist’ and more “tectonic shift.” The novel, about theater kids at an elite performing arts high school in the 80s, doesn’t aim to trick, but to destabilize. It’s a thrilling, unsettling, spectacular book. I can’t say more, just read it.

–Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Rudolph Herzog, tr. Emma Rault, Ghosts of Berlin (Melville House)

Celebrated filmmaker and author, Rudolph Herzog—yes, the son of Werner Herzog—has written a collection of ghost stories set in Berlin, as told by the Millennials who now live there. Linking all the stories is the globalized character of Berlin and the lingering effects of the war on both the city and its people. The list of characters ranges from a Greek emigré to an undead Nazi sympathizer, to a cursed spirit set upon the gentrifiers of a previously-Turkish neighborhood, to a woman-laborer during the Weimar era who has returned to haunt the little girl of two ruthless tech executives, to a former East Germany inhabitant whose household items are continually, mysteriously rearranged. You can tell, this cast is as funny as it is surprising and Herzog utilizes that to his advantage. Herzog’s stories are utterly atmospheric, engrossing, refreshing, and devoid of pretense; they are a cut-and-dry updated narrative of Berlin, a city continually relearning how to bear its history.

–Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Attica Locke, Heaven, My Home (Mulholland)

Attica Locke’s new mystery continues the saga of Darren Matthews, first introduced in the Edgar-winning Bluebird, Bluebird. When a white supremacist’s young son goes missing around Lake Caddo, Darren is dispatched to track down the missing child while carrying on a surreptitious investigation into ABT activities in the area. Upon arrival, Darren quickly discovers tensions between Jefferson, a place where you can buy a confederate flag bikini, and Hopeton, the historic free black community next door. A trailer park’s worth of white supremacists is squatting on land owned by residents of Hopeton, and it’s up to Darren to protect the community from further encroachment as he searches for the child. Heaven, My Home is another tightly plotted, richly detailed masterpiece perfect for our times.

–Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Naja Marie Aidt, tr. Denise Newman, When Death Takes Something From You, Give it Back (Coffee House)

It was a great year for memoir, the form which burst out of standard shapes and sizes a long time ago (anyone read Sarashina Diary, one of the first memoirs that is also a travel book, or Henry Adams’ Education? The grandson of the former president would be right at home in today’s craze of autofiction). For whatever reason, in 2019 writers remembered a much broader avenue of invention was open to them. Take Edouard Louis’ Who Killed My Father, his powerful book about, among other things, the cost of shame on his relationship with his father, not to mention his father’s own life. Each section gathers and unfurls itself with immense dignity. In his flipbook of memoirs This Does Not Belong To You/My Parents: an Introduction Aleksandar Hemon alternates between the mysterious un-narrated world of his childhood and the shattering search for agency his parents experience upon leaving Bosnia in their fifties.

And then there’s Naja Marie Aidt’s memoir, which almost defies description, it is so many books in one. On one level, it tells a terrible tale of how Aidt’s son died in a freak accident and knocked the author sideways, compelling a whole-scale reorganization of what she once knew. This is a book about more than shock, grief and mourning, though. Drawing on the work of poets Anne Carson, Inger Christensen and others, it’s a meditation on time and the way our narration of what happens during life sieves through a slippery gear—our selves—how consciousness is the sound of trying to get it turning again. I’ve read it several times and on each occasion it grows bigger, grander, the moment between clock ticks so vast a whole life can fit through.

–John Freeman, Executive Editor

Camilla Townsend, Fifth Sun (Oxford University Press)

Fifth Sun, Camilla Townsend’s remarkable revisionist history of the Aztec kingdom, hits that difficult-to-find sweet spot between scholarly discovery and narrative thrill. Townsend has produced the first account of Aztec history that draws exclusively on indigenous texts, written in the Nahuatl language, which presents native Mexican culture as it existed before, during, and after the Spanish conquest. Europe, Townsend shows, is no longer the primary mediator of this history. Fifth Sun spans four centuries, and Townsend’s moving first-person recreations of Mexica myths, migrations and more make the narrative feel like an energetic and novelistic oral history.

–Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman is in Trouble (Random House)

Fleishman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner tells the story of a recently-divorced doctor whose dating-app-enabled deliverance is halted when his ex-wife drops off their kids with him and disappears to a retreat. He’s a wallower, but his narrator wisely prevents his account from veering from the comic into the tragicomic. The narrator is the best part about Fleishman—revealed, at just the right moment, to be a real person. She is a woman. She is a writer. Her name is Libby. And she begins to take control of the story, after wondering why she (a former feature writer for a men’s magazine) has to keep making boring men sound interesting. She begins, then, to tell the story of Toby’s whole marriage, including an empathetic presentation of his ex Rachel, one which incorporates a meaningful understanding of women’s experiences. With its explicit takedown of the long-standing genre which celebrates boring or gross men, Fleishman is in Trouble might seem perfect to some, and a little too on-the-nose, for others. But it’s a productive contribution, either way.

–Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Bryan Washington, Lot (Riverhead)

Bryan Washington’s Lot resists lazy talking points. Washington’s debut short story collection moves deftly, and at breakneck speed, between characters occupying the many worlds of Houston, who all come from different perspectives, ethnicities, and sexualities. But in interviews around the book’s publication, Washington made it clear that to focus on the multitude of experiences on display here was to miss the point, at least a little bit. This is what Houston (and America) look like, and writing characters that reflect the country should be so common as to be unremarkable. “There’s a way of writing about marginalized characters that limits the range, scope, and gaze of their experience to their marginalization, which I was absolutely uninterested in doing,” he told The Paris Review. “The marginalized don’t think of ourselves incessantly through the lens of our marginalization.” His many narrators show a many-faceted portrait of Houston as they explore budding intimacies, hurt and help one another, and find ways to survive. This is a beautiful debut achievement. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Sally Rooney, Normal People (Hogarth)

What more is there to say about Normal People? Nothing, I think, and while I am weary and wary after many endless hype cycles and think pieces and group texts, I do have to admit that I loved this novel this year. I read it twice, and will read it again—hopefully when everyone else has finally stopped talking about it.

–Emily Temple, Senior Editor