Biography - American Lion by Jon Meacham 
Newsweek editor and bestselling author Meacham (Franklin and Winston) offers a lively take on the seventh president's White House years.

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry - The Shadow of Sirius by W.S. Merwin
With no punctuation and a solitary launching capital letter, Merwin offers what may be his most personal, generous and empathic collection. Somehow, he manages to dissolve the boundaries between one time and another, seeming to look forward to the past or remember what has yet to happen. The poems show the marks of having weathered a full life but also feel fresh and new. 

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman  

Taking inspiration from Kipling’s The Jungle Book, Gaiman creates a charming allegory of childhood. Although the book opens with a scary scene the story quickly moves into more child-friendly storytelling. An orphaned baby toddles into a nearby graveyard whose ghostly residents adopt him, name him Nobody ("Bod"), and allow him to live in their tomb. The story follows Bod's progress as he grows from baby to teen, learning life’s lessons amid a cadre of the long-dead, ghouls, witches, intermittent human interlopers. A pallid, nocturnal guardian named Silas ensures that Bod receives food, books, and anything else he might need from the human world. Whenever the boy strays from his usual play among the headstones, he finds new dangers, learns his limitations and strengths, and acquires the skills he needs to survive within the confines of the graveyard and in wider world beyond. Recommended for ages 10 and up.

The House in the Night by Beth Krommes

A spare, patterned text and glowing pictures explore the origins of light that make a house a home. Naming nighttime things that are both comforting and intriguing to preschoolers - a key, a bed, the moon - this bedtime book for young children illuminates a reassuring order to the universe.

Fiction - 2666 by Roberto Bolano

Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño’s life (he died in 2003), 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of SantaTeresa - a fictional Juárez - on the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared.

Non-Fiction - The Forever War by Dexter Filkins

Filkins, a New York Times prize-winning reporter, is widely regarded as among the finest war correspondents of this generation. His richly textured book is based on his work in Afghanistan and Iraq since 1998. It begins with a Taliban-staged execution in Kabul. It ends with Filkins musing on the names in a WWI British cemetery in Baghdad. In between, the work is a vivid kaleidoscope of vignettes. Filkins does not editorialize - a welcome change from the punditry that shapes most writing from these war zones. This book also differs essentially from traditional war correspondence because of its universal empathy, feelings enhanced by Filkins's spare prose which masterfully illustrates the varied ways that the people of Iraq and Afghanistan have been affected by ongoing war.

White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
In October, first time novelist Adiga was plucked from relative obscurity to the top of the heap when he was awarded the top literary prize of the United Kingdom. Adiga offers a revealing look at class struggle in modern-day India as seen through the eyes of chauffeur Balram Halwai. Halwai escapes a brutal existence in rural India only to end up murdering his rich employer in Delhi. The novel is told, in part, as a correspondence between Halwai and the premier of China, for whom the driver believes he holds valuable insights.

Fiction - Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen

Matthiessen’s epic trilogy – Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man’s River, and Bone by Bone – was conceived as one vast mysterious novel, but because of its length it was originally broken up into three books. In Shadow Country, the author has cut nearly a third of the overall text and collapsed the time frame while deepening the insights and motivations of his characters with brilliant rewriting throughout. Inspired by a near-mythic event of the wild Florida frontier at the turn of the twentieth century, Shadow Country re-imagines the legend of the inspired Everglades sugar planter and notorious outlaw E. J. Watson, who drives himself relentlessly toward his own violent end.

Nonfiction - The Hemingses of Monticello by Annette Gordon-Reed 

Reed tells the story of the slave family whose close blood ties to our third president had been systematically expunged from American history until very recently. It brings to life not only Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson but also their children and Hemings's siblings, who shared a father with Jefferson's wife, Martha. The family's compelling saga is set against the backdrop of Revolutionary America, Paris on the eve of its own revolution, 1790s Philadelphia, and plantation life at Monticello. 

Poetry - Fire to Fire by Mark Doty

Doty collects the best of his seven previously published books of poetry, along with a generous selection of new work in Fire to Fire. His signature style encompasses both the plainspoken and the artfully wrought, and speaks to the crises and possibilities of our time.

 

 

 

Young People's Literature - What I Saw and How I Lied by Judy Blundell

This taut, noirish mystery/coming-of-age story is set in 1947. When first met, 15-year-old Evie and her best friend are buying chocolate cigarettes to practice smoking. Evie sheds that innocence on a trip to Florida, where her stepfather, Joe, back from the war in Europe, abruptly takes her and her beautiful mother, Beverly, and where Evie falls in love with glamorous Peter, an army buddy whom Joe is none too happy to see. But after a boating accident results in a suspicious death and an inquest, Evie is forced to revisit her romance with Peter and her relationships with Joe and her mother, and to consider that her assumptions about all three may have been wrong from the beginning. 

A Mercy by Toni Morrison

From the Nobel Prize–winning author of Beloved come another tragic tale of slavery. It is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and of a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment. In Morrison's deft hands, acts of mercy often have unforeseen consequences.

 

 

 

2666 by Roberto Bolano

Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño’s life (he died in 2003), 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of SantaTeresa - a fictional Juárez - on the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared. (Also nominated for  National Book Critics Circle Award, see above.)

Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

Lahiri won a Pulitzer Prize for her debut effort, Interpreter of Maladies. In Unaccustomed Earth she returns to winning form with eight dazzling stories that explore the secrets at the heart of family life. It is a work rich with the author’s signature gifts: exquisite prose, emotional wisdom and subtle renderings of the most intricate workings of the heart and mind.

 

 

Netherland by Joseph O'Neill

In a post-9/11 New York City, Hans - a banker originally from the Netherlands - finds himself marooned after his English wife and son return to London. Alone and untethered, feeling lost in the country he had come to regard as home, Hans stumbles upon the vibrant New York subculture of cricket, where he revisits his lost childhood and, thanks to a friendship with a charismatic and charming Trinidadian named Chuck Ramkissoon, begins to reconnect with his life and his adopted country. Netherland depicts the grand strangeness and fading promise of 21st century America from an outsider’s vantage point, the complicated relationship between the American dream and its particular dreamers, and the struggle for meaning that governs any single life. 

Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser

As the title suggests, Dangerous Laughter is a collection of thirteen darkly comic stories that stretche the boundaries of the ordinary world as they offer commentary on the misery wrought by misdirected human desire and ambition.  

 

 

 

The Forever War by Dexter Filkins

Through Filkins, a prizewinning New York Times correspondent we witness the remarkable chain of events that began with the rise of the Taliban in the 1990s, continued with the attacks of 9/11, and moved on to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Forever War serves up a visceral understanding of today’s battlefields and of the experiences of the people on the ground, warriors and innocents alike. It is a work, not just about America’s wars after 9/11, but ultimately about the nature of war itself.

The Dark Side by Jane Mayer

In the days immediately following 9/11, the most powerful people in this country made a series of radical decisions about how to combat terrorists and strengthen national security in a state of utter chaos and fear, decisions that not only violated the Constitution, but also hampered the pursuit of Al Qaeda. In gripping detail, Mayer relates the impact of these decisions with respect to the moral standing of America in the world, and its sense of itself. The Dark Side chronicles a disturbing chapter in American history that will likely serve as one of the lasting legacies of the George W. Bush presidency. 

Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes

Two years after the best-selling Arthur and George, Julian Barnes gives us a memoir on mortality that touches on faith, science and family as well as a rich array of exemplary figures who over the centuries have confronted the same questions he now poses about the most basic fact of life: its inevitable extinction.

This Republic of Suffering by Drew Gilpin Faust

More than 600,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be six million. In This Republic of Suffering, Faust reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation, describing how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality. 

The World Is What It Is by Patrick French

The book's subtitle, "The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipul," is sufficient summary, perhaps, but it fails to adequately describe the rich detail of French's revelatory portait of the controversial Nobel laureate, whose only stated ambition was greatness as a writer, in pursuit of which goal nothing else was sacred. Amid a harrowing emotional life, French traces the course of the fierce visionary impulse underlying Naipaul’s singular power, a gift to produce masterpieces of fiction and nonfiction.