“Visible City,” by Tova Mirvis (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
This year abounded with fantastic domestic novels—Robin Black’s “Life Drawing,” Julia Fierro’s “Cutting Teeth”—but none hit me as hard as Tova Mirvis’ “Visible City,” an utterly perfect, deeply moving evocation of contemporary Manhattan, which reminded me of Paula Fox and Laurie Colwin, and also those master chroniclers of the privileged classes, Wharton and Fitzgerald. Mirvis writes with a rare combination of urgency, elegance, and humor—sentences so gorgeous and refined they don’t call attention to themselves—unabashedly probing her characters’ psychological and emotional depths, all the while examining the larger social, economic, and cultural forces at play in their lives. Brilliant.
Tessa Hadley’s seventh book, “Clever Girl,” tells the story of an Englishwoman named Stella from childhood in the 1950s through middle age with such visceral detail that when I think back on events of the novel, it feels like I am remembering my own past. Hadley plunges us into a chaotic, seemingly random life, yet nothing is random; nothing is haphazard here. Hadley is carving out this world with X-Acto knife precision. “Clever Girl” seizes and exposes life, its every strange configuration, jolt and drama, its great and unexpectedly spiral path that brings us back to people and places we thought we had long left behind but never do.
“Ugly Girls,” by Lindsay Hunter (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)Olivia Laing, author of “The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking” (Picador)Kyle Minor, author of “Praying Drunk” (Sarabande Books)
“Wynne’s War,” by Aaron Gwyn (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
The most overlooked good book of the year — and probably my favorite — is “Wynne’s War,” by Aaron Gwyn. It is a tale of friendship and horsemanship and the moral crises that rise from competing loyalties among the members of an elite Special Forces unit tasked with a secret mission in eastern Afghanistan. Gwyn’s prose puts one in mind of Daniel Woodrell and Tom Franklin, and his preoccupations concern beauty as much as they do darkness.Bryan Stevenson, author of “Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption” (Spiegel & Grau)
“Lila,” by Marilynne Robinson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
This book contains more depth, moral insight and compassion than anything I’ve read in years and affirms that Ms. Robinson is one of the two or three finest American novelists of the last half-century. “Lila” returns to the characters of her Pulitzer-Prize winning novel “Gilead” which was a stunning achievement. “Gilead,” “Home” and “Lila” make reading fiction a meditative, reflective, existential experience that is unforgettable and uniquely moving. Lila is a more worldly protagonist than earlier characters. Her struggle for redemption is all the more beautiful because of the hardships she’s endured. Extraordinary!
“Love, Nina,” by Nina Stibbe (Little, Brown and Company)
I fell head over heels for Nina Stibbe’s “Love, Nina.” In the 1980s, Stibbe was a nanny for the sons of Mary-Kay Wilmers, the editor of the London Review of Books. Her dry, wry and magnificently observant letters home provides a glimpse into the domestic lives of London’s intelligentsia (Alan Bennett’s tips on everything from coleslaw to fixing a washing machine are a particular joy). To be shelved alongside “The Pursuit of Love” and the collected Jeeves and Wooster, and taken on a rainy day with a mug of strong tea.Eimear McBride, author of “A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing” (Coffee House Press)Hampton Sides, author of “In the King of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette” (Doubleday)
“Deep Down Dark,” by Hector Tobar (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
“Visible City,” by Tova Mirvis (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
This year abounded with fantastic domestic novels—Robin Black’s “Life Drawing,” Julia Fierro’s “Cutting Teeth”—but none hit me as hard as Tova Mirvis’ “Visible City,” an utterly perfect, deeply moving evocation of contemporary Manhattan, which reminded me of Paula Fox and Laurie Colwin, and also those master chroniclers of the privileged classes, Wharton and Fitzgerald. Mirvis writes with a rare combination of urgency, elegance, and humor—sentences so gorgeous and refined they don’t call attention to themselves—unabashedly probing her characters’ psychological and emotional depths, all the while examining the larger social, economic, and cultural forces at play in their lives. Brilliant.
Tessa Hadley’s seventh book, “Clever Girl,” tells the story of an Englishwoman named Stella from childhood in the 1950s through middle age with such visceral detail that when I think back on events of the novel, it feels like I am remembering my own past. Hadley plunges us into a chaotic, seemingly random life, yet nothing is random; nothing is haphazard here. Hadley is carving out this world with X-Acto knife precision. “Clever Girl” seizes and exposes life, its every strange configuration, jolt and drama, its great and unexpectedly spiral path that brings us back to people and places we thought we had long left behind but never do.
“Ugly Girls,” by Lindsay Hunter (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)Olivia Laing, author of “The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking” (Picador)Kyle Minor, author of “Praying Drunk” (Sarabande Books)
“Wynne’s War,” by Aaron Gwyn (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
The most overlooked good book of the year — and probably my favorite — is “Wynne’s War,” by Aaron Gwyn. It is a tale of friendship and horsemanship and the moral crises that rise from competing loyalties among the members of an elite Special Forces unit tasked with a secret mission in eastern Afghanistan. Gwyn’s prose puts one in mind of Daniel Woodrell and Tom Franklin, and his preoccupations concern beauty as much as they do darkness.Bryan Stevenson, author of “Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption” (Spiegel & Grau)
“Lila,” by Marilynne Robinson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
This book contains more depth, moral insight and compassion than anything I’ve read in years and affirms that Ms. Robinson is one of the two or three finest American novelists of the last half-century. “Lila” returns to the characters of her Pulitzer-Prize winning novel “Gilead” which was a stunning achievement. “Gilead,” “Home” and “Lila” make reading fiction a meditative, reflective, existential experience that is unforgettable and uniquely moving. Lila is a more worldly protagonist than earlier characters. Her struggle for redemption is all the more beautiful because of the hardships she’s endured. Extraordinary!
“Love, Nina,” by Nina Stibbe (Little, Brown and Company)
I fell head over heels for Nina Stibbe’s “Love, Nina.” In the 1980s, Stibbe was a nanny for the sons of Mary-Kay Wilmers, the editor of the London Review of Books. Her dry, wry and magnificently observant letters home provides a glimpse into the domestic lives of London’s intelligentsia (Alan Bennett’s tips on everything from coleslaw to fixing a washing machine are a particular joy). To be shelved alongside “The Pursuit of Love” and the collected Jeeves and Wooster, and taken on a rainy day with a mug of strong tea.Eimear McBride, author of “A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing” (Coffee House Press)Hampton Sides, author of “In the King of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette” (Doubleday)
“Deep Down Dark,” by Hector Tobar (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
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