At the end of each year, we make a lot of lists: 100 Notable Books, the 10 Best Books, the most memorable genre novels. And while we stand wholeheartedly behind those recommendations, inevitably each of us has that one unforgettable read that doesn’t quite make the cut — but is no less worthy of your attention. Here are a few of the books that stuck with us and became personal favorites this year. Perhaps they will stick with you, too.
Exiles
by Mason Coile
There is nothing better than being pulled into an immersive, read-in-one-sitting book. That was exactly my experience with this 204-page horror mystery. Here’s the hook: Three astronauts set out on a one-way trip to Mars to become the first human settlers on the planet. Once they arrive, they learn that a whole wing of their planned base has been destroyed, their robot helpers have become sentient, one robot is missing altogether and the remaining machines are warning of a danger that lurks outside. Are the robots trustworthy? What could possibly be looming out in the dark? And, most pressing, can these humans survive with the diminished resources they have? I picked up this novel on a lazy Sunday and stayed rapt on my couch until I finished. It was a sweet (or should I say sinister?) little treat. Read our review. — MJ Franklin, preview editor
The Passenger Seat
by Vijay Khurana
This taut, terrific novel — Khurana’s debut — ratchets up the tension in a classic formula: A couple of restless young men on a wilderness road trip, rifle in tow, test the bonds of their tentative friendship and learn more than they anticipated about manhood, violence and the consequences of poor impulse control. Khurana’s sinuous prose zips right along, taking us inside the minds of both friends to illuminate their distinct ambitions and insecurities, before swerving into a surprising and graceful finish. I’ve been recommending it for months to anybody who likes Richard Ford and Andre Dubus III. Read our review. — Gregory Cowles, senior editor
The Correspondent
by Virginia Evans
Sybil Van Antwerp lives a quiet life in Annapolis, Md., tending her garden and enjoying her retirement. She doesn’t have a spouse or a pet, and she can be prickly with friends. She prefers the company of pen pals — her brother, a former colleague, favorite authors, a young boy going through a hard time. As Evans’s debut novel unfolds in a series of letters (some fired off, others labored over with great care), Sybil’s past starts to take shape. But questions (and shadows) remain. Who is Sybil’s mystery correspondent? Why does she hold herself at a remove from people who want to be close, including her own son and daughter? Fans of “Olive Kitteridge” and “84 Charing Cross Road,” take note: This beautiful, wise, funny story provides further proof that the quirkiest among us deserve a second chance. — Elisabeth Egan, feature writer
More Weight
by Ben Wickey
It took a decade to produce this densely packed 532-page masterwork of a graphic novel, and that effort is evident in Wickey’s riveting blend of hand-drawn visuals and storytelling. The book, which includes 55 pages of endnotes detailing its primary sources, examines the 1692 Salem witch trials and how misinformation and groupthink have impacted American history. The title comes from the supposed last words of Giles Corey, the defiant antihero slowly crushed to death under a pile of rocks after refusing to enter a plea on a bogus witchcraft accusation, but “more weight” can also be interpreted as Wickey’s argument against a culture that has since watered down and lightened up the Salem tragedy. — J.D. Biersdorfer, staff editor
Eye of the Monkey
by Krisztina Toth; translated by Ottilie Mulzet
In an unnamed Central European country, scarred by a civil war and buckling under an autocrat, citizens are deeply segregated by class and constantly surveilled. But the machinations of the United Regency, as the government is called in this novel, are hardly the focus; instead, the story traces the lives and travails of a handful of characters, including a psychiatrist who seduces his patient, as they confront dead-end choices. Toth is an acclaimed Hungarian writer and has written one of the most elegant, disorienting novels I’ve read this year: It’s funny and evenhanded enough that the finale arrives as a devastating fait accompli. And Mulzet’s translation is feverishly good. Read our review. — Joumana Khatib, editor and newsletter writer
Grand Rapids
by Natasha Stagg
Reading this coming-of-age novel set in suburban Michigan is like watching a scab form over a raw wound; some will take a hard pass, while others won’t be able to look away. The 15-year-old narrator has just lost her mother to cancer and spends much of her summer getting high with her best friend, Candy, and fumbling half-blind through a sexual awakening. She works at a nursing home during the day, then often finds herself in a haze of PJ Harvey, Robitussin and reality TV — and mixing with sometimes dangerous, invariably disappointing men. Stagg’s writing is precise and unaffected, and her short chapters have the lingering effect that great songs do: Their power’s not just in the notes you hear but in the silences between. — Dave Kim, preview editor
The Season
by Helen Garner
For decades, Garner has turned her gimlet eye on human foibles and societal vagaries. No one has ever accused the acclaimed Australian novelist and essayist of sentimentality. And yet, with “The Season,” she presents what she herself calls “a nanna’s book about footy” — a love letter to her grandson’s Aussie Rules football team, and to the grandson himself. You’ll learn a lot about a year in this gleefully violent sport, the triumphant “season” of the title, and get to know her grandson’s scrappy under-16 squad, the Colts. This is a sports book, and a very satisfying one. But Garner’s real subject is the fragility of boyhood — and the bittersweet joys of being a grandparent. A jewel of a book for so many people, that you won’t soon forget. Read our review. — Sadie Stein, preview editor
Theory & Practice
by Michelle de Kretser
You don’t need to have gone to graduate school in the 1980s, or know your Derrida from your Deleuze, to revel in de Kretser’s sendup of an era when lumbering Apple desktops were considered a “technology of enchantment” and scholars hopped up on theory waged war on politically suspect “texts.” De Kretser’s narrator, a Melbourne Ph.D. student, cannot help noticing the yawning gap between her colleagues’ lofty ideals and their often much less noble behavior — a mounting catalog of contradictions that in this author’s deft hands becomes a comic and, ultimately, moving window onto the universal human capacity for self-deception. Read our review. — Emily Eakin, senior editor
Discontent
by Beatriz Serrano; translated by Mara Faye Lethem
Marisa, a 32-year-old creative director at an ad agency in Madrid, has become an expert in the white-collar shell game of pantomiming busyness: She rearranges anodyne pitch decks, exchanges blandly cheerful platitudes at meetings and plagiarizes underlings with abandon. Beneath the novel’s breezy “Office Space”-style nihilism, though, Serrano — via a seamless translation by Lethem — locates the profound loneliness of her protagonist, who seems to live almost entirely behind screens or via surface encounters. “Discontent” is one of this year’s loveliest small surprises: a melancholy and tartly funny little bonbon of a book with a (literal) knockout ending. Read our review. — Leah Greenblatt, preview editor
Gotham at War
by Mike Wallace
Wallace does it again, and perhaps for the last time. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author brings his monumental trilogy on New York to a close with a kaleidoscopic history of the political conflicts that roiled the city in the run-up to World War II. It’s got everything: uptown patricians, downtown socialists, dogged immigrants, celebrity anthropologists. Together this motley crew faced off against an outpost of Nazis who saw the five boroughs as a ripe territory to sow racial division. And New Yorkers didn’t just confront fascism on U.S. soil (Madison Square Garden was among their favorite battlegrounds): They also pushed the nation to cross the Atlantic and fight the Third Reich in Europe. It’s the Big Apple grid, fully electrified. Read our review. — Neima Jahromi, preview editor
Soft Core
by Brittany Newell
“Before I started dancing, I rarely thought of my body in any great detail,” says Ruth (stage name Baby), the newbie stripper whose deadpan observations salt Newell’s mordantly funny novel. “Its robust capacity for pleasure was something to be celebrated, like a nation’s exports. At all other times I was fond of my body like you’d be fond of a favorite mug — I liked it enough to use it every day but not enough to talk about it.” Talk she does, though — about the dressing room etiquette at the club where she works, the economically divided San Francisco where she plays and the missing boyfriend she starts to see all over town. Read our review. — Scott Heller, features editor
The Wasp Trap
by Mark Edwards
For pure escapism, there’s nothing I like better than a locked-room mystery. This is an especially good one — smart, propulsive and peppered with devilishly clever red herrings. Six friends gather in a Notting Hill mansion one evening to celebrate the professor who hired them back in 1999, when they were college students, to help develop a dating app. But they’ve barely sat down to dinner when they realize that their cell service has been cut off, and the doors and windows have been bolted shut. That’s when a man comes in, brandishing a gun. “There is a secret in this room … that dates back to the summer of ’99,” he tells them. “One of you knows it. Maybe some of you. Maybe all of you. And before the end of the night we are going to know it too.” Read our review. — Tina Jordan, deputy editor
A Forbidden Alchemy
by Stacey McEwan
With a new romantasy series launching seemingly every week, they can all start to blur together. So it is a real joy to discover something original that blends the genre’s drama and spice with imaginative world-building and political relevance. McEwan’s novel is a gripping saga about two soul mates who meet as children, uncover a government conspiracy and then, as adults, find themselves on opposite sides of a civil war. It is full of yearning and clever magic, yet also grapples with economic disparity, organized labor and class conflict. It takes McEwan a minute to get all her chess pieces in place but, once we hit the main action, she wields them with the panache of a grandmaster. I am already counting down the days until the sequel. — Jennifer Harlan, service editor
Spent
by Alison Bechdel
Early in this autofictional graphic novel, the cartoonist protagonist, also named Alison Bechdel, and her wife remove their KN95 masks and take rapid Covid tests on the porch of their friends’ house before entering a party. A minor moment in this very funny tale of capitalism, community, friendship, love and selling out, the image has stayed with me for months. Nowhere else have I seen the mundane routines of pandemic life portrayed at all, much less in such bright and cheerful color. And who better to help us make sense of (and laugh at) our recent strange era of nasal swabbing and Zoom calls than the author who has previously made such topics as parental deception, suicide, gender dysphoria and psychoanalysis … comic. Read our review. — Aliza Aufrichtig, design editor
I Do Know Some Things
by Richard Siken
Each book is an opportunity to respond to the writer’s cardinal question: How to put it? Siken’s latest poetry collection, an autobiography in fragments, offers one answer, such as it is: back together. After a stroke in 2019, Siken abandoned the deft enjambments of his earlier work (including a debut, “Crush,” that received the 2004 Yale Younger Poets Prize and has since been passed around by countless writers like a totem). The 77 prose poems in this book reckon with love and memory and personal connection, but most of all with language and its loss. “There were few nouns. They wouldn’t connect,” Siken writes in one poem. In another: “I tried to say it completely. I said it as plain as I could.” — John Maher, news editor
Insomnia
by Robbie Robertson
In this posthumous memoir, the lead guitarist of the Band and best-selling author of “Testimony” chronicles his friendship and creative partnership with Martin Scorsese, which began in 1976 when Scorsese directed “The Last Waltz,” the landmark documentary about the Band’s final performance. As the Band’s story came to an end and his marriage fell apart, Robertson found Scorsese in a similar situation — and moved into his Beverly Hills home. His lively account of that time is a tender portrait of shared adventure and an unflinching reflection on brotherhood, loss and redemption, replete with drug-fueled, all-night movie screenings and raucous cameos by Liza Minnelli, Robert De Niro and many more. — Tas Tobey, senior news assistant
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