Esther Aarts
100 Notable Books of 2018
The year’s notable fiction, poetry and nonfiction, selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review.
Roy and Celestial are a young black couple in Atlanta “on the come up,” as he puts it, when he’s convicted of a rape he did not commit and sentenced to 12 years in prison. The unfairness of the years stolen from this couple by a great cosmic error forms the novel’s slow burn.
This stunning debut comprises two novella-like sections, one about a young editor’s affair with an older author and the other about an Iraqi-American economist detained at Heathrow. The result is transgressive, shrewd and politically engaged.
This new collection of verse by the poetry editor of The New Yorker (and director of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture) is political in the best, most visceral way — critical, angry, squinting hard at the culture — while remaining at the same time deeply and lovingly personal.
The incarcerated novelist’s debut is a singular portrait of the opioid epidemic and the United States’ failure to provide adequate support to veterans. It’s full of slapstick comedy, despite gut-clenching depictions of dope sickness, the futility of war and PTSD.
Written with bristling intelligence, this debut novel by a British writer (whose nonfiction books include meditations on drinking and urban loneliness) pays homage to the iconoclastic author Kathy Acker, creating a pastiche of voices and identities.
This marvelous debut novel, about a male writer’s romantic entanglements, is like one of those restaurant dishes that present multiple preparations of a vegetable on the same plate — “beets, three ways” — to capture its essence. “Early Work” is books, three ways.
What are the downsides of living forever? Horn explores this idea through the story of Rachel, who has been alive for 2,000 years and is getting a little tired of it. “The hard part isn’t living forever,” she says. “It’s making life worth living.”
Everything Under
This bewitching debut novel, a finalist for the Booker Prize, follows a young woman’s search for the mother who abandoned her 16 years earlier.
Of all the political threads that permeate Wolitzer’s 12th novel, the most interesting is the challenge of intergenerational feminism. But Wolitzer is an infinitely capable creator of human identities as real as the type on this page; people are her politics.
This remarkable debut novel traces the course of mental illness in a young Nigerian-born woman from babyhood — when Ada’s fretful crying cannot be soothed — through her college years, when multiple personalities begin to bloom inside her mind.
“Friday Black” is an unbelievable debut, one that announces a new and necessary voice. Adjei-Brenyah has written a powerful and important and strange and beautiful collection of stories meant to be read right now; this is a dystopian story collection as full of violence as it is of heart.
The narrator of Nunez’s wry novel inherits a Great Dane after her friend and mentor, an aging author, commits suicide. The novel (winner of the 2018 National Book Award for fiction) suggests that something larger than writerly passion has been lost in our culture, but itself serves as a tribute to the values it holds dear.
This timely novel brings together a retired classics professor in Berlin and a group of African refugees. The risk of didacticism is high, but the book’s rigor and crystalline insights pay off, aesthetically and morally.
A novel that ricochets between Chicago in the mid-1980s, an era when AIDS was a death sentence, and present-day Paris, where the shadow of its contagion still looms over a mother in search of her errant daughter.
In Urrea’s sprawling, tender, funny and bighearted family saga — a Mexican-American novel that is also an American novel — the de La Cruz clan gathers in San Diego to celebrate the 70th birthday of its patriarch, who is dying of cancer.
Kumar’s novel of a young Indian immigrant who recounts his loves lost and won as a college student in the early 1990s has the feeling of thinly veiled memoir. It’s a deeply honest look at a budding intellectual’s new experience of America, filled with both alienation and an aching desire to connect.
Disparate lives in disparate places intersect in this novel, which revolves around a single mother whose boyfriend enlists her in a scheme to smuggle cigarettes across state lines. With consummate skill, Silber reveals surprising connections between characters in contemporary New York and 1970s Turkey.
Based on a true story, this searing autobiographical novel depicts a father struggling to cope with the tragic loss of his partner just as their daughter is born.
Rendered in English for the first time, Gary’s last novel before committing suicide tells a story of the French Resistance as it was lived in the Norman countryside while also capturing the themes of identity and reinvention that obsessed the celebrated French author.
As she did in the first two volumes of this spare, beautiful trilogy, Cusk illuminates her narrator’s inner life via encounters with others. The novels describe in haunting detail what it’s like to walk through the world, trailing ashes after your life goes up in flames.
Shteyngart’s prismatic new road-trip novel stars a Wall Street finance bro, loaded down with job and family woes, who impulsively hops on a Greyhound bus headed west. We do not root for him, but we root for his comeuppance.
Johnson’s long preoccupation with mortality culminates in a posthumous collection. “It’s plain to you that at the time I wrote this, I’m not dead,” one character says. “But maybe by the time you read it.”
The great Irish writer, who died in 2016 at the age of 88, captured turning points in individual lives with powerful slyness. This seemingly quiet but ultimately volcanic collection is his final gift to us, and it is filled with plots sprung from human feeling.
The Norwegian crime writer emphasizes the noir aspects of Shakespeare’s tragedy by turning it into a fast-paced thriller about murder and corruption in 1970s Glasgow. The result has a sharp social edge as well as a timely political resonance.
Kushner’s much-anticipated new novel, a powerful and realistic page turner about a former lap dancer serving two life sentences in a women’s prison, reveals an imagination Dickensian in its amplitude — and in its reformist zeal.
In her sparkling novel — shortlisted for the International Man Booker — Nors trains her gaze on a woman many people would look past, a middle-aged translator learning to drive.
This hefty volume concludes the Norwegian author’s mammoth autobiographical novel with lengthy exegeses on art, literature, poetry and Hitler (whose “Mein Kampf” gives Knausgaard his title).
In Moshfegh’s darkly comic and profound novel, a troubled young woman evading grief decides to renew her spirit by spending the year sleeping. “I knew in my heart,” she tells the reader, “that when I’d slept enough, I’d be O.K.”
This novel, a gritty depiction of a society grounded in corruption, hedonism and violence, may be a sendup of life in Peru before the downfall of Alberto Fujimori in 2000, but it has contemporary relevance for many countries. When civic life becomes degraded, Vargas Llosa demonstrates, everyone is affected, the rich and the poor, the high and the low, the victim and the victimizer.
This landmark translation matches the original’s line count while drawing on a spare, simple and direct idiom that strips away formulaic language to let the characters take center stage.
A thriller that jolts Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler’s iconic private investigator, out of his quiet Mexican retirement and back into the world of scams and seductions. Osborne, who worked as a reporter along the border in the early 1990s, knows Mexico well and he passes that knowledge along to Marlowe.
The science of botany and the art of storytelling merge to ingenious effect in Powers’s magisterial new novel — a story in which people are merely the underbrush and the real protagonists are the trees that the human characters encounter.
An Ethiopian-American teenager living in a mysterious island commune narrates this impressive debut novel, recalling her childhood in Boston and her entanglement there with a charismatic parking-lot attendant and his possibly sinister schemes.
Two children die at the hands of their nanny in this devastating novel, an unnerving cautionary tale that won France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt and analyzes the intimate relationship between mothers and caregivers.
Cole’s main character, a young epidemiologist pursuing her Ph.D. in New York, is refreshingly down-to-earth, and her love affair with a young African prince develops at a satisfying slow burn. This novel checks a lot of boxes: STEM girls, gaslighting, sexual consent.
A collection of short fiction that becomes a wry catalog of the many ways an acquisitive urge can go astray. Renters become unhappy owners; a wedding gift prompts a battle among friends; a man and his father feud over £160 and the price of an airmail stamp.
These expert stories by a Pulitzer finalist are awash in money, lush foliage and menace, in prose so offbeat it’s revelatory.
This graphic novel is a Midwestern gothic tale for our times, recounting the story of a woman’s disappearance and murder, seen through the eyes of her bereaved boyfriend as he watches the trolls and conspiracy theorists dissect her death online. It’s a shattering work of art.
Severance
Laced within this novel’s dystopian narrative — a semi-surreal sendup of a workplace and its utopia of rules, offering commentary on “dizzying abundance” and unrelenting consumption — is an arresting encapsulation of a first-generation immigrant’s nostalgia for New York.
Set in plantation-era Martinique, this novel is a kind of action pastoral, tracing a slave’s desperate escape from a savage master and his monstrous mastiff. His exhilarating flight evokes the shock of freedom with tactile immediacy.
For a man in the 1950s, gay sex was a scandal that led to a prison term. His son comes to maturity in a different era, one in which he can take a legal husband. Hollinghurst’s novel traces the private and public twists of this process.
In her stunning new novel, rich in both ideas and people, Novik gives classic fairy tales — particularly “Rumpelstiltskin” — a fresh, wholly original twist, with the vastness of Tolkien and the empathy and joy in daily life of Le Guin.
Mukherjee’s novel, a homage of sorts to V.S. Naipaul, presents five interconnected stories set in India and exploring the lives of the unmoored.
Orange’s devastatingly beautiful debut novel, about a group of characters converging on the San Francisco Bay Area for an event called the “Big Oakland Powwow,” explores what it means to be an urban Native American.
Set in England, France and the Caribbean, Phillips’s fragmented novel uses the difficult, lonely life of the half-Welsh, half-West Indian writer Jean Rhys (author of “Wide Sargasso Sea”) to explore themes of alienation, colonialism and exile.
In her new collection, the poet laureate addresses national traumas including slavery and the Civil War — some of the poems are drawn from the letters of black soldiers — while asking how an artist might navigate the political and the personal.
In his latest novel, the author of “The English Patient” tells the story of a London family fractured by Allied intelligence work. And the danger won’t end when the fighting is over.
This eloquent novel, Edugyan’s third, is a daring work of empathy and imagination, featuring a Barbados slave boy in the 1830s who flees barbaric cruelty in a hot-air balloon and embarks on a life of adventure that is wondrous, melancholy and strange.
French has stepped away from her standout Dublin Murder Squad series to deliver a nervy, obsessive novel — equal parts crime thriller and psychological study — about an art gallery publicist and an unsolved murder in his family.
These six stories, like all of Eisenberg’s work, are blazingly moral and devastatingly sidelong. She is an artist of the unsaid: the unacknowledged silences and barely intimated strangenesses of the world.
The first full biography of Ali since his death two years ago, Eig’s richly researched, sympathetic yet unsparing portrait of a controversial figure for whom the personal and the political dramatically fused could not come at a more appropriate time.
Ellis’s subject is not only the founding era, but also our own, and the “ongoing conversation between past and present.” The author of numerous books on the early United States, Ellis draws connections between our history and our current age with an authority that few other writers can muster.
The doctor to the infamous Hamilton-Burr duel also created a legendary botanical garden for early America, now buried far beneath Rockefeller Center. Johnson tells his story.
For his latest book, Bauer, an investigative journalist, went undercover as a guard at a private prison in Louisiana. His alarming, riveting exposé portrays a multibillion-dollar industry plagued by violence, corruption, deprivation and incompetence.
This impassioned account of fracking’s toll on a small town in Pennsylvania by Griswold, a poet and journalist, lays bare in novelistic detail the human and environmental costs of a practice abetted by greed and government negligence.
This first major biography of the great tennis champion, written by a civil rights historian, shows that Ashe’s activism was as important as his athletic skill. He belongs on the Mount Rushmore of elite sports figures who changed America.
Elizabeth Holmes and her startup, Theranos, perpetrated one of the biggest scams in the history of Silicon Valley, raising millions for a medical device that never really existed. Carreyrou’s account reads like a thriller.
A vivid, slightly surreal history of “the great minor city of America,” starting 500 million years ago and continuing up through Timothy McVeigh, Kevin Durant and the Flaming Lips.
Hisham, a journalist from Raqqa, details his country’s descent into endless bloodshed. Crabapple’s abundant illustrations capture the chaos.
In his new collection of comic personal essays, Sedaris — who is now 61 — grapples seriously with themes of family, mortality and illness. As always, his very essence seeps through the pages like an intoxicating cloud.
Churchill’s extraordinary life was filled with triumph and disaster, adulation and contempt, and the task for any historian is to strike a proper balance. Roberts’s expansive narrative includes all the necessary details about the man he calls an indispensable figure. This is the best single-volume biography yet written.
Expanding on their influential Atlantic article, the authors trace the culture of “safetyism” on campus to a generation convinced of its own fragility, warning of potentially dire consequences for democracy.
The prolific British novelist, playwright and poet reflects on the sacrifices and satisfactions of her career, drawing larger conclusions about the conflict between a woman’s public and private responsibilities.
The crash of 2008, Tooze argues, was caused in both Europe and America, and its impact, he says, has been more political than economic, leading to a continuing wave of nationalism, protectionism and populism throughout most of the West.
We are accustomed to stories of Christians martyred by pagans, but in this searingly passionate book, Nixey reverses the narrative, describing in great detail the desecrations and destruction Christians wreaked upon pagans and classical civilization.
Bolin’s stylish and inspired collection centers on the figure — ubiquitous in police procedurals from “Twin Peaks” to “True Detective” — of the “dead girl,” a character who represents a dominant American fantasy, inciting desire and rage in equal measure.
Williams, a New Yorker staff writer, tells the bizarre story of a man caught smuggling a stolen Tyrannosaurus skeleton into America. It connects her with the dark network of people trafficking in pilfered fossils and takes her all the way to Mongolia.
Macy’s harrowing account of the opioid epidemic, in which hundreds of thousands have already died, masterfully interlaces stories of communities in crisis with dark histories of corporate greed and regulatory indifference.
This harrowing memoir recounts the author’s upbringing in a survivalist Idaho family cursed by ideological mania and outlandish physical trauma, as well as her ultimately successful quest to obtain the education denied her as a child.
Pinker continues his recent argument for being happy about the state of the world, despite the rise of authoritarian nationalism, with a rousing defense of the four big ideas named in his subtitle.
Last year saw a profusion of books about Martin Luther to mark the 500th anniversary of his posting the 95 Theses. Massing widens the lens wondrously, bringing in Erasmus, the great humanist foe of Luther. Their rivalry set the course for much of Western civilization.
Deftly roving from literature and philosophy to art, pop music and film, Smith’s incisive new collection showcases her exuberance and range while making a cohesive argument for social and aesthetic freedom.
A noted historian uncovers the scores of brawls, stabbings, pummelings and duel threats that occurred among congressmen between 1830 and 1860. The mayhem was part of the ever-escalating tensions over slavery.
Lewis brings his breezy, appealing style to an examination of three relatively obscure government departments, energy, agriculture and commerce, shining a light on the life-or-death work these agencies perform, and showing how the Trump administration is doing what it can to undermine them.
The title honors the female aviators who were hindered by the deep gender inequities of the golden age of flying. These are women few of us have heard of before; as O’Brien explains of their forgotten histories, each woman “went missing in her own way.”
Blight’s monumental biography of the man who was the most famous African-American of the 19th century gives us not only the career but also the context that allowed Douglass to enter the White House as an adviser to Abraham Lincoln. And unlike Douglass’s own autobiographies, this book takes us inside the Douglass household to show us his complex relationship with the women in his life.
This second volume of an important biography looks at both the public and private life of a major figure of the 20th century. Guha admires Gandhi’s achievements, but does not gloss over the man’s flaws.
This longtime resident of Texas examines the complexities, contradictions and sheer goofiness of his state, arguing that it heralds America’s future.
This searching account of growing up in Jackson, Miss., in the 1980s is addressed to the author’s mother, a brilliant, demanding and volatile single parent. Laymon probes his experience with racism, obesity and sexual violence with candid intensity, but it is his complex portrait of maternal love that leaves an indelible mark.
Pollan writes about new research into psychedelics and how they can reduce trauma. He also describes, in sometimes remarkable ways, how he experienced his own trips.
This somber, intimate and at times wrenching self-portrait — written by the actress herself and not a ghostwriter, with minimal rationalization, sentiment or self-pity — feels like an act of personal investigation, not a Hollywood memoir.
Pieced together from texts, emails and black box recordings, this is a tense, moment-by-moment account of the 2015 sinking of the cargo ship El Faro during Hurricane Joaquin.
In 1986 the Los Angeles Central Library went up in flames, an episode that provides the impetus and central drama for Orlean’s latest book, an unexpectedly fascinating paean to libraries — among the few institutions around “that welcome everyone and don’t charge any money for that warm embrace.”
This impassioned study by Perry, a scholar at Princeton, yields a fascinating portrait of the influential black playwright and activist, who died young in 1965, cutting short a life of unusual promise.
A sometimes fanciful, always gossipy portrait of Queen Elizabeth’s younger sister, who loved to appear rebellious and bohemian but was also intensely devoted to the privileges that accompanied royal life.
This searing memoir, by the son of teenage parents in Camden, N.J., tells the story of a childhood in the cross hairs of racism and homophobia.
This narrative of the Syrian war from 2011 through 2016 offers page after page of extraordinary reporting and exquisite prose, rendering its individual subjects with tremendous intimacy.
This deeply reported account tracks an immigrant couple’s struggle to remake their lives in America while staying connected to their hometown in China.
In the early 1900s, you could find “pepper” made from sawdust or “coffee” that featured tree bark and ground acorns. Food was regularly contaminated and adulterated. Blum writes about the understated head of the U.S.D.A., Harvey Washington Wiley, who did the most to help change this situation and persuaded Americans and lawmakers to think differently about food.
Bergman’s fast-paced account of Israel’s program to assassinate its enemies raises troubling moral and practical questions but also demonstrates that the tactic can be a highly effective tool against terrorist groups.
Zimmer does a deep dive into the question of heredity, exploring everything from how genetic ancestry works to the thorny question of how race is defined, biologically. The book is Zimmer at his best: obliterating misconceptions about science in gentle prose.
Brennan-Jobs’s memoir of an unstable childhood at the mercy of her depressed, volatile and chronically impoverished mother, on the one hand, and her famous, wealthy and emotionally abusive father, on the other, is a luminous, if deeply disturbing, work of art.
This collection of Yang’s essays includes three that mine the question of Asian-American identity. Yang emphasizes the feeling of invisibility that he often experiences as he tries to get inside the mind of people like Seung-Hui Cho, the man who killed more than two dozen people at Virginia Tech in 2007.
The tree of life as we imagine it, with new species branching out over time, is much more complicated than Charles Darwin dreamed. Quammen’s book describes the years of research to discover “horizontal gene transfer,” which allows traits to jump from branch to branch.
Gerald’s journey from his boyhood in a blighted Dallas neighborhood to his role as the cynosure of a room comprising no small number of the 1 percent is recounted here with great lyricism and emotion. His voice comes through, at turns exuberant, humorous, unsentimental, imaginative, keen, as he tells a deeply American story.
This sweeping, sobering account of the American past is a story not of relentless progress but of conflict and contradiction, with crosscurrents of reason and faith, black and white, immigrant and native, industry and agriculture rippling through a narrative that is far from completion.
A law professor recounts the history of American companies’ radical efforts to shape the law, with the result, he writes, that “today corporations have nearly all the same rights as individuals.”
This memoir, by a pediatrician at a city hospital in Flint, Mich., who realized that her young patients were being poisoned by lead in the city’s drinking water, recounts her struggle to expose the crisis to public view with compassion and indignation.
Chute offers a tour de force of the world of comics, from high-minded graphic novels to Superman, analyzing what exactly makes them a unique and relevant art form right now.
Giridharadas examines the worlds of Davos and Aspen, where an elite intent on “changing the world” hang out, emerging with a quietly scathing report on how little they actually do to make a difference when it comes to the big structural problems. They are instead the enablers of the rich and powerful.