With the year more than half way through, we at Book Marks thought we’d take a look back at the titles that garnered the strongest reviews since January 1st. Whether your poison is historical fiction, family memoir, short stories, investigative journalism, graphic non fiction, biography, or sci-fi, this list has something for you.
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Fiction
1.Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders – Best Overall
(28 Rave, 11 Positive, 3 Mixed)
“…a luminous feat of generosity and humanism … the war here is a crucible for a heroic American identity: fearful but unflagging; hopeful even in tragedy; staggering, however tentatively, toward a better world … events sometimes conspire to make a work of art, like a novel set in the past, supremely timely. In describing Lincoln’s call to action, Saunders provides an appeal for his limbo denizens — for citizens everywhere — to step up and join the cause.”
–Colson Whitehead (The New York Times Book Review)
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2. Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout – Best Short Story Collection
(25 Rave, 3 Positive)
“These stories return Strout to the core of what she does more magnanimously than anyone else, which is to render quiet portraits of the indignities and disappointments of normal life, and the moments of grace and kindness we are gifted in response.”
–Susan Scarff Merrell (The Washington Post)
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3. Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
(23 Rave, 4 Positive, 3 Mixed, 1 Pan)
“Hamid rewrites the world as a place thoroughly, gorgeously, and permanently overrun by refugees and migrants, its boundaries reconfigured so that ‘the only divisions that mattered now were between those who sought the right of passage and those who would deny them passage.; He doesn’t flinch from the mess and anger that come from redistribution and accommodation—but, still, he depicts the world as resolutely beautiful and, at its core, unchanged. The novel feels immediately canonical, so firm and unerring is Hamid’s understanding of our time and its most pressing questions.”
–Jia Tolentino (The New Yorker)
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4. Borne by Jeff VanderMeer – Best Science Fiction
(15 Rave, 1 Positive)
“…when I term Borne the author’s best work yet, it’s precisely for this untrammeled inventiveness. VanderMeer has brought off a fiction that takes him again and again to his strength, namely, imaginative spectacle.”
–John Domini (Bookforum)
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5. The Idiot by Elif Batuman
(11 Rave, 19 Positive, 2 Mixed, 3 Pan)
“A loose, baggy monster, full of irrelevant garbage and needless words — and all the richer for it — the book implicitly makes an argument for what a twenty-first-century novel might be … Batuman is virtuosic in articulating the internal workings of this moment. Her compassion for the agony of those attempting to forge a connection through words is perceptive, intelligent, and funny.”
–Molly Fischer (Harper’s)
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6. White Tears by Hari Kunzru
(14 Rave, 6 Positive, 2 Mixed, 1 Pan)
“Kunzru’s prose has a Delilloesque density, constructing settings and atmospheres so charged and vivid they seem to envelop the reader in a miasma of mise-en-scène … At every turn, Kunzru’s words concoct a dreamlike world where the past isn’t dead, nor even past, and the boundaries of reality flicker at the margins. For a nation seduced by a fantasy of white appropriation, maybe a horror story of white appropriation is exactly what we need.”
–Claire Fallon (The Huffington Post)
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7. The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen
(12 Rave, 5 Positive)
“With anger but not despair, with reconciliation but not unrealistic hope, and with genuine humour that is not used to diminish anyone, Nguyen has breathed life into many unforgettable characters, and given us a timely book focusing, in the words of Willa Cather, on ‘the slow working out of fate in people of allied sentiment and allied blood?.'”
–Yiyun Li (The Guardian)
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8. Transit by Rachel Cusk
(14 Rave, 4 Positive, 3 Mixed)
“It’s only January, but I doubt that I’ll read a better novel this year than Rachel Cusk’s Transit. Cusk writes in a cut-glass style that is elegant, austere, and disciplined — an important word in a novel about gaining control over the self and fate. Yet this cool, balanced style is used to describe the hottest of feelings and the most destabilizing of experiences.”
–Anthony Domestico (The Boston Globe)
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9. Homesick For Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh
(9 Rave, 12 Positive)
“Homesick for Another World abuses its chosen genre, just as Moshfegh intended, but in the way that Dr. Frankenstein abused his raw materials. Raw and red and sutured, his monster was tortured into consciousness, to live.”
–Josephine Livingstone (The New Republic)
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10. The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley by Hannah Tinti
(11 Rave, 2 Positive, 1 Mixed)
“The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley displays such a high degree of polish any trace of the maker’s hand is removed. Every sentence perfect, every circumstance layered with meaning, effect, intrigue, and forward motion. Can a writer be too good?”
–Melissa H. Pierson (The Barnes and Noble Review)
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Non Fiction
1. Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann
(16 Rave, 4 Positive, 1 Mixed)
“…[a] disturbing and riveting book … If this all sounds like the plot of a detective novel, you have fallen under the spell of David Grann’s brilliance … Grann takes what was already a fascinating and disciplined recording of a forgotten chapter in American history, and with the help of contemporary Osage tribe members, he illuminates a sickening conspiracy that goes far deeper than those four years of horror. It will sear your soul.”
–Dave Eggers (The New York Times Book Review)
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2. Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood – Best Memoir
(12 Rave, 7 Positive, 1 Mixed)
“…full of American contradictions and dense with brilliant sentences … [her father] emerges with a vividity that will be familiar to the lapsed children of religious men given to reactionary grunting and voting for Donald Trump … Lockwood’s chronicle of her homecoming at times lacks dramatic tension, but it’s consistently charming … Moving from a place of light into darkness and then returning to light is something very rare indeed. It has the shape of salvation.”
–Christian Lorentzen (Vulture)
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3. Hunger by Roxane Gay
(10 Rave, 7 Positive, 4 Mixed)
“…a bracingly vivid account of how intellect, emotion and physicality speak to each other and work in tireless tandem to not just survive unspeakable hurt, but to create a life worth living and celebrating … Undestroyed, unruly, unfettered, Ms. Gay, live your life. We are all better for having you do so in the same ferociously honest fashion that you have written this book.”
–Rebecca Carroll (The Los Angeles Times)
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4. Richard Nixon: A Life by John A. Farrell – Best Biography
(9 Rave, 4 Positive)
“He’s an electrifying subject, a muttering Lear, of perennial interest to anyone with even an average curiosity about politics or psychology. The real test of a good Nixon biography, given how many there are, is far simpler: Is it elegantly written? And, even more important, can it tolerate paradoxes and complexity, the spikier stuff that distinguishes real-life sinners from comic-book villains? The answer, in the case of Richard Nixon, is yes, on both counts.”
–Jennifer Senior (The New York Times)
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5. Imagine Wanting Only This by Kristen Radtke – Best Graphic Literature
(8 Rave, 6 Positive, 1 Pan)
“…one of the most haunting graphic memoirs I’ve ever read … [Radtke] has forsaken and been forsaken, she is audacious and vulnerable, she takes risks and she is wounded by what the world is and how it bends back upon itself. As we turn the pages on her journey, we are ravaged and ravished.”
–Beth Kephart (The Chicago Tribune)
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6. The Blood of Emmett Till by Timothy B. Tyson
(9 Rave, 1 Positive)
“What sets Tyson’s book apart is the wide-angle lens he uses to examine the lynching, and the ugly parallels between past and present … A terrific writer and storyteller, Tyson compels a closer look at a heinous crime and the consequential decisions, large and small, that made it a national issue.”
–Joseph P. Williams (The Minneapolis Star Tribune)
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7. South and West by Joan Didion
(6 Rave, 12, Positive, 2 Mixed, 1 Pan)
“Didion’s notes, which surpass in elegance and clarity the finished prose of most other writers, are a fascinating record of this time. But they are also something more unsettling. Readers today will recognize, with some dismay and even horror, how much is familiar in these long-lost American portraits.”
–Nathaniel Rich (The New York Review of Books)
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8. The Novel of the Century by David Bellos
(8 Rave, 1 Positive)
“The Novel of the Century perfectly captures all sides of this publishing phenomenon and the man at its center. Bellos fascinates from beginning to end – and who knows? He may even tempt his braver readers to leave his base camp and make an assault on the Everest of the novel itself.”
–Steve Donoghue (The Christian Science Monitor)
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9. Between Them by Richard Ford
(6 Rave, 6 Positive, 2 Mixed)
“With a depth of perception that’s both affectionate and insightful, Ford tells the stories of his parents’ lives and deaths by turn … It’s through this innate desire to know, paired with Ford’s exceptional abilities as a prose craftsman, that these two ordinary people are made vital and vivid to us on the page.”
–Cheryl Strayed (The New York Times Book Review)
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10. Blind Spot by Teju Cole
(7 Rave, 1 Positive, 1 Mixed)
“The effect is like realizing that what you thought were stray notes cohere into song when you listen across a long enough interval. These repetitions teach us how to think along with Cole by calling our attention to details that might seem easy to ignore … The effect is a delirious sense of second sight. Cole brings the unseen realm of poetry into vision, exposing a reality that’s not beneath the surface so much as caught in its interstices.”
–Ismail Muhammad (Slate)
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