From novels and memoirs to cookbooks and short stories, 2014 was an embarrassment of riches for readers. And in case you weren’t aware, books are the perfect shape for mile-high stacking under the tree. Here are 10 of the year’s best.
- The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan. Winner of the 2014 Man Booker Prize, Australian author Richard Flanagan pays homage to his late father in this epic account of Japan’s construction of the Thai-Burma Death Railway during WWII. The Washington Post calls it “a classic work of war fiction from a world-class writer.”
- Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill. The author’s highly original structure is fast-paced and fragmented, with a sharp perspective on relationships, marriage, and children. Compact in scale and scope, it’s Brooklyn life in all its open, urban, angst-ridden glory. Or, as NPR called it, profound.
- We Are Not Ourselves by Matthew Thomas. This year's answer to The Goldfinch in buzz and brawn, Thomas' debut novel spans three generations of Irish-Americans as they navigate childhood, marriage, and parenting. Through his pen, Thomas has found a remarkable way to make ordinary life extraordinary.
- Little Failure by Gary Shteyngart. This tale of coming of age in Russia and America is endearing and hilarious. Fellow memoirist Mary Karr says Shteyngart perfectly captures "anybody's desperate need for a tribe." Moving back and forth between the jarring differences of communism and capitalism, Gary, born Igor, gives readers a glimpse of what it means to be an immigrant in America. With panic attacks. [Read the Independent's review here.]
- A Boat, a Whale & a Walrus by Renee Erickson. This beautifully designed new cookbook will hopefully help Erickson — already well known to Seattle foodies — cast a wider net. From freshly harvested Dungeness crab to earthy local vegetables, the recipes highlight the attention to quality and mindfulness that goes into each of her restaurants.
- The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014, edited by Daniel Handler (with an introduction by Lemony Snicket). Chock full of curious essays, poems, and graphic-novel excerpts, you’ll find in this collection everything from Janine di Giovanni’s eyewitness accounts in Syria to a man who saves cult followers from themselves.
- All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. Booklist gave this novel a starred review, and the critics have unanimously voted it one of the year’s best. The story of a blind French girl and an orphaned German boy whose lives intersect in the midst of the Second World War is Doerr’s heartbreaking prose at its best. [Read our interview with Anthony Doerr here.]
- Being Mortal by Atul Gawande. This physician/author is no stranger to writing about medicine, but Being Mortal might be his most poignant work yet regarding the conversations we are loath to face. Recounting bedside histories of disease and illness, and the difficult decisions that are universal to the human race, Gawande illuminates our reticence to accept life’s largest reality.
- Nora Webster by Colm Tóibín. A quiet yet powerful novel about an Irish woman’s struggle for independence after the loss of her husband, this is Tóibín’s first work of full-length fiction since Brooklyn. Seeking freedom from the constrictions of single motherhood and life in rural County Wexford, the title character finds solace in music and, ultimately, in herself. As is Tóibín’s signature, there’s not a sentence out of place.
- Redeployment by Phil Klay. Winner of the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction, Klay’s collection of short stories centered on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan offers a nuanced glimpse into the psychology of what it means to go to war. Which, for some soldiers, is easier than returning home. [Read the Independent's review here.]
