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10. The Encyclopedia of Early Earth, Isabel Greenberg
A graphic novel set in a mythical time when the world is still young, about a man from the North Pole who travels to the South Pole, where he meets a woman. They fall in love, only to discover that because they’re from different poles they repel each other magnetically and therefore can never touch. (Never mind that opposed magnetic poles actually attract each other, just go with it.) To fill the void between them they spin stories—fantastical, funny, wise, often touching yarns, which Greenberg both tells and illustrates with warm, whimsical beauty. We get to listen in. —Lev Grossman
9. Lexicon, Max Barry
Secret societies are thick on the ground in fiction these days, but Barry has founded one of the most intriguing yet: the Poets, a shadowy group that has so mastered the art of persuasion that normal people have no choice but to do exactly what they say. Told with infectious humor from two points of view, one Poet and one non-, Lexicon starts at top speed and never slows down. It’s unquestionably the year’s smartest thriller. —Lev Grossman
8. The Interestings, Meg Wolitzer
Five oddball teenagers at an artsy summer camp become friends, and they decide to call their little group The Interestings. Summer ends, but life keeps going, and Wolitzer keeps on following the five into their various futures. The years and decades roll forward and their ambitions and crushes and jealousies and flaws mold their lives into strange, imperfect, unexpected shapes — one becomes a therapist; the other, the creator of a wildly successful cartoon; another, a fugitive from justice. Wolitzer’s novelistic vision is so broad that it embraces the entire tapestry of their interwoven fates, and her glorious novelistic intelligence maps the complex five-way bonds between them with magnificent precision. —Lev Grossman
7. The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman
Slender but exceedingly deep, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is the story of a little boy in mid-century rural England who is accidentally drawn into a struggle between an evil spirit who’s trying to take up residence on Earth and his neighbors, the Hempstocks, who are much more powerful and less human than they appear. It’s a strange and beautiful and frightening fairy tale; it’s also the master fantasist’s most emotionally raw, personal novel to date. —Lev Grossman
6. NOS4A2, Joe Hill
It takes a deep and thorough knowledge of the human soul to frighten properly, and the depth of Hill’s knowledge is fully apparent here. NOS4A2 is the license plate of the Rolls-Royce Wraith in which the book’s villain abducts children and takes them to a thoroughly demonic theme-park world called Christmasland; it falls to Vic, a woman with a curious gift for finding things, to stop him. This is a horror novel, no mistake, and a searingly, upsettingly scary one, but it’s also a rich study of human evil and a lavish display of raw writing talent. —Lev Grossman
5. The Signature of All Things, Elizabeth Gilbert
Gilbert’s memoir Eat, Pray, Love made her a household name; now she reminds us that she began her career as a writer of fiction with this masterly tale of overflowing sensual and scientific enthusiasms in the 19th century. Gilbert’s heroine is Alma Whittaker, a cerebral, insatiably curious spinster who wanders the globe in search of exotic flora but who stumbles on that more elusive and baffling natural phenomenon, love. —Lev Grossman
4. The Lowland, Jhumpa Lahiri
A life-spanning novel about two brothers from Calcutta: one dies young, in an act of political violence, and one lives on, trying to make sense of his brother’s death and pick up the loose threads he left behind, which include a pregnant wife, whom the surviving brother marries. Lahiri’s graceful, measured prose ticks off the years and registers, precisely and with deep pathos, the strange, surprising, melancholy and very occasionally wonderful changes that time wreaks on us all. —Lev Grossman
3. The Flamethrowers, Rachel Kushner
Kushner’s second novel (and second to earn a National Book Award nomination) tells the story of Reno, a young woman striving for success in a man’s world of land-speed racing, the gritty 1970s New York art scene and (eventually) radical politics in Italy — three disparate settings brilliantly realized in Kushner’s vivid prose. Her heroine is a bracing twist on the archetypal self-made man. Observant and impressionable, adventurous and unsure, Reno is caught in the act of self-making, and her unguarded spirit mirrors the revolutionary spirit of the age. —Radhika Jones
2. Tenth of December, George Saunders
One of America’s premier satirists, Saunders has made a career out of laying bare the shallow, corporate-infused discourse of contemporary life. In his collection of 10 searing stories, he reveals what lies beneath that Orwellian language: not (as we might expect) spiritual emptiness, but love, hope, aspiration and compassion, amid the darkest of human experience. Individually the stories showcase a remarkable array of voices — the desperate mother of an unmanageable child; a cancer patient determined to die with dignity; a young boy torn between disobedience and heroism. Together they emphasize how little divides us, in our timeless desire to be understood. —Radhika Jones
1. Life After Life, Kate Atkinson
“Dying is an art, like everything else,” Sylvia Plath wrote in “Lady Lazarus.” “I do it exceptionally well.” So does Ursula Todd, who is born in England in 1910 and dies again, and again, and again. Whenever Ursula dies — at birth, or from drowning at the seaside, or at the hand of an abusive husband, or by her own hand — her life restarts, by some mysterious magic, and in her new life she tries to correct the mistakes of the old one. This is one of those fantastical novels, like The Time Traveler’s Wife, that tells us more about the realities of being human than most realist novels do. Among its harsh realities are life during wartime in both London (in one life) and Berlin (in another), set-pieces that can stand with anything in the literature of the Second World War. By its nature, Atkinson’s basic conceit gives rise to a gorgeous braid of storytelling that reminds us how gloriously polyphonic novels can be — Life After Life rhymes and chimes and harmonizes with itself, adding layers of complexity as it goes, in a bravura performance as great as anything published so far this millennium. Particularly as it all serves a story that is, in its essence, primally simple: like all of us, Ursula wishes only to live her best life, to be who she ought to be — watching her try and fail and ultimately triumph in this basic human task is the most thrilling and moving experience fiction has to offer this year. —Lev Grossman
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