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It's almost Thanksgiving, which is the beginning of the end of another year, and for us at PW that means our annual best books list. From more than 50,000 volumes, we valiantly set out to choose 100, and this year we've upped the ante with a top 10 list. A usually cooperative, agreeable bunch, we gave ourselves a reason to fight. We wanted the list to reflect what we thought were the top 10 books of the year with no other consideration. We expect you'll be surprised: there's a graphic novel, an adventure story, possibly the next Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a delicious biography that could bring Cheever back into the literary firmament. We ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz. We gave fair chance to the "big" books of the year, but made them stand on their own two feet. It disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male. There was kicking and screaming for a science fiction title. A literary ghost story came so close, it squeaked. There was almost a cookbook. Our fabulous long list smoothed ruffled feathers, but still we can't resist one honorable mention: Kevin Wilson's debut collection, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (Harper Perennial). With no regrets, we're ready for "Auld Lang Syne."

Click the genre tabs above to see our picks in each genre, and click the years above for even more picks!

  • Cheever: A Life

    Blake Bailey (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group)

    Bailey, who was given access to the journals Cheever kept throughout his life, shines a new light on Cheever's literary output, making possible a fresh reappraisal of his achievement. In addition, Bailey offers up juicy, appalling, hilarious and moving anecdotes with verve, sensitivity and perfect timing.

  • Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon

    David Grann (Doubleday)

    In this classic adventure tale, New Yorker writer Grann--who gets winded climbing the stairs of his New York City walkup--follows in the footsteps of early--20th-century Amazon jungle explorer Percy Fawcett, who disappeared along with his son on a 1925 expedition. Grann expertly and energetically weaves the story of Fawcett's explorations with that of his own.

  • Gourmet Today

    Ruth Reichl (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

    Gourmet magazine is history, but before it folded, editor Reichl followed up The Gourmet Cookbook with this comprehensive and thoroughly tested mammoth collection of tried and true recipes.

  • The Day-Glo Brothers: The True Story of Bob and Joe Switzer's Bright Ideas and Brand-New Colors

    Chris Barton (Charlesbridge)

    The unlikely subjects of this fascinating picture book biography exemplify ingenuity and dedication to chasing one's dreams.

  • The Curious Garden

    Peter Brown (Little, Brown)

    With humor and some showstopping spreads, Brown offers a green fable about the rebirth of a city, without a hint of preachiness.

  • Yummy: Eight Favorite Fairy Tales

    Lucy Cousins (Candlewick)

    Moving beyond the geniality of Maisy, Cousins expertly draws out the primitive emotions at the core of Little Red Riding Hood, The Three Little Pigs, and six other beloved stories.

  • Dinotrux

    Chris Gall (Little, Brown)

    Few things are more kid-pleasing than trucks and dinosaurs--put them together in a raucous, prehistoric hybrid and you have picture-book gold.

  • John Brown: His Fight for Freedom

    John Hendrix (Abrams)

    Hendrix's powerful, exaggerated imagery in this picture book biography is ideally suited to the life of this controversial American abolitionist.

  • Stagecoach Sal

    Deborah Hopkinson (Disney-Hyperion)

    Blithe storytelling and slyly humorous art give this story of an utterly confident, quick-thinking 19th-century heroine plenty of pioneer spirit.

  • The Lion & the Mouse

    Jerry Pinkney (Little, Brown)

    Not a single word from Aesop's fable of friendship appears in Pinkney's version, set in the Serengeti. This isn't a problem since the lovingly detailed interplay between the protagonists says it all.

  • Otis

    Loren Long (Philomel)

    Long's story of the friendship between a tractor and a young calf exudes a comforting sense of nostalgia and a gentleness of spirit.

  • Crow Call

    Lois Lowry (Scholastic Press)

    Newbery Medalist Lowry's first picture book, drawn from a childhood story about her father's return from war, is poignant and quietly moving, with a timely resonance.

  • The Scarecrow

    Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)

    Reporter Jack McEvoy decides to go out with a bang, after he's laid off from the L.A. Times, in a nail-biting thriller that charts the demise of print journalism and shows why Connelly is one of today's top crime authors.

  • Sweethearts of Rhythm: The Story of the Greatest All-Girl Swing Band in the World

    Marilyn Nelson (Dial)

    Gloriously evocative poetry and paintings create a stirring tribute to an all-female swing band that made spirits soar during an era of war and prejudice.

  • Duck! Rabbit!

    Amy Krouse Rosenthal (Chronicle)

    A simple, fixed design and two combative, off-screen voices make this book and its central optical illusion--is that animal a duck or a rabbit?-- a delight.

  • All the World

    Liz Garton Scanlon, illus. by Marla Fraz (S&S/Beach Lane)

    A subtle undercurrent of interconnectedness and a spare elegance make this picture book more than just a gentle ode to families of all shapes, sizes and kinds (which it assuredly is).

  • Wintergirls

    Laurie Halse Anderson (Viking)

    A powerful exploration of anorexia, dysfunction and death, Anderson's story of a friendship ripped apart is moving and haunting.

  • Going Bovine

    Libba Bray (Delacorte)

    An angel, a dwarf, cults, wormholes and mad cow disease all factor into the surreal cross-country road trip that teenage Cameron takes, in a satirical story that's as memorable as it is funny.

  • Fire

    Kristin Cashore (Dial)

    Introducing Fire, a human “monster” with psychic abilities, this companion novel to Graceling expands the scope of Cashore's fantasy world and offers twists, intrigue and romance aplenty.

  • Catching Fire

    Suzanne Collins (Scholastic Press)

    This much-awaited sequel to Collins's dystopian bestseller, The Hunger Games, doesn't disappoint; it's immersive, voracious reading as the ramifications of Katniss's actions in that book spread.

  • If I Stay

    Gayle Forman (Dutton)

    Masterful characterizations make the tragedy at the core of this novel all the more devastating, as narrator Mia weighs the decision to live or die.

  • The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate

    Jacqueline Kelly (Holt)

    With a detailed, evocative setting and an authentic, relatable protagonist, this turn of the century coming-of-age novel teems with humor, spirit, and energy.

  • Purple Heart

    Patricia McCormick (HarperCollins/Balzer & Bray)

    This timely and provocative thriller, with a teenage American soldier at its center, is a nuanced exploration of war, heroism, and morality.

  • The Fate of Katherine Carr

    Thomas H. Cook (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

    Edgar-winner Cook eloquently explores the often cathartic act of storytelling as George Gates, a former travel writer who after seven years still broods over his eight-year-old son's murder, looks into the unsolved disappearance of reclusive poet Katherine Carr 20 years earlier.

  • The Ask and the Answer

    Patrick Ness (Candlewick)

    Set on a planet colonized by men and now wracked with strife, Ness's sequel to The Knife of Never Letting Go entwines themes of sexism, terrorism, genocide and human nature, while bringing the action to a fever pitch.

  • A Season of Gifts

    Richard Peck (Dial)

    The singular Mrs. Dowdel from A Year Down Yonder and A Long Way from Chicagobrings humor and heart to this holiday story; as ever, Peck's writing has a comforting, evergreen quality.

  • When You Reach Me

    Rebecca Stead (Random/Lamb)

    Every syllable feels rich with meaning in this atmospheric mystery involving a girl, her former best friend, and her mother, set in 1970s New York City.

  • Shiver

    Maggie Stiefvater (Scholastic Press)

    Lyrical and thoughtful, this paranormal romance between a girl and a werewolf offers wit, an intriguing mythology, and dual (but equally honest and compelling) narratives.

  • Marcelo in the Real World

    Francisco X. Stork (Scholastic/Levine)

    Artfully crafted characters form the heart of this riveting novel about a 17-year-old with Asperger's syndrome, who grapples with issues of ethics, love, and other real-life conflicts.

  • Tales from Outer Suburbia

    Shaun Tan (Scholastic/Levine)

    Tan proves that his prose is every bit as hypnotic as his artwork in this wondrous collection that reveals the banality and strangeness of the suburbs.

  • Lips Touch: Three Times

    Laini Taylor, illus. by Jim Di Bartolo (Scholastic/Levine)

    In lush prose, Taylor offers three utterly captivating stories, each centered on a kiss; comic book--style prequels from Di Bartolo, her husband, add to the enchantment.

  • The Uninvited

    Tim Wynne-Jones (Candlewick)

    In this thriller about a college student uncovering twisted family secrets, Wynne-Jones expertly draws his characters and setting while ramping up the tension and the creepiness.

  • The Great and Only Barnum: The Tremendous, Stupendous Life of Showman P. T. Barnum

    Candace Fleming, illus. by Ray Fenwick (Random/Schwartz & Wade)

    This illuminating biography reveals Barnum as a complex, infinitely clever figure and delineates his triumphs as well as his failures.

  • Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice

    Phillip Hoose (FSG/Kroupa)

    Colvin's memories of fighting for civil rights in the 1950s--including refusing to give up her bus seat as a teenager in Montgomery, Ala. (before Rosa Parks)--make for a searing true-life story of courage.

  • Spooner

    Pete Dexter (Grand Central)

    Dexter's crowd-pleasing wiles are razor sharp in this long-awaited novel, the madcap and touching, assured and (ahem) dexterous story of a very Dexter-like Warren Spooner.

  • Marching for Freedom: Walk Together Children and Don't You Grow Weary

    Elizabeth Partridge (Viking)

    Arresting photography and firsthand memories from those who participated, as children, in the 1965 march to Montgomery make for a haunting and inspirational read.

  • Dark Places

    Gillian Flynn (Crown/Shaye Areheart)

    Flynn tops her impressive debut, Sharp Objects, with a second crime thriller, centered on the slaying of a mother and two daughters in their Kansas farmhouse witnessed by the youngest, surviving daughter. It builds to a truth so twisted even the most astute readers won't see it coming.

  • The Man in the Wooden Hat

    Jane Gardam (Europa)

    Old Filth with this witty and very British love story, taking on with aplomb loyalty, lust, ambition and longing as she excavates the holes in all of our hearts.

  • Ravens

    George Dawes Green (Grand Central)

    Two con men hold a family hostage in rural Georgia in order to get half of their $318 million lottery winnings in this masterful, often comic novel of psychological suspense, Green's first since 1995's The Juror.

  • Tinkers

    Paul Harding (Bellevue Literary Press)

    George Crosby's deathbed reveries wander through memories of his own life as a boy and the lives of his father and grandfather, in this sumptuously written first novel that has been the darling of indie bookstores.

  • The Believers

    Zoë Heller (Harper)

    Heller zeroes in on a liberal Jewish Greenwich Village family whose perfect lefty household falls into some hilarious setups as the dysfunctions pile up and eventually spill over when the patriarch's feet of clay are revealed. Hilarious, readable and atmospheric.

  • The Vagrants

    Yiyun Li (Random)

    Wrenching and bleak are understatements for Li's magnificent gothic account of life in provincial 1979 China, centering on the execution of a counterrevolutionary. For all the morbid happenings--and there are many of them--the novel's immediately involving and impossible to walk away from.

  • Await Your Reply

    Dan Chaon (Ballantine)

    Chaon was a National Book Award finalist for Among the Missing, and this gripping account of colliding fates, the shifty nature of identity in today's wired world and the limits of family is easily as good, if not better. It's a literary page-turner, a cunningly plotted and utterly unputdownable novel.

  • How to Sell

    Clancy Martin (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

    Martin's peerless debut novel about a naïve Canadian's crooked education in the jewelry business is horrifying and sad and very funny. Truth is always elusive; here, it's a dire liability, too.

  • Keep on Clickin'

    (PW's Romance section started in 2010)

    There are no titles in this category. Please click ahead to SF/Fantasy/Horror

  • New World Monkeys

    Nancy Mauro (Crown/Shaye Areheart)

    An outstandingly original debut that takes the ridiculous (a couple kill a wild pig on their move to the burbs that turns out to be their new town's beloved mascot) and renders it psychological in this sendup of academia, advertising, peeping toms and young marrieds.

  • The Last War

    Ana Menendez (Harper)

    A deeply moving story of a photojournalist in Istanbul waiting to join her war correspondent husband in Iraq. Her reluctance, suspicions and flashbacks of their time spent in Afghanistan create a dark background for the brilliance of her descriptions and observations.

  • Nemesis

    Jo Nesbø (Harper)

    Oslo Insp. Harry Hole discovers that a bank robbery is linked to the apparent suicide of a woman friend he hasn't seen in years in this lush crime saga from the Norwegian author.

  • Lark and Termite

    Jayne Anne Phillips (Pantheon)

    This elegant unraveling of parallel narratives--a grunt's Korean War tour of duty and the story of a family struggling through hard times nine years later--is at once intensely personal and loaded with themes of identity, duty and renewal, all the while maintaining a tight coil of suspense.

  • The Cry of the Sloth

    Sam Savage (Coffee House)

    The increasingly desperate letters dispatched by the editor of a middling literary magazine provide a glimpse into the soul of a minor writer ravaged by existential dread. As Savage slowly deflates the narrator's self-importance, he provides a caustic and supremely funny portrait of a man in decline.

  • Drood

    Dan Simmons (Little, Brown)

    Narrated by Wilkie Collins, this unsettling and complex thriller imagines a frightening sequence of events that prompts Collins's friend and fellow author, Charles Dickens, to write The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Dickens's last, uncompleted novel.

  • Cutting for Stone

    Abraham Verghese (Knopf)

    Verghese's move to fiction is sweeping and fabulous, starting in India, settling in Ethiopia and moving on to the U.S. in a magnificent epic that follows twin boys as they negotiate medical training, revolution, the search for their roots and their relationship with each other.

  • The Little Stranger

    Sarah Waters (Riverhead)

    A finalist for the Man Booker Prize, this subtle, creepy haunted house story chronicles the decline of an aristocratic county family after WWII as seen through the less than reliable eyes of a bachelor doctor, whose mother once served as a maid at the family's manor.

  • Sag Harbor

    Colson Whitehead (Doubleday)

    Whitehead's intellect, gorgeous prose, measured nostalgia and sheer storytelling prowess raises the bar for coming-of-age novels. It's as sublime as you're likely to read.

  • A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon

    Neil Sheehan (Random House)

    The development of the ICBM as a key part of the cold war arsenal wasn't inevitable. In a splendidly reported and narrated account, Sheehan credits Air Force Gen. Bernard Schriever with the foresight and shrewdness to triumph over powerful Pentagon opponents and develop the crucial and terrifying weapon.

  • Once the Shore

    Paul Yoon (Sarabande)

    The eight stories in Yoon's remarkable collection revolve around the inhabitants of a small South Korean island rocked by Japanese occupation and later by the Korean War and are no less powerful for their quiet introspection. Yoon's delicate exploration of heartache places him high in the firmament of old souls.

  • Chronic

    D.A. Powell (Graywolf)

    Powell may well be his generation's best poet, one of the best now writing. His fourth book tells of love found and lost against the backdrop of disease and pop culture.

  • Museum of Accidents

    Rachel Zucker (Wave Books)

    Zucker's best book yet tells a series of harrowing domestic stories, reminding us that the scariest place to be is often at home with the family.

  • The Bitter Withy

    Donald Revell (Alice James)

    Revell is once again in fine form, finding the places where religious faith and experimental poetry converge.

  • The Collected Poems of C.P. Cavafy

    Daniel Mendelsohn (Knopf)

    Classicist Mendelsohn never forgets that the great books are always about right now, making him the ideal translator for Cavafy, who saw ancient history everywhere in turn-of-the-20th-century Greece. This will be the standard edition of Cavafy for the foreseeable future.

  • Upgraded to Serious

    Heather McHugh (Copper Canyon)

    McHugh is as quirky and playful as ever, but now haunting questions of mortality have crept into her poems.

  • Bryant and May on the Loose

    Christopher Fowler (Bantam)

    London's Peculiar Crimes Unit gets a new lease on life as Bryant and May investigate gang crimes that could threaten the economic benefits expected from the 2012 Olympics in Fowler's blend of the comic and the grotesque.

  • The Wrong Mother

    Sophie Hannah (Penguin)

    A brief affair with a man whose wife later apparently commits a heinous crime then kills herself leads to serious trouble for Sally Thorning, part-time environmental rescuer and full-time mother, in this psychological mystery paced like a ticking time bomb.

  • The Dark Horse

    Craig Johnson (Viking)

    Wyoming sheriff Walt Longmire return to his cowboy roots as he goes undercover to investigate a murder outside his jurisdiction: a wife has confessed to shooting her rancher husband dead, but is she really guilty?

  • The Silent Hour

    Michael Koryta (Minotaur)

    Koryta spins a dark tale of broken dreams and second chances in this mystery featuring PI Lincoln Perry, who helps a convicted murderer who's been paroled. It's a convoluted case in which a missing woman's brother heads a notorious Cleveland, Ohio, mob family.

  • In Other Rooms, Other Wonders

    Daniyal Mueenuddin (Norton)

    An NBA finalist (we found him first), Mueenuddin delivers Pakistan through the stories of its people: yearning, struggling, plotting, in a heartbreaking story collection that is specific and universal all at the same time.

  • Londongrad

    Reggie Nadelson (Walker)

    New York City police detective Artie Cohen, a principled, street-smart guy with very human failings, travels to London to tell his best friend, shady Russian immigrant Tolya Sverdloff, that Sverdloff's daughter (who was also Cohen's girlfriend) has been murdered.

  • The Lord of Death

    Eliot Pattison (Soho Crime)

    Edgar-winner Pattison mixes an eye-opening look at contemporary China with a traditional whodunit involving the gunning down of China's minister of tourism along with an American woman, a skilled climber, near Mount Everest.

  • The Cloud Pavilion

    Laura Joh Rowland (Minotaur)

    Detective-turned-politician Sano Ichiro helps his estranged uncle find the uncle's missing daughter in the masterful 14th entry in a series that brings early 18th-century Japan to vivid life.

  • The Windup Girl

    Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade)

    Bacigalupi's powerful debut warns of dire ecological collapse and the evils of colonialism in an eerily plausible near future Thailand.

  • Lovecraft Unbound

    Ellen Datlow (Dark Horse)

    Editor extraordinaire Datlow assembles a phenomenal anthology of homages to pulp horror great H.P. Lovecraft, penned by an impressive slate of big-name horror authors.

  • The Devil'sAlphabet

    Daryl Gregory (Del Rey)

    This subtle, eerie present-day horror novel mercilessly dissects and reassembles the classic narrative of a man returning to his smalltown birthplace, where the familiar folks have become strange creatures.

  • The City & the City

    China Miéville (Del Rey)

    Putting a quasi-fantastical twist on a classic police procedural story, Miéville delves deep into the psyches of city dwellers and the ways people blind themselves to reality.

  • Boneshaker

    Cherie Priest (Tor)

    The dramatic first novel in Priest's Clockwork Century universe sends a determined 35-year-old single mom into a ruined city full of zombies and poison gas, where she must save her son from a mad inventor.

  • Captive of Sin

    Anna Campbell (Avon)

    Campbell pulls out all the stops with this heart-wrenching historical romance. A hastily wed heiress must help her husband, a war hero, recover from post-traumatic stress that leaves him unable to bear human touch.

  • Soulless

    Gail Carriger (Orbit)

    Carriger combines Victorian romance, supernatural creatures, steampunk sensibilities and a healthy dose of the bizarre in her hilarious debut.

  • Big Machine

    Victor LaValle (Spiegel & Grau)

    LaValle's brilliant second novel is unlike anything else out there: Ricky Rice, an ex-junkie African-American bus station porter, gets sucked into the bizarre machinations of a rural Vermont cult dedicated to studying “The Voice.” The narrator is blisteringly funny in chronicling his bizarre quest, providing both a blazing story and an astute commentary on race.

  • A Dark Love

    Margaret Carroll (Avon)

    Carroll develops what could be a stock story of an abusive marriage into a pulse-pounding romantic thriller with a strong, inspiring heroine determined to save herself.

  • Child of Fire

    Harry Connolly (Del Rey)

    Connolly's intense first novel heralds the next generation of urban fantasy (city not required) with a nearly powerless hero who must rely on his smarts and threadbare ethics to survive.

  • Hunt at the Well of Eternity

    Gabriel Hunt (Hard Case Crime)

    Reasoner launches the Gabriel Hunt series with a fast-paced tale of purely entertaining Indiana Jones--like adventure, smartly updated for modern sensibilities.

  • Parker: The Hunter

    Darwyn Cooke and Richard Stark (IDW)

    A magnificent comics recreation of Stark/Donald Westlake's noir classic of crime and vengeance and a stylish evocation of his stony, relentless protagonist.

  • Driven by Lemons

    Josh Cotter (AdHouse)

    A notebook full of abstract doodles somehow morphs into a riveting narrative that is as strange as it is imaginative.

  • Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth

    Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papad (Bloomsbury)

    Both informative and engrossing, this full-color comics-bio tells the story of mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell's messy personal life while documenting his maniacal pursuit of the philosophical foundations of modern mathematics.

  • The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders

    Emmanuel Guibert and Didier Lefèvre (First Second)

    Alternating photos by the late photographer Lefèvre with the comics panels of his friend and chronicler Guibert, this powerful and prescient documentary work details a 1986 trip by a French medical team through war-ravaged Afghanistan.

  • Asterios Polyp

    David Mazzucchelli (Pantheon)

    A brilliant academic architect--Asterios Polyp designs edgy buildings that are never built--and witty, self-confident pedant, Polyp is faced with a profound loss of belief in the life he has chosen.

  • Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe

    Bryan Lee O'Malley (Oni Press)

    The further rollicking adventures of world-famous Canadian slacker Scott Pilgrim; his awesome girlfriend, Ramona Flowers; and Scott's ongoing battle with her seven evil ex-boyfriends.

  • Footnotes in Gaza

    Joe Sacco (Metropolitan)

    Focused on a little-known massacre of Palestinian refugees in Gaza in 1956, this definitive work is ultimately a history of the Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation.

  • The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

    Richard Holmes (Pantheon)

    In a thrilling narrative of scientific discovery and the spirit of an age, Holmes illustrates how the great scientists of Britain's romantic era gripped the imaginations of their contemporaries and forever changed our understanding of the universe and our place within it.

  • A Drifting Life

    Yoshihiro Tatsumi (D&Q)

    A massive (840 pages) and poignant memoir by the master--indeed inventor--of Japanese alternative comics (called gekiga) that doubles as a fascinating history of the beginnings of the Japanese manga industry after WWII.

  • You'll Never Know: A Good and Decent Man

    Carol Tyler (Fantagraphics)

    Tyler profiles the greatest generation and the terrible price it paid in this memoir of her father's life during WWII, and measures her own life against it.

  • Pluto

    Naoki Urasawa (Viz Media)

    A tense mystery, an unsettling science fiction tale and a subtle exploration of what it means to be human as master manga-ka Urasawa reimagines Astro-Boy as something much more adult and serious.

  • Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater

    Frank Bruni (Penguin Press)

    In this wonderfully honest memoir, former New York Times food critic Bruni admits to a lifelong battle with his weight. Detailing his life from baby bulimia to Weight Watchers, Bruni addresses desire, shame, identity and self-image.

  • Land of the Lost Souls: My Life on the Streets

    Cadillac Man (Bloomsbury)

    In 16 years of living homeless in Manhattan, native New Yorker Cadillac Man has amassed a stunning collection of stories regarding a population and culture most people never even consider, and a talent for rendering them with beauty, sympathy and brutal truth.

  • Columbine

    Dave Cullen (Hachette/Twelve)

    After a decade on the Columbine beat, Cullen skillfully dismantles all the media myths about the 1999 school massacre in an edge-of-your-seat account of how two troubled boys terrorized a town.

  • Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

    Barbara Ehrenreich (Metropolitan)

    This indictment of America's reigning ideology of positive thinking stretches from breast cancer culture through religion and politics into the business world, where it was likely at the root of last year's economic collapse.

  • The Good Soldiers

    David Finkel (Crichton/FSG)

    Finkel's incredible fly-on-the-wall reporting gives an uncomfortably visceral sense of one army battalion's involvement in the Iraqi surge, with “the dust, the fear, the high threat level, the isolation....”

  • Yes Means Yes! Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape

    Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti (Seal)

    Activist writers Friedman and Valenti present an extraordinary, eye-opening essay collection that focuses on the importance of sexual identity and ownership in the struggle against rape in the U.S., as well as a number of related issues, including sexual pleasure, self-esteem and the mixed societal messages that turn “nice guys” bad.

  • Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City

    Greg Grandin (Metropolitan)

    Grandin presents a masterful and devastating account of Henry Ford's folly: his attempt to plant an idealized American town in the Amazon jungle alongside a rubber plantation.

  • Stitches

    David Small (Norton)

    A graphic novel to bring us all back to comics, Small's account of his terrifying childhood is amazing. The drawings of his parents and the small suffering boy who doesn't quite understand until much, much later will pull you along panel by panel and tear your heart out.

  • Food for Thought, Thought for Food

    Richard Hamilton and Vincente Todolo (Actar)

    This fascinating illustrated volume goes beyond standard food porn, looking at the refined artwork of Spain's chef Ferran Adrià, whose unmatched culinary innovation landed him in 2007's documenta, a prestigious annual international art exhibition.

  • Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home

    Rhoda Janzen (Holt)

    Janzen does the easy jokes about moving back in with her religious parents after her marriage falls apart, but she also conducts an unflinching self-examination that makes her emotional healing come across as all the more genuine.

  • The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope

    William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer (Morrow)

    This exquisite story of struggle, ingenuity and hope, from a 14-year-old Malawi boy who saved his family by building an electricity-generating windmill, strips life to its barest essentials, challenging American readers with all they take for granted.

  • The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream

    Patrick Radden Keefe (Doubleday)

    A propulsive, dramatic account of Chinatown's human smugglers and gangs behind the ill-fated 1993 voyage of the Golden Venture and its human cargo.

  • True Compass: A Memoir

    Edward M. Kennedy (Hachette/Twelve)

    Kennedy's life, replete with well-known tragedies, triumphs and shameful episodes, is rendered in perfectly polished, witty and moving tales that follow two historic arcs: that of a remarkable American family and a half-century of American politics.

  • Strength in What Remains

    Tracy Kidder (Random)

    Kidder’s transcendent tale of Deo, a Burundian refugee in New York, is a labor of profound compassion and enviable technique--his narrative finds fresh and crucial ways of depicting trauma and memory.

  • Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman

    Jon Krakauer (Doubleday)

    With access to Tillman’s diaries, Krakauer gives an unparalleled portrait of the football star turned army Ranger, who was the victim not only of lethal friendly fire but of a cynical government coverup.

  • Half the Sky

    Nicholas Kristoff and Sheryl WuDunn (Knopf)

    New York Times columnist Kristoff and his wife, WuDunn, collaborate on a vitally important book that locates women’s empowerment in the developing world as the central moral issue of our time. Their vignettes on women activists in Africa, India and China are heartbreaking, galvanizing and unforgettable.

  • Gabriel García Márquez

    Gerald Martin (Knopf)

    The master receives his due in a sprawling and atmospheric biography with lush detail, a quick pace and a veritable Who’s Who of Latin American radical politics and literature.

  • Green Metropolis

    David Owen (Riverhead)

    This iconoclastic manifesto is the sharpest environmental book of the year. Owen excoriates ecoconsumerism and trends, fells green goliaths Michael Pollan and Amory Lovins and celebrates Manhattan as the most sustainable city in the nation.

  • Shop Class as Soulcraft

    Matthew B. Crawford (Penguin Press)

    Philosopher and motorcycle mechanic Crawford makes a brilliant case for the intellectual satisfactions of working with one's hands--and why white-collar work is the assembly line of the new millennium. Crawford is catholic in his tastes (references range from Aristophanes to Dilbert), unsentimental and irresistible as he extols the virtues of “knowing how to do one thing really well.”

  • Larry’s Kidney

    Daniel Asa Rose (Harper)

    This bizarre, slapstick journey into medical tourism’s heart of darkness, with plenty of gonzo stops along the way, is a laugh-out-loud tribute to family ties and a less-than-subtle commentary on the state of U.S. health care.

  • Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays

    Zadie Smith (Penguin Press)

    Smith’s first nonfiction book--a collection of her essays on reading, writing and being--is erudite and shines with uncommon wit, warmth and generosity of spirit.

  • Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of U.S. Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan

    Doug Stanton (Scribner)

    This bestseller is a riveting, epic account of mounted U.S. soldiers fighting alongside the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan’s war-ravaged mountains.

  • Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957--1965

    Sam Stephenson (Knopf)

    In 1957, legendary photographer W. Eugene Smith opened up his New York City loft to some of the great artists of mid-century jazz, including Thelonious Monk and Zoot Sims. These fantastic photos--taken of the musicians as well as scenes snapped outside Smith’s window--offer a rare glimpse into an important music scene as well as a neighborhood being itself when it thought no one was watching.

  • Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong

    Terry Teachout (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

    Teachout’s forceful reassertion of Louis Armstrong’s significance to 20th-century America is a model for writing serious biography about pop culture icons.

  • Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789--1815

    Gordon S. Wood (Oxford Univ.)

    True to the outstanding quality of Oxford’s History of the United States series, Wood offers an account of the young nation’s development during its first decades.

  • Angry Conversations with God: A Snarky but Authentic Spiritual Memoir

    Susan E. Isaacs (FaithWords)

    Humor certainly makes religion bearable for even those averse to the divine. What you see in the title is what you get: a snarky, laugh-out-loud exploration of a funny person’s spiritual journey.

  • The Case for God

    Karen Armstrong (Knopf)

    “Magisterial” is the adjective of choice to describe Armstrong’s work; her usual confident sweep across times and cultures rises above the “answer-the-atheists” tired angle to make a passionate footnoted argument for the human need for a God.

  • The End of Suffering: Finding Purpose in Our Pain

    Scott Cairns (Paraclete)

    Ask a poet--please--why God permits suffering, and you get a meditative fresh breath of a response, the beauty of which, like the great biblical reflections, provides sympathy and a tiny bit of relief.

  • Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality

    Barbara Bradley Hagerty (Riverhead)

    Go after a question with head, heart and soul, as did journalist Hagerty, observing neuroscientists, mystics and those who have had near-death experiences. The result is a well-narrated book of authoritative voices and personal reflections, eminently readable, on a subject that attracts its share of woo-woo authors.

  • Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi

    Geoff Dyer (Pantheon)

    Dyer creates an aging hipster grinding it out as a freelance journalist who pursues the girl instead of the story: covering the Biennale. Then, depending on your point of view, he either loses or finds himself when he's sent to Varanasi. Dyer has many books to recommend him, but all you need is angst-ridden Jeff: funny, frank and utterly charming, and if you haven't walked in his shoes, you'll wish you had.

  • The Future of Faith

    Harvey Cox (HarperOne)

    Almost 35 years after the influential and bestselling The Secular City, Cox continues to offer the big picture, a worldwide view of where religion is heading: an era of spirit, beyond faith and dogmatic belief.

  • Have a Little Faith

    Mitch Albom (Hyperion)

    For someone who is not a professional religionist, Albom knows how to find the sacred in the everyday--again--in a finely observed story of two very different men of faith, an ex-junkie pastor who works with the homeless and a rabbi who wants Albom to deliver his eulogy.

  • In Due Season: A Man’s Life

    Paul Wilkes (Jossey-Bass)

    Page after page of reflection, observation and unsparing honesty add up to an eloquent, well-seasoned life that is an ordinary and occasionally holy search for meaning.

  • Judas: A Biography

    Susan Gubar (Norton)

    An English scholar who is not a theologian sifts through centuries of writings that imagine and reimagine one of history’s most reviled and compelling figures.

  • Muslims in America: A Short History

    Edward E. Curtis IV (Oxford Univ.)

    This accessible history by a scholar who is not among the usual academic talking-head experts on Islam brings breadth and nuance to an important subject.

  • Rashi

    Elie Wiesel (Schocken/Nextbook)

    An inspired pairing of writer and subject revivifies the life and times of the 11th-century Talmudic sage.

  • Lidia Cooks from the Heart of Italy

    Lidia Bastianich and Tanya Manuali (Knopf)

    Adding to her growing library of Italian cuisine, Bastianich, with daughter Manuali, offer a stellar and authentic array of regional Italian recipes in this tantalizing and lavishly photographed collection.

  • Momofuku

    David Chang and Peter Meehan (Clarkson Potter)

    Restaurateur and chef Chang teamed up with food writer Meehan in this outstanding collection of recipes and vibrant full-color photos from Chang’s restaurants--Momofuku, Ssäm Bar and Ko--serving dishes like chicken wings cooked with bacon and in rendered duck fat, and pan-roasted asparagus with poached eggs and miso butter.

  • Ad Hoc at Home

    Thomas Keller (Artisan)

    In this dazzlingly beautiful cookbook, Keller, chef and owner of such established restaurants as the French Laundry and Per Se, shifts from haute cuisine to family-style dishes: buttermilk fried chicken, fig-stuffed roast pork loin and shortbread cookies.

  • Child Care Today: Getting It Right for Everyone

    Penelope Leach (Knopf)

    Influential child-care author Leach (Your Baby and Child) evaluates the state of child care in the Western world in this thoroughly researched and helpful guide.

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