Gallery/Scout Press
Jack loves—and infinitely trusts—her husband Gabe. The two work together as white-hat hackers to find vulnerabilities in companies’ IT setups, he as the IT expert and she as the break-in artist. But something is off—he won’t respond after one job goes sideways. Then Jack comes home to find Gabe murdered and she is naturally the prime suspect. You can guess what comes next: Jack has to use her badass, wily skills to find the killer on her own before she becomes the next victim. Yes, it’s a page turner.

Penguin Publishing Group
Montreal at the turn of the 20th century was, at least according to the premise of this story, a bawdy, dirty place. Except of course for the wealthy barons who exploited all the workers (and patronizing the prostitutes) living in those squalid conditions. Never would these societies intermingle until, of course, they did. This is a love story of two girls from either side of the tracks, forever bound by an act of violence. Their budding relationship is beset by obstacle after obstacle, with an occasional Molotov cocktail (and döppelganger) tossed in. Definitely worth the read.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
I picked up playing squash earlier this year, so imagine my excitement of finding a novel about my new sport of choice! The action on the court was of course overshadowed by the drama that took place off the court. This Indian immigrant family to Britain had to deal with family ties and loyalties tested at every turn. I’ve read other enthusiast books that reflect the passion of the sport more than they’ll ever fit into a pantheon of literature. This story belongs there.

Tor Publishing Group
I don’t know if I should call myself a lover of speculative fiction or more of a dabbler. I definitely have my limits, in particular when an author has an agenda that smacks you on the head like a hammer. While Newitz does a good job of building a literal world where sentient animals and machines have become so intertwined that the definition of humanity has become both expansive and meaningless, the climate change tropes are so obvious that they fall into clumsiness.

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
I’d never read Richard Ford before, despite his being around for, well, forever. This one, from the early ’80s, shows us just how far we’ve come as far as the ways men treat women, cultural norms, and dealing with tragedy. It’s also a view into how what was normal just a few decades ago has completely become obsolete today. It was good, but definitely a reflection of its era.

Harper
Based upon the real life exploits of Mary Jayne Gold, an American Francophile who smuggled Jewish artists across the Pyrenees during World War II so they could get to America. In this telling, Nanée is a risk-taking socialite who has the means and connections to hobnob with the avant garde artists of the day. Including many who are Jewish. Including one with whom she falls in love. So when many of these artists are taken in the middle of the night to “work camps” with no means of communication to the outside world, Nanée takes up with the Emergency Rescue Committee, a secret group that rescues these artists, as the postmistress to deliver the messages that can lead to their freedom. Definitely dark at times, but quite a good read.

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
I’m always a fan of Colson Whitehead — he plays so well in nearly every genre — and ‘Nickel Boys’ is right up there in this Civil Rights-era story of a straight-and-narrow Black boy who ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time, resulting in a sentence at a reform school that is anything but. Still, Elwood figures out how to survive while maintaining his dignity.

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
I guess I was on a Richard Flanagan kick this summer. This one blew me away. Really. Dorrigo Evans, born a poor Tasmanian, reflects on his life. The World War II years in the forests of Japan, where his platoon is captured and enslaved to build a railroad to nowhere. Dorrigo and his compatriots suffer through sickness, delusions, and in some cases literally dropping dead right where they sit. Yet he survives to return to the woman he loves but can’t have.

Told from the end of his life, decades after he’s made himself a well-known, wealthy man, Dorrigo has survived the worst life has to throw at him. It’s a story of loss and missed chances, but ultimately a life well lived.

Penguin Publishing Group
I made it partway through this collection of related stories of brilliant minds descending into madness, but just couldn’t keep going. Maybe a little too close to home ;-)? It’s on top 20 lists for several reviewers; maybe they saw something I didn’t.

Putnam
No, the four siblings of this story won’t live forever. But due to a prophecy from an old woman when they were children, they do know when they’re going to die. As each brother and sister alternately barrels or limps toward their destiny, we see how they’ve been imprisoned by this prediction, a cell they can’t escape.

Penguin Publishing Group
There’s a lot of Yiddish-related literature coming out these days. This one mixes early 20th century Jewish immigrants with the Black communities that arose in the northeastern US just a couple generations out from the Civil War. The good Christian white folks hate (in the most literal sense of the word) both of these outliers. Yet relations between the Black and Jewish communities barely hold together but for the sheer will and personality of the story’s protagonists. What we get is a sweet story told from characters in both populations, one that deserves the accolades this book has received. Definitely one of my top 3 for the year.

HarperCollins
A man’s wife leaves him. He can’t fathom why. He meets people, they come and go, a little of this happens, then a little bit of that. Eventually his wife comes back. He’s relieved. Not much happens but this almost-nothingness comes in a reasonably nice package.

HarperCollins
Wow. Just wow. At the age of 10, Aminata is living a life that anybody in her family line would have expected her to live. She’s clearly intelligent, she’s been learning how to deliver babies (“catch babies” in this book’s parlance), and follows along when her father reads his Quran. Then, in a matter of hours, Aminata’s life changes dramatically. Her mother, then her father, are violently murdered right in front of her eyes. She then spends three months marching to the coast of Africa, where she’s put on a ship and sent to the American colonies as a slave. From there we live her story of slavery, freedom, discrimination, and the many trials she must face through her long life. A tour de force and one of my definite favourites for the year.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
I loved Paul Murray’s ‘Skippy Dies,’ and this novel set in small-town Ireland was just as satisfying. Find the most dysfunctional family you can—a woman who married her husband less out of love than the grief they shared following the death of his brother; the husband, the once-brilliant son of a domineering father who pushes him into the family business, which results in a scandal, the scope of which is slowly coming to light; a daughter whose own brilliance allows her to leave home but faces her own unrequited love; and a son who struggles to make friends and may or may not be getting involved in an online relationship with a pedophile. Throw in a car crash, an abusive father, extramarital affairs, and a doomsdayer and you end up with a resolution where every character is led to this final triumphant moment. Except there will be no triumph.

HarperCollins Canada
A young Black journalist, improbably named Mahatma, returns to Winnipeg to take a job at one of the local newspapers (this is the early ’80s, so the city has several of them). His timing is concurrent with social upheaval in the city—an anti-French language movement is causing riots, the communist mayor is taking heat from a rival paper because he may or may not be on a US watchlist due to his politics. And the news war between the multiple publications and TV/radio outlets is taking no prisoners. While the story seems to amble on from one crisis to the next, we see at the end how everything is truly connected.

HarperCollins
In the summer of ’74, Boston was burning. Forced integration of Black kids into historically white schools, principally in the poorer neighborhoods of Roxbury and Dorchester, was making the white residents mad as hell. The cops were on the take, kids were coming home from Vietnam in body bags, and drugs were beginning to flow in courtesy of the small-time organized crime syndicates that had popped up. So when Mary Kay Fennessy can’t get a straight answer as to whether her daughter is alive—not to mention her role in the death of a black teenager—she takes matters into her own hands. She’s got nothing left to lose, and yes, there’s blood.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
This is a story of seduction, yet the seducer has no interest in the protagonist who believes she’s the target of this famous artist’s desire. If that sounds confusing, it kind of is. At its core, Second Place is a story about power dynamics, and what happens when that dynamic shifts.

Random House Publishing Group
As someone whose life dream is to work in the writer’s room of a TV production, this novel—a love story, really—was exactly where I wanted to be. You’ll recognize the setting, because it is and it isn’t Saturday Night Live. You may recognize the caricatures of the writing staff, though the messed-up personalities probably aren’t that far from the truth. So when Sally actually attracts the interest of a world-famous music star, it’s understandable that she can’t believe it’s happening. It’s a rom com, so you know she eventually gets the guy, but she has a lot of (dumb, hilarious) obstacles to overcome. I laughed out loud here and there.

Biblioasis
The ’70s weren’t great for industry, both across the pond in England as well as in places like Quebec. Things got violent, loyalties were tested. That’s about as far as I got before I got bored.

Knopf Canada
The reviews this book received were nothing short of fantastic. I made it through about three pages and couldn’t keep going.

Random House of Canada
I was so looking forward to reading this story of the Yiddish cowboy who rides his way through Nazi-occupied lands, six guns a-blazin’. That’s not exactly how the story goes, but our hero somehow makes it alive out of the closest shaves, even when the people right next to him aren’t so lucky. It’s a hero’s journey for sure, and also fun romp, if you can call a Holocaust novel a romp (or fun, for that matter). Our young cowboy has a physical defect, by the way, that may remind Gary Shteyngart fans of that author’s ‘Absurdistan.’

Europa Editions
Given the number of Holocaust novels I read this year (and, really, any year) I’d say this was my favorite. Based on the true story of a priest who snuck Jewish prisoners into the Vatican by turning them into a choir so he could save their lives, the father raised the ire of the Nazi brass all the way to the top. Between him and his collaborators, they saved a good number of lives but also cheated their own deaths. Mostly.

ECW Press
In anticipation of Rice’s newly released “Moon of the Turning Leaves,” something of a sequel to this book, I wanted to check this out to learn about Rice’s indigenous perspective of survivors of what might be an apocalyptic event — nobody’s quite sure, but nobody’s turning back on the electricity, either. As people in this northern Ontario reservation community live in growing fear and suffering, some strangers appear that don’t make things better.

Center Point

While I’ve been a huge fan of Waldman’s husband, Michael Chabon, for decades, this was my first novel of hers. I wasn’t disappointed. Mostly. The book is written, more or less, in three parts: One set in the modern day (really a decade ago, when the book was written), one part at the end of World War II in just-liberated Hungary, and the last set in 1913 in pre-WWI Hungary. The 1913 section, which ties up the loose ends of the first two parts, was written from the perspective of a psychiatrist whose journals show he was a creature—and the epitome—of his era. He was so paternalistic and arrogant I wanted to wring his neck. Also, the modern protagonist fell hard and fast into a relationship that was key to the plot, but felt a little less than believable.

Dutton
I’ve been a Wilco fan for upwards of a quarter century. I knew a little about Jeff Tweedy, mostly gleaned from short interviews, the documentary “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart,” and the osmosis of living in Chicago back in the ’90s. This memoir gives us so much more. And Tweedy’s writing makes the music make so much more sense. If you want a companion memoir, check out Nick Offerman’s “Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Likes to Walk Outside.” Jeff makes several appearances in this hiking memoir from the man formerly known as Ron Swanson.

New Directions
It’s the prototypical 50-year-old man’s dream, right? To meet a young woman (a girl, really) who becomes smitten and the two fall in what might be a semblance of love. Put the two into the waning days of the Iron Curtain, as it becomes inevitable that the Berlin Wall will fall, and things get more complicated. Told from the point of view of both the man and the woman, ‘Kairos’ raises questions of who’s using who, where’s the power dynamic, and what does such a relationship mean in a closed society where every move is being watched.

Grove Atlantic

I’m a sucker for a good mystery or suspense novel, and Val McDermid has not disappointed me yet. The way she gets into the heads of her protagonists (who are so complex that it’s hard to know if they’re truly the good guys) is always well done. In this outing, the killer thinks the revenge he’s taking out on the girlfriend who unceremoniously dumped him is foolproof. He’s crashing weddings, picking up lonely women, and killing them in some of the most gruesome ways possible. But detective Carol Jordan and her team in the newly formed ReMIT division use psychological profiling and old-fashioned police work to eventually figure things out before the killer takes his fourth victim. This is the 10th(?) Carol Jordan outing, so the end will be a shock to fans of this series.

Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
Most of what you’ll see on this list is fiction. This, however, is a true story of how Key nearly lost his wife, then did everything he could to win her back. It’s a story of obliviousness, anger, hard work and, ultimately, redemption. Hopefully.

Penguin Publishing Group
Because the lead characters of a book look this are my demographic — middle-aged(ish) professional white guys with unresolved issues of one kind or another — I can recognize and appreciate the writing. Other authors in this genre, if you can call it that, include Jonathan Tropper and Joshua Braff. I had a fun time with this one because it takes place around the Boston and Cape Cod area, where I spent some time this past summer, so I could picture the place while watching a family (from all four members’ perspectives) navigate through personal disasters of their own making. Does it end happy? Let’s just say that everyone has a journey, everyone grows, but nobody ends up a hero.

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Just like I haven’t read much from Indian novelists, I haven’t read many from down under, either. And, as I learned in ‘First Person,’ the Aussie mainlanders see anyone from Tasmania as uneducated bumpkins that don’t do much more than take up space. So why has Kif, an underemployed, self-professed writer who hasn’t written anything of value, been asked to take on the biography of a noted personality who may or may not be a crime lord and killer? Why does this larger-than-life personality show up for his scheduled interviews yet not answer a single question? And, finally, will Kif finally give into his subject’s demands to be killed? The story was decent—I never found Kif to be a terribly sympathetic character—and he raises more moral questions than the story answers.

St. Martin’s Publishing Group
When it comes to mysteries, the long nights of Norway or London’s constant threat of rain and fot set a certain dark tone. Upper Maine isn’t far behind. Forest ranger Mike Bowditch has a lot of people after him, but he doesn’t know who and he doesn’t know why. All he knows is they’ve run his truck into a frozen river, he’s fighting hypothermia and dodging bullets, and the killers are getting closer. Is he going to make it? This is the 12th in the Bowditch series, so that may answer the question. We need Mike for the next installment, but this is a good story nonetheless.

Simon & Schuster
It’s hard to know—who’s putting the wool over whose eyes in this story of a teenage loser whose best friend (and sometime lover) turns out to be a highly charismatic con man. But the two stay together with the promise of love (sometimes unrequited), riches, and the powers of persuasion. I’m putting this near the top of my list as well for the year.

Doubleday
From the end of last year into this one, my media consumption coincidentally revolved around one theme: time travel. There was The Time Traveler’s Wife (the book, not the TV series), Russian Doll on Netflix, and this one. I really liked The Time Traveler’s Wife, and All Our Wrong Todays takes a close second. Somehow Mastai figured out how to make the physics work. The world these characters live in is a future that’s perhaps better than what we can expect because of this time machine (and nuclear power). Yet something isn’t quite right, and the mystery is what our characters need to solve to put things in their proper timeline. Of course there’s a loop that needs to be broken and some surprising discoveries along the way. If you can find this, give it a read.

W. W. Norton & Company
I love reading Alex Petri in the Washington Post – she’s funny, sarcastic, insightful, and refuses to pull punches on some of the hypocritical clowns that call themselves leaders. In a full length book, however, it’s a lot of Alex. Read, take a break, then come back to it. You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll wonder how we got to where we are today.

Penguin Publishing Group
I’ve not read much Indian literature, so this thriller was a good introduction to the talent behind this story of an orphaned boy in the lowest of castes who manages to find his way out and, eventually, up into a world of drugs and organized crime that’s just a little too close to the world he left behind. There’s a lot of what feels too much like coincidence, but it’s a fast-paced, great story just the same.