The Books Briefing: All the Books We Loved This Year

❖ Mostly Dead Things, by Kristen Arnett

“In its exigency and sometimes-gruesome specificity, Mostly Dead Things mirrors the work of its protagonist, Jessa-Lynn Morton, a taxidermist who must run the family business after her father dies by suicide.”

❖ The Old Drift, by Namwali Serpell

“The Old Drift … is, in some measure, all of the following: historical epic, surrealist adventure, interpersonal (and interspecies) study, dystopian warning, anthropological commentary. It is also … a story that grips the reader from its first pages.”

❖ Night Boat to Tangier, by Kevin Barry

“Short runic paragraphs, mad images, bursts of almost-poetry, profligate (but artful) swearing … And underneath it all … a drug-smuggling love story.”

📚 Read more about these books here.

❖ Trust Exercise, by Susan Choi

“Set at a high school for the arts, the book homes in on the drama students Sarah and David, who compete in the cutthroat world of theater while falling in and out of love. But Choi then turns the narrative on its head, multiple times.”

❖ The Topeka School, by Ben Lerner

“All of [the characters’] stories consider, in a sense, the way men simply won’t shut up: They talk and talk to dominate their surroundings, and if that doesn’t work they yell, and if that doesn’t work either they try violence.”

❖ Lot, by Bryan Washington

“The son of a Latino father and black mother, Lot’s protagonist learns early that he likes boys—and that this renders him vulnerable. His arc is at times heartbreaking, but Washington writes with a tenderness that grants even the most difficult moments a level of grace.”

📚 Read more about these books here.

❖ Say Nothing, by Patrick Radden Keefe

“By framing his narrative around human stories—like Jean McConville, the mother of 10 who was taken from her home in 1972, never to return—Keefe makes the atrocities committed [in Northern Ireland] more comprehensible.”

❖ Lost Children Archive, by Valeria Luiselli

“Luiselli mixes genres and perspectives, the personal and the political, as she tracks a dissolving marriage and disappearing children.”

❖ EEG, by Daša Drndić

“The Croatian writer Daša Drndić’s final novel begins after a failed suicide attempt. Andreas Ban, a retired psychologist and EEG’s fiery narrator, has survived, but he has not escaped death—it consumes him.”

📚 Read more about these books here.

❖ Three Women, by Lisa Taddeo

“As Lisa Taddeo writes about her subjects, the women she uses to map out an anthropological, humane, passionate study of female desire, she seems almost to inhabit them.”

❖ In the Dream House, by Carmen Maria Machado

“The memoir is the rare blend of criticism and personal history that demonstrates the disorienting effects of a trauma, while also building a language with which to understand that devastation.”

❖ She Said, by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey

“She Said … reads at some moments as a thriller, and at others as an indictment of a system full of rot. But it is ultimately about the women, bonded in their pain, who refused to be silent any longer.”