Best Fiction Read 2009
Discover the best fiction reads of 2009 with our curated list of top books. Explore award-winning novels, hidden gems, and must-read titles from this iconic year in literature.
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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
by Stieg Larsson
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The thrilling first book in the Millenium series featuring Lisbeth Salander: “Combine the chilly Swedish backdrop and moody psychodrama of a Bergman movie with the grisly pyrotechnics of a serial-killer thriller, then add an angry punk heroine and a down-on-his-luck investigative journalist, and you have the ingredients of Stieg Larsson’s first novel” (The New York Times). Harriet Vanger, a scion of one of Sweden's wealthiest families disappeared over forty years ago. All these years later, her aged uncle continues to seek the truth. He hires Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading journalist recently trapped by a libel conviction, to investigate. He is aided by the pierced and tattooed punk prodigy Lisbeth Salander. Together they tap into a vein of unfathomable iniquity and astonishing corruption.
Book
The Sharing Knife, Volume Four
by Lois McMaster Bujold
Now at the end of their river journey, Dag and Fawn must retrace their steps. But what should be the destination? And are Dag's magical powers now strong enough to face the final danger?
Book
The City & The City
by China Miéville
Inspector Tyador BorlĂş must travel to Ul Qoma to search for answers in the murder of a woman found in the city of BesĹşel.
Book
Sundown, Yellow Moon
by Larry Watson
Forty years after the suicide of his best friend’s father, a writer revisits the tragedy and tries to unravel the mystery behind one man’s inexplicable actions on that icy January day in 1961. Through his own recollections and his fiction–sometimes impossible to separate–he attempts to make sense of a senseless act and, in the process, to examine his youth, his connection to his best friend, Gene, and the enigma of Marie, a beautiful girl whose heart once belonged to both of them and whose spell still lingers through the decades. Spare, haunting, lyrical, Sundown, Yellow Moon is a piercing study of love and betrayal, grief and desire, youth and remembrance. Larry Watson not only brings to life a distinct period in history but, most affectingly, reveals the interplay of memory, secrets, and the passage of time. Praise for Sundown, Yellow Moon: “Watson succeeds impressively, especially in deepening our understanding of first love.” –Alan Cheuse, Chicago Tribune “A marvelous evocation of a time and place and of high school existence when it was considerably less ferocious than it is today . . . [Sundown, Yellow Moon] twitches aside the curtain to reveal the menace and mendacity lurking behind placid and mundane lives.” –Minneapolis Star Tribune “[An] oddly heartbreaking story: allowed to run amok, the past becomes a monster capable of devouring the present.” –Booklist “Larry Watson takes the less-traveled roads, through landscapes and heartscapes vaguely familiar, intensely poetic and always jangling. . . . He has established himself as one of the leading poetic realists, painting his stories across the canvas of interiors: small-town America and the human heart.” –San Jose Mercury News, on Orchard
Book
Brimstone
by Robert B. Parker
Determined to locate a woman he loves who inexplicably ran off, hired gunman Virgil Cole, along with deputy Everett Hitch, makes his way across New Mexico and Texas before finding her in a brothel, a situation complicated by a religious man and saloon violence. By the best-selling author of Appaloosa.
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Her Fearful Symmetry
by Audrey Niffenegger
When Elspeth Noblin dies of cancer, she leaves her London apartment to her twin nieces, Julia and Valentina. These two American girls never met their English aunt, only knew that their mother, too, was a twin, and Elspeth her sister. Julia and Valentina are semi-normal American teenagers--with seemingly little interest in college, finding jobs, or anything outside their cozy home in the suburbs of Chicago, and with an abnormally intense attachment to one another. They are twenty. . The girls move to Elspeth's flat, which borders Highgate Cemetery in London. They come to know the building's other residents. There is Martin, a brilliant and charming crossword puzzle setter suffering from crippling Obsessive Compulsive Disorder; Marjike, Martin's devoted but trapped wife; and Robert, Elspeth's elusive lover, a scholar of the cemetery. As the girls become embroiled in the fraying lives of their aunt's neighbors, they also discover that much is still alive in Highgate, including--perhaps--their aunt, who can't seem to leave her old apartment and life behind.. Niffenegger weaves a captivating story in Her Fearful Symmetry about love and identity, about secrets and sisterhood, and about the tenacity of life--even after death..