Best New Fiction Of 2002
Discover the best new fiction books of 2002! Explore our curated list of top-rated novels and must-read titles from acclaimed authors this year.
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The Lovely Bones
by Alice Sebold
Sebold's mesmerizing and luminous first novel--a #1 national bestseller--builds a tale filled with hope, humor, suspense, and even joy, following an unspeakable tragedy.
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From a Buick 8
by Stephen King
The state police of Troop D in rural Pennsylvania have kept a secret in Shed B out back of the barracks ever since 1979, when Troopers Ennis Rafferty and Curtis Wilcox answered a call from a gas station just down the road and came back with an abandoned Buick Roadmaster. Curt Wilcox knew old cars, and he knew immediately that this one was...wrong, just wrong. A few hours later, when Rafferty vanished, Wilcox and his fellow troopers knew the car was worse than dangerous -- and that it would be better if John Q. Public never found out about it. Curt's avid curiosity taking the lead, they investigated as best they could, as much as they dared. Over the years the troop absorbed the mystery as part of the background to their work, the Buick 8 sitting out there like a still life painting that breathes -- inhaling a little bit of this world, exhaling a little bit of whatever world it came from. In the fall of 2001, a few months after Curt Wilcox is killed in a gruesome auto accident, his 18-year-old boy Ned starts coming by the barracks, mowing the lawn, washing windows, shoveling snow. Sandy Dearborn, Sergeant Commanding, knows it's the boy's way of holding onto his father, and Ned is allowed to become part of the Troop D family. One day he looks in the window of Shed B and discovers the family secret. Like his father, Ned wants answers, and the secret begins to stir, not only in the minds and hearts of the veteran troopers who surround him, but in Shed B as well.... From a Buick 8 is a novel about our fascination with deadly things, about our insistence on answers when there are none, about terror and courage in the face of the unknowable.
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The Nanny Diaries
by Emma Mclaughlin
Based on real-life experiences, this novel is the inside story on the lives of the rich and privileged from the women who know all their secrets--the nannies. Excerpt to "Talk" magazine.
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War of Honor
by David Weber
Honor Harrington faces a new set of adventures as she becomes embroiled in an interstellar war that could destroy the Manticoran Alliance, the Republic of Haven, and the Andermani Empire.
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Destiny's Way
by Walter Jon Williams
From award-winning author Williams, the fourth original hardcover novel in the "New York Times" bestselling "Star Wars" series.
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Shrink Rap
by Robert B. Parker
Boston private detective Sunny Randall agrees to protect a touring writer from her abusive ex-husband, but she quickly learns that the stalker in question is much more sophisticated, intelligent, and potentially deadly than most.
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Lullaby
by Chuck Palahniuk
From the author of theNew York TimesbestsellerChokeand the cult classicFight Club, a cunningly plotted novel about the ultimate verbal weapon, one that reinvents the apocalyptic thriller for our times. Carl Streator is a solitary widower and a fortyish newspaper reporter who is assigned to do a series of articles on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. In the course of this investigation he discovers an ominous thread: the presence at the death scenes of the anthologyPoems and Rhymes Around the World, all opened to the page where there appears an African chant, or “culling song.” This song turns out to be lethal when spoken or eventhoughtin anyone's direction–and once it lodges in Streator's brain he finds himself becoming an involuntary serial killer. So he teams up with a real estate broker, one Helen Hoover Boyle–who specializes in selling haunted (or “distressed”) houses (wonderfully high turnover), and who lost a child to the culling song years before–for a cross-country odyssey to remove all copies of the book from libraries, lest this deadly verbal virus spread and wipe out human life. Accompanying them on this road trip are Helen's assistant, Mona Sabbat, an exquisitely earnest Wiccan, and her sardonic ecoterrorist boyfriend Oyster, who is running a scam involving fake liability claims and business blackmail. Welcome to the new nuclear family. On one level,Lullabyis a chillingly pertinent parable about the dangers of psychic infection and control in an era of wildly overproliferated information: “Imagine a plague you catch through your ears . . . imagine an idea that occupies your mind like a city.” But it is also a tightly wound thriller with an intriguing premise and a suspenseful plot full of surprising twists and turns. Finally, because it is a Chuck Palahniuk novel, it is a blackly comic tour de force that reinforces his stature as our funniest nihilist and a contemporary seer. From the Hardcover edition.
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The Crush
by Sandra Brown
After serving on the jury for a high-profile murder case, Dr. Rennie Newton suddenly finds herself the object of obsession by the accused killer, whom the jury had acquitted, and is drawn into a deadly game of vengeance with an embittered police officer who will do anything to bring the man to justice. 600,000 first printing.