Books: Best of 2002 (Part 1)
Discover the best books of 2002 with our curated list of top titles. Explore must-read fiction, nonfiction, and award-winning releases from this iconic year in literature.
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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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Middlesex
by Jeffrey Eugenides
Calliope's friendship with a classmate and her sense of identity are compromised by the adolescent discovery that she is a hermaphrodite, a situation with roots in her grandparent's desperate struggle for survival in the 1920s.
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The Crimson Petal and the White
by Michel Faber
Yearning to escape her life of prostitution in 1870s London, Sugar finds her fate entangled in the complicated family life of patron William, an egotistical perfume magnate.
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The Eyre Affair
by Jasper Fforde
In an fantasy Britain, someone begins kidnapping characters from works of literature and Thursday Next, renowned Special Operative in literary detection, must track down the criminal.
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At Swim, Two Boys
by Jamie O'Neill
Two young men, Jim, the naive, scholarly son of a Dublin shopkeeper, and Doyler, a rough working boy, struggle with issues of political, religious, and sexual identity in the year leading up to the Easter uprising of 1916.
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Things You Should Know
by A. M. Homes
The most daring voice of her generation, A. M. Homes writes with terrifying compassion about the things that matter most. Homes's distinctive narratives illuminate our dreams and desires, our memories and losses, and our profound need for connection, and demonstrate how extraordinary the ordinary can be. In "Chinese Lesson," we meet Geordie, a man watching over his wandering, senile mother-in-law by means of an electronic chip implanted in the back of her neck. In "Remedy," an advertising executive bolts from the city one afternoon for the imagined comfort of her childhood home and finds that her parents have allowed Ray, an eccentric wellness guru, to move in. Sexy and inspiring, "Georgica" offers a meditative narrative about one woman's unconventional strategy for getting pregnant. "The Former First Lady and the Football Hero" is the deeply moving, darkly comic story of a former First Lady's courage in dealing with the President as his mind slowly evaporates. In these beautifully written stories, we find shape-shifters, children running headlong into the darkness of adolescent sexuality, a man passionately wanting to live but not knowing how. And, most important, we find ourselves. An expert literary witness, A. M. Homes takes us places we would not go alone and brings us back -- always with uncanny emotional accuracy, wit, and empathy. She is one of the master practitioners of American fiction, and Things You Should Know is a landmark collection.
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Innocents
by Cathy Coote
Having set out to seduce her teacher as part of a personal agenda, a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl realizes her seductive powers are greater than she realized and leaves the home of her guardian aunt and uncle in order to move in with him. Original.
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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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Paradise Alley
by Kevin Baker
At the height of the Civil War, what begins with strong words and a few broken bottles will, over the course of five days, escalate into the worst urban conflagration in American history. Hundreds of thousands of poor Irish immigrants smolder with resentment against a war and a president that have cost them so many of their young men. When word spreads throughout New York's immigrant wards that a military draft is about to be implemented -- a draft from which any rich man's son with $300 can buy an exemption -- trouble begins to spill into the streets. Down in the waterfront slum of Paradise Alley, three women -- Deirdre Dolan O'Kane, Ruth Dove, and Maddy Boyle -- struggle with their private fears as they wait for the storm to descend on them. Deirdre, whose lace-curtain sensibilities have always kept her at arm's length from her neighbors, is devastated by the discovery that her husband, Tom, has been wounded at Gettysburg. In her desperation, Deirdre must turn for aid and comfort to Ruth, a woman she has always judged as morally depraved. Ruth, too, has been cut off from her husband, Billy Dove, an ex-slave. At dawn he set out for the Colored Orphans' Asylum uptown, to collect his last wages. But he has not returned by day's end, or by the next morning. In the meantime, Ruth has learned that dozens of black men and women have been lynched or beaten by rioters. She begins to fear the worst, not just for Billy, but for herself and their children, too -- because she now knows that he is coming. He is Dangerous Johnny Dolan, Deirdre's estranged brother, who after fourteen years' exile has returned to New York. Years before, it was Johnny who saved Ruth from the famine in Ireland, who arranged for her steerage passage from Dublin to New York -- and who beat her mercilessly until she arranged to have him sent away for murder. Even as the riot builds toward its violent climax, Dolan searches relentlessly for Ruth and Deirdre, carried along by the unruly mob. In the end, these remarkable women have nothing but one another to rely on as they seek to protect their homes and families from the brutality of a city -- and a nation -- gone mad. Paradise Alley a story of race and hatred, of love and war, of risk and dauntless courage.
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The Blank Slate
by Steven Pinker
Each dogma carries a moral burden, so their defenders have engaged in desperate tactics to discredit the scientists who are now challenging them.".
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