New York Times Notable Books For 2006: Fiction Top 40
Explore the New York Times Notable Books of 2006: Fiction Top 40—a curated list of the year's most acclaimed novels. Discover must-read literary gems and bestselling fiction from celebrated authors.
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Against the Day
by Thomas Pynchon
A tale spanning the years between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the end of World War I features characters who are caught up in such events as the labor troubles of Colorado, the Mexican revolution, and the heyday of silent-movie Hollywood.
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Alentejo Blue
by Monica Ali
A Portuguese village awaits the return of a prodigal son, which causes various desires and disappointments to collide.
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All Aunt Hagar's Children
by Edward P. Jones
In fourteen sweeping and sublime stories, five of which have been published in The New Yorker, the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Known World shows that his grasp of the human condition is firmer than ever Returning to the city that inspired his first prizewinning book, Lost in the City, Jones has filled this new collection with people who call Washington, D.C., home. Yet it is not the city's power brokers that most concern him but rather its ordinary citizens. All Aunt Hagar's Children turns an unflinching eye to the men, women, and children caught between the old ways of the South and the temptations that await them further north, people who in Jones's masterful hands, emerge as fully human and morally complex, whether they are country folk used to getting up with the chickens or people with centuries of education behind them. In the title story, in which Jones employs the first-person rhythms of a classic detective story, a Korean War veteran investigates the death of a family friend whose sorry destiny seems inextricable from his mother's own violent Southern childhood. In "In the Blink of God's Eye" and "Tapestry" newly married couples leave behind the familiarity of rural life to pursue lives of urban promise only to be challenged and disappointed. With the legacy of slavery just a stone's throw away and the future uncertain, Jones's cornucopia of characters will haunt readers for years to come.
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Arthur & George
by Julian Barnes
Tells the alliance of George, the son of a Midlands vicar, and Arthur a shabby genteel Edinburgh, their adventures, triumphs, and set-backs.
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Beasts of No Nation
by Uzodinma Iweala
In this stunning debut novel, Agu, a young boy in an unnamed West African nation, is recruited into a unit of guerrilla fighters as civil war engulfs his country. Haunted by his father's own death at the hands of militants, Agu is vulnerable to the dangerous yet paternal nature of his new commander. While the war rages on, Agu becomes increasingly divorced from the life he had known before the conflict started—a life of school friends, church services, and time with his family still intact. In a powerful, strikingly original voice that vividly captures Agu's youth and confusion, Uzodinma Iweala has produced a harrowing, inventive, and deeply affecting novel.
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Black Swan Green
by David Stephen Mitchell
A meditative novel of a young boy on the cusp of adulthood follows a single year in the life of thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor as he grows up in what is for him the sleepiest village in Worcestershire, England, in 1982. By the aauthor of Cloud Atlas. 50,000 first printing.
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Brookland
by Emily Barton
Set in eighteenth-century Brooklyn, this is the story of a determined and intelligent woman who is consumed by a vision of a bridge she devises to cross the East River in a single, magnificent span.
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Digging to America
by Anne Tyler
This luminous novel brims with tender observations about what it is to be an American, and about Iranian-born Maryam Yazdam, who after 35 years in this country must finally come to terms with her "outsiderness."
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Everyman
by Philip Roth
Philip Roth's new novel is a candidly intimate yet universal story of loss, regret, and stoicism. The best-selling author of The Plot Against America now turns his attention from "one family's harrowing encounter with history" (New York Times) to one man's lifelong skirmish with mortality. The fate of Roth's everyman is traced from his first shocking confrontation with death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers, through the family trials and professional achievements of his vigorous adulthood, and into his old age, when he is rended by observing the deterioration of his contemporaries and stalked by his own physical woes. A successful commercial artist with a New York ad agency, he is the father of two sons from a first marriage who despise him and a daughter from a second marriage who adores him. He is the beloved brother of a good man whose physical well-being comes to arouse his bitter envy, and he is the lonely ex-husband of three very different women with whom he's made a mess of marriage. In the end he is a man who has become what he does not want to be. The terrain of this powerful novel -- Roth's twenty-seventh book and the fifth to be published in the twenty-first century -- is the human body. Its subject is the common experience that terrifies us all. Everyman takes its title from an anonymous fifteenth-century allegorical play, a classic of early English drama, whose theme is the summoning of the living to death.
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Golden Country
by Jennifer Gilmore
Gilmore reinvents the classic Jewish American novel in her ambitious and extraordinary debut that follows the intertwining lives of three immigrant families from the 1920s to 1960s.
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Half of a Yellow Sun
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Re-creates the 1960s struggle of Biafra to establish an independent republic in Nigeria, following the intertwined lives of the characters through a military coup, the Biafran secession, and the resulting civil war.
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The Inhabited World
by David Long
Stuck in a state of purgatory in the Washington State house in which he lived and died, Evan Molloy, who had shot himself to death for a reason he cannot recall, now must deal with the home's new inhabitant, Maureen Keniston.
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Intuition
by Allegra Goodman
A trio of researchers becomes caught up in the desperate quest for a financial grant from the Philpott, a prestigious research laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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The Keep
by Jennifer Egan
"Two cousins, irreversibly damaged by a childhood prank whose devastating consequences changed both their lives, reunite twenty years later to renovate a medieval castle in Eastern Europe, a castle steeped in blood lore and family pride. Built over a secret system of caves and tunnels, the castle and its violent history invoke and subvert all the elements of a gothic past: twins, a pool, an old baroness, a fearsome tower. In an environment of extreme paranoia, cut off from the outside world, the men reenact the signal event of their youth, with even more catastrophic results. And as the full horror of their predicament unfolds, a prisoner, in jail for an unnamed crime, recounts an unforgettable story -- a story about two cousins who unite to renovate a castle -- that brings the crimes of the past and present into piercing relation." -- From publisher's description.
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Last Evenings on Earth
by Roberto Bolaño
Stories of the "failed generation" set in the Chilean exile diaspora of Latin America and Europe.
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The Lay of the Land
by Richard Ford
Frank contemplates his life while the 2000 presidential election plays out and Thanksgiving looms on the horizon.
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Lisey's Story
by Stephen King
Two years after losing her husband of twenty-five years, Lisey looks back at the sometimes frightening intimacy that marked their marriage, her husband's successes as an award-winning novelist, and his secretive nature that established Lisey's supernatural belief systems, on which she eventually comes to depend for survival. 1,250,000 first printing.
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Old Filth
by Jane Gardam
Book One in Jane Gardam's Old Filth Trilogy Sir Edward Feathers has had a brilliant career, from his early days as a lawyer in Southeast Asia, where he earned the nickname Old Filth (FILTH being an acronym for Failed In London Try Hong Kong) to his final working days as a respected judge at the English bar. Yet through it all he has carried with him the wounds of a difficult and emotionally hollow childhood. Now an eighty-year-old widower living in comfortable seclusion in Dorset, Feathers is finally free from the regimen of work and the sentimental scaffolding that has sustained him throughout his life. He slips back into the past with ever mounting frequency and intensity, and on the tide of these vivid, lyrical musings, Feathers approaches a reckoning with his own history. Not all the old filth, it seems, can be cleaned away. Borrowing from biography and history, Jane Gardam has written a literary masterpiece reminiscent of Rudyard Kipling's Baa Baa, Black Sheep that retraces much of the twentieth century's torrid and momentous history. Feathers' childhood in Malaya during the British Empire's heyday, his schooling in pre-war England, his professional success in Southeast Asia and his return to England toward the end of the millennium, are vantage points from which the reader can observe the march forward of an eventful era and the steady progress of that man, Sir Edward Feathers, Old Filth himself, who embodies the century's fate.
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One Good Turn
by Kate Atkinson
"Atkinson's bright voice rings on every page, and her sly and wry observations move the plot as swiftly as suspense turns the pages of a thriller."--San Francisco Chronicle.
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Only Revolutions
by Mark Z. Danielewski
Moving back and forth in American history, a kaleidoscopic novel follows Hailey and Sam, two wayward teenagers, as they crash New Orleans parties, barrel up the Mississippi, head through the Badlands, and take on other adventures.
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The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • A searing, post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son's fight to survive, this "tale of survival and the miracle of goodness only adds to McCarthy's stature as a living master. It's gripping, frightening and, ultimately, beautiful" (San Francisco Chronicle). A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other. The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world entire," are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation. Look for Cormac McCarthy's new novel, The Passenger, coming October '22.
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Special Topics in Calamity Physics
by Marisha Pessl
Having moved from one academic outpost to another throughout her childhood at the side of her aphorism-prone father, Blue van Meer attends the elite St. Gallway School in her senior year, where she falls in with a charismatic group of friends before the deaths of a teacher and student awaken her analytical instincts. A first novel. 50,000 first printing.
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Strong is Your Hold
by Galway Kinnell
Pulitzer Prize winner Galway Kinnell's first new collection of poetry in more than a decade, with a bound-in CD of poems read by the author Here is the eleventh book of poems by Galway Kinnell, whom the New York Times has called "one of the true master poets of his generation." In this striking and various collection, he gives us poems of intermingling with the natural world, love poems and evocations of sexuality, poems about his father, his children, poet friends, poet heroes, and mythic figures. Included also is "When the Towers Fell," his stunning requiem for those who died in the World Trade Center on 9/11. The book's title derives from Walt Whitman's "Last Invocation": "Strong is your hold O mortal flesh, / Strong is your hold O love."
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Suite Française
by Irn̈e Nm̌irovsky
In 1940, several families and individuals are thrown together as they flee Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion and struggle to stay alive and grieve for the life they once knew.
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Terrorist
by John Updike
From one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century—and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series: “A chilling tale that is perhaps the most essential novel to emerge from September 11” (People) about an eighteen-year-old devoted to Allah, who’s convinced he’s discovered God’s purpose for him. “The most satisfactory elements in Terrorist are those that remind us that no amount of special pleading can set us free of history, no matter how oblivious and unresponsive to it we may be.” —The New York Times Book Review The terrorist of John Updike’s title is eighteen-year-old Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy, the son of an Irish American mother and an Egyptian father who disappeared when he was three. Devoted to Allah and to the Qur’an as expounded by the imam of his neighborhood mosque, Ahmad feels his faith threatened by the materialistic, hedonistic society he sees around him in the slumping New Jersey factory town of New Prospect. Neither Jack Levy, his life-weary guidance counselor at Central High, nor Joryleen Grant, his seductive black classmate, succeeds in diverting Ahmad from what the Qur’an calls the Straight Path. Now driving a truck for a local Lebanese furniture store—a job arranged through his imam—Ahmad thinks he has discovered God’s purpose for him. But to quote the Qur’an: Of those who plot, God is the best.
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The Translator
by Leila Aboulela
When Sammar, a Sudanese widow living alone in Aberdeen and working as an Arabic translator at a Scottish university, takes a job with Rae, a Scottish Islamic scholar, she finds herself falling in love, despite his lack in faith in all she holds sacred, in the first North American edition of the first novel by the acclaimed author of Minaret. Original. 25,000 first printing.
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Twilight of the Superheroes
by Deborah Eisenberg
A collection of short works by the author of The Stories (So Far) of Deborah Eisenberg includes the tales of a group of friends whose efforts to acquire a luxurious Manhattan sublet are halted by the September 11 attacks, a teacher's Roman holiday in the wake of her husband's life-threatening illness, and a brother's painful love for his schizophrenic sister.
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The Uses of Enchantment
by Heidi Julavits
One autumn day in 1985, sixteen-year-old Mary Veal vanishes from her Massachusetts prep school. A few weeks later she reappers unharmed and with memory of what happened to her or at least little that she is willing to share.
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A Woman in Jerusalem
by Abraham B. Yehoshua
A victim of a suicide bombing lies nameless in a hospital morgue, and a Jerusalem newspaper accuses her employer of "gross negligence and inhumanity." Overwhelmed by guilt, her employer entrusts the task of identifying and burying the victim to another employee. As the facts of the woman's life take shape, the employee yields to feelings of regret and atonement.