Top Ten Fiction Books

1.  A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin

It was, famously, six years between the last Song of Ice and Fire book and this one. What was George R.R. Martin doing all that time? Was he wandering in the wilderness? Was he sunning on the beaches of Dorne? No: he was girding his loins and rallying the banners, and he has come charging back with one of the strongest books of the series, and the year. Dance with Dragons puts us back in the main narrative stream of A Song of Ice and Fire: we go into exile with the black-humored dwarf Tyrion, raise dragons with Daenerys, walk the wall and brood with Jon Snow.

2. The Pale King by David Foster Wallace

No one knew what to expect from the half-finished manuscript that David Foster Wallace left behind when he died. What we got was the best we could have hoped for: a construction site of a novel, to be sure, hard hats required, with the barest skeleton of a plot, but also some of Wallace's most direct and personal and eloquent writing. The opening section of the book includes a dozen pages set in the head of a junior accountant on a regional jet, just sitting and thinking, and it's riveting.

3. State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

 

 

This is a strange, complex and triumphantly confident reimagining of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness for a different age. Marina Singh, a docile lab rat, must follow her former mentor Dr. Annick Swenson into the sweaty and uncomfortable depths of the Amazon jungle, whence Swenson has vanished in search of the secret to a mysterious fertility drug. Singh finds her living with a bizarre indigenous tribe, but from there the mystery only deepens — Swenson's methods are, as the saying goes, unorthodox.

 

 

4. Open City by Teju Cole

 There's not much by way of plot to Teju Cole's debut novel, Open City, in which a Nigerian psychiatry resident named Julius takes long walks around New York City. But the flights of Julius' mind — both the things he remembers and the things he elides — fuel a powerful and unnerving inquiry into the human soul.

5. Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson

 

 At this point, the deliciously gloomy, ongoing adventures of the permanently hangdog Jackson Brodie form a kind of seedy, hardboiled modern epic. Depressed but indomitable, a fallen policeman in a fallen world, Brodie here tugs on a slender thread, the search for the real identity of an adopted woman in New Zealand, and an old and desperately unhappy mystery comes tumbling out. His voice duets with that of Tracy, an unmarried police detective of a certain age who seems doomed to a lonely decline until she impulsively and illegally adopts a child.

6. The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson

Meet the parents with real boundary issues: performance artists Caleb and Camille Fang, who use their children in cruel Candid Camera–style stunts as naturally as a painter uses a brush and oil. Annie rebels in her teens to become an actress; the more apologetic Buster, a writer. She's Oscar-nominated but a mess; he's a mess, period. Then Mom and Dad disappear.


7. Hark! A Vagrant by Kate Beaton

It's tough to say what list this book belongs on, but it's the debut of a smart, funny, wholly unique voice, and it ought to be somewhere, so let's put it here. Kate Beaton is a cartoonist who draws wildly expressive portraits of historical and literary figures and then makes them say funny things. " Russian (rubs beard thoughtfully): "Go on ...") But the main point is that they're hilarious. Whatever else it might be, Hark! A Vagrant is the wittiest book of the year.

 8. The Hypnotist by Lars Kepler

Lars Kepler is Swedish, and he's being billed, naturally, as the successor to Stieg Larsson. But Kepler casts a subtler, creepier spell than his countryman (Kepler is actually the pseudonym for a Swedish husband-and-wife writing team). The book starts with a bloodbath: Erik Maria Bark, an emphatically retired hypnotherapist, is called in to delve into the psyche of a young boy, the last survivor of a brutal killing spree who is incapacitated by shock.  Kepler has a remarkable feeling for physical cruelty, and his ability to inhabit the workings of psychotic psyches is authentically shocking. Larsson is destined to have many heirs, but of this year's crop, Kepler is by far the best.

9. Maine by J. Courtney Sullivan

   

Novelists used to specialize in entertaining, funny-sad, well-observed stories about complicated family relationships. But such books were in surprisingly short supply this year, which makes a gem like Maine all the more precious. Sullivan gives us three sunny, alcoholic acres of Maine coastline and three generations of Kelleher women: the upright matriarch, the good-girl daughter-in-law, Nobody is completely happy with the deal she's struck,buthey have to learn to live with it or strike another before it's too late.

10. The Death Ray by Daniel Clowes

Daniel Clowes continues to plot a lofty, lonely course through the subconscious of popular culture with this hilariously bleak graphic novel starring a superhero who, in his venality and triviality, makes the heroes of Kick-Ass and Watchmen look like Supermen. Andy, a skinny loser-type growing up in Chicago in the 1970s, discovers that smoking a cigarette gives him superstrength; later he comes into possession of the titular death ray, which looks like a classic Hugo Gernsback–style prop, except that it actually works.