Critics' choice: The year's best novels

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'Biography of X' by Catherine Lacey

X is a fictional character, but Catherine Lacey "animates her so fully that I’m half-convinced she might be alive out there somewhere," said Hillary Kelly in the Los Angeles Times. In a novel that "burns hot and never fades," we get to know the recently deceased title character — a renowned novelist and performance artist, and perhaps a fraud — through the eyes of her widow, "who is just as confused and curious as the reader about who her dead wife really was." X’s life story unfolds in an alternate-universe United States in which the South seceded in 1945, said Kenzie Bryant in Vanity Fair, and you might call its world dystopian "if the fictional history didn’t so neatly parallel this country’s actual one." Lacey further blurs the line between fiction and reality by folding together true and invented details about artists who would have been X’s contemporaries. The result "had my mind working in a totally different way, like doing the crossword while taking in a beautiful story." Buy it here.

'The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store' by James McBride

James McBride’s latest novel "pulls off the singular magic trick of being simultaneously flattening and uplifting," said Maureen Corrigan at NPR. The discovery of a skeleton in Pottstown, Pennsylvanie, presents a mystery that leads us back to the 1930s, when Jewish and Black residents lived side by side in the city’s Chicken Hill neighborhood. Led by an openhearted Jewish grocery owner, the community comes together to protect a deaf 12-year-old orphan who has been targeted for state institutionalization. And while the premise may sound sentimental, McBride, as usual, "crowds the chaos of the world into his sentences." It is no stretch at all to call this "hypnotically entertaining" novel Dickensian, said Ron Charles in The Washington Post. But don’t measure it by distant past greats, because "the melodrama that McBride spins is wholly his own, steeped in our country’s complex racial tensions and alliances," and he also finds his own way to bound past the differences that separate us. Buy it here.

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'Chain-Gang All-Stars' by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Already one of our finest young short-story writers, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah this year delivered a first novel "as thrilling as it was questioning of those same thrills," said Christopher Borrelli in the Chicago Tribune. In a dystopian America where subjects of mass incarceration compete for parole in televised fights to the death, two of the pastime’s star female gladiators, famed for their violent triumphs as well as their shared romance, head toward a final showdown with each other. Disturbingly, "the exciting battles put you in a ringside seat and it’s hard to sit on your hands." Adjei-Brenyah is "so good at writing fight scenes that our moral disgust never definitively stamps out the primitive thrill of reading them," said Giri Nathan in The New York Times. Chain-Gang All-Stars never preaches. Instead "it lures you in, asif to demonstrate how easy it might be to accept a world this sick." Buy it here.

'The Fraud' by Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith brings "characteristic brilliance" to her first historical novel, said The New Yorker. In Victorian London, a famous trial of a man who claimed to be the heir to a title and fortune divides the public, and we observe the legal circus through the eyes of a housekeeper who works for a once celebrated novelist and hopes to write her own book about a Jamaican witness in the trial. The resulting story is "filled with jabs at the hypocrisy of the upper class and corollaries of the pugilistic rhetoric of contemporary populism," yet Smith somehow makes its many parts cohere. "All historical novels are at heart a reflection of the time in which they were written," said Laura Miller in Slate. "But for Smith, the 19th century proves liberating, a perspective that allows her to ruminate on her favorite subject: the unfathomable nature of human beings and their never-ending ability to surprise." Buy it here. 

'Lone Women' by Victor LaValle

"Rich in secrets, suspense, and dread, Victor LaValle’s latest is a gripping and heartfelt thriller about how lone women survive a harsh world," said Adrienne Westenfeld in Esquire. In 1914, Adelaide Henry burns down her childhood home and lugs a single locked trunk to Montana, hoping to start fresh start by taking advantage of a government policy offering homestead land to single women. But as the sole Black woman in a largely white town, she faces racial prejudice while secretly contending with more supernatural horrors. "And when the lock on her steamer trunk is broken, all hell breaks loose." LaValle’s genre-bender is "one part horror story, one part old-school Western, and one part supernatural mystery, an unhinged exploration of isolation, loneliness, family separation, and loss," said Lacy Baugher Milas in Paste. The novel "feels like a classic and something completely brand new at the same time." Buy it here. 

'How to Say Babylon' by Safiya Sinclair

Safiya Sinclair’s brilliant debut memoir "grabs the reader with the beauty of its words," said Carole V. Bell in The Washington Post. But the Jamaican born poet also has a rich story to tell, and that story "sticks because of the thorniness and complexity of its ideas." Sinclair grew up in a Rastafari household ruled over by a domineering musician father who sought to control how she and her siblings dressed and ate, even as they suffered discrimination for being members of Jamaica’s tiny Rastafarian minority. A love of poetry nurtured by her mother proved Sinclair’s gateway to a U.S.-based life of her own making, said The Atlantic. But "Sinclair does more than sketch out a straightforward story of domestic peril and escape." She also paints a complex portrait of Jamaica and Rastafarianism. "Even when she looks beyond her own biography, every political or geographical detail adds to this vivid chronicle of her origin as an artist and a free woman." Buy it here.

'The Best Minds' by Jonathan Rosen

"An act of tremendous compassion" as well as a literary triumph, The Best Minds is an "inch-by-inch, pin-you-to-the-sofa" reconstruction of a friendship readers won’t soon forget, said Alexandra Jacobs in The New York Times. Author Jonathan Rosen grew up in a New York City suburb alongside Michael Laudor, a brilliant young man who, after being diagnosed with schizophrenia, graduated from Yale Law School and was celebrated for destigmatizing the disease until he murdered his pregnant fiancée in 1998. Rosen’s "complex and moving" account rehumanizes Laudor while simultaneously building "a thoughtfully constructed indictment of a society that prioritizes profit, quick fixes and happy endings over the long slog of care." Beyond that, the book "opens a window on a particular time and place," said Laura Miller in Slate. Rosen and Laudor’s rocky shared history from 1973 on unfolds against "a backdrop of changing cultural conceptions of mental illness," ideas that reshaped both their lives. "The result is a masterful interweaving of intimate memoir and sweeping history." Buy it here. 

'King' by Jonathan Eig

An "instant classic," this first comprehensive biography of Martin Luther King Jr. in more than three decades shows us the civil rights leader as a person, "not a stamp, or statue, or national holiday," said Christopher Borrelli in the Chicago Tribune. After interviewing scores of people who knew King and accessing troves of previously unseen materials, author Jonathan Eig presents a portrait of King that he admits will trouble some readers. But that’s only because his often gripping book presents a credibly multifaceted figure —  "a depressed King, a lecherous King, a thoughtful King, a committed King." The Baptist minister’s private battles with depression and infidelity only make his public achievements more remarkable. "Eig argues persuasively and elegantly that King’s flaws were very much part of what turned his personal struggles into the struggle for civil rights," said Julia Vitale in Air Mail. King possessed a sure feel for effective public theater, and "no one can come away from this book without a freshly realized appreciation for his bravery." Buy it here.

'Monsters' by Claire Dederer

In this masterful work of criticism, said Lauren Puckett-Pope in Elle, author Claire Dederer "asks one of the most pertinent questions of the era (and, really, every era): What do we do with the artists we love when we learn those artists aren’t good people?" Woody Allen, Pablo Picasso, J.K. Rowling, and other cultural giants have won love and admiration before the revelation of upsetting behaviors or beliefs, and as Dederer examines how best to weigh the offenders’ transgressions, her book "hums with the irreconcilable nature of such inquiries." If you’re looking for easy answers, "you won’t find them here," said Adrienne Westenfeld in Esquire. "Can we ethically consume the art of monstrous artists? Do we hold monstrous women to different standards than monstrous men?" Dederer argues that we must learn to live with our inability as individuals to arrive at clear answers that allow us to be consistent in our response to artists who disappoint us. "Lucid and fierce, generous and unflinching, Monsters is the most exhilarating study on this topic to date." Buy it here. 

'The Wager' by David Grann

"David Grann continues to set the gold standard for narrative nonfiction," said Chris Vognar in The Boston Globe. In the latest riveting true tale from the author of Killers of the Flower Moon and The Lost City of Z, readers are pulled headlong into a mutiny and shipwreck aboard an 18th-century British man-o’-war that had been tasked with robbing a Spanish ship of its rich cargo of silver. The crew famously descended into factionalism, savagery, and cannibalism, and survivors returned telling conflicting stories. As the tale unfolds, "you can feel every blast of wind, taste every gulp of salt water, and rue every fateful decision." Voltaire, Rousseau and Herman Melville were among the writers and thinkers who drew from the story as they fashioned their influential theories about human nature, said Julia Flynn Siler in The Wall Street Journal. Grann’s "tour de force" account covers the history of that aftermath too, "showing how storytelling can shape individual and national fortunes — as well as our collective memory." Buy it here. 

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