Blow Fly by
Patricia Cornwell
Tropic of Night by
Michael Gruber
The Sinister Pig by
Tony Hillerman
The Night of the
Dance by James Hime
Fatal Flaw by
William Lashner
Shutter Island by
Dennis Lehane
Fear Itself by
Walter Mosley
The Jester by
James Patterson
Soul Circus by George P. Pelecanos
Resurrection Men by Ian Rankin
The Babes in the Wood by Ruth Rendell
Naked Prey by John Sandford
The Kalahari
Typing School for Men by Alexander McCall Smith
Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear
New York Times Best Books of 2003
Reviews written by
The New York Times!
Non-fiction:
The Bounty: The
True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty by Caroline Alexander
Fletcher Christian really led a mutiny on the Bounty in
1789; and Captain Bligh and 18 crewmen did sail 3,600 miles of the South Pacific
for seven weeks in a 23-foot open boat to reach safety after the mutineers
tossed them overboard. Caroline Alexander's threatening subtitle simply means
she sets out to prove that we have never understood these two men and hadn't a
clue about how Bligh, a caring officer, became the heavy in the legend or why
Christian, who was detested even by his fellow mutineers, became a sympathetic
character to later generations.
Khrushchev: The
Man and His Era by William Taubman
Nikita Khrushchev left a deep imprint on the first 47 years
of the Communist era, almost two-thirds of its whole history. He was involved in
Stalin's collectivization program that destroyed millions of peasants and the
bloody purges of the late 30's. He supervised the arrests and executions of
thousands in Ukraine in 1939. After World War II he was one of the three Soviet
leaders closest to Stalin, and after the dictator died in 1953, Khrushchev
outmaneuvered the others and took control in 1956. That year he made the famous
''secret speech'' to the Communist Party Congress, denouncing the crimes of
Stalin in vivid detail and setting loose forces that would eventually bring down
the Soviet Union. Before he was toppled from power in 1964, he also nearly
caused a nuclear war over Russian missiles in Cuba, but he also arranged the
first detente with America shortly afterward.
Living To Tell the Tale by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
At 76, Gabriel García Márquez has the comforting
confidence of a man unafraid to tease his admirers. This memoir, the first of
three planned volumes, takes him to his early 20's, before he leaves his country
as it sinks into violence.
Fiction:
Brick Lane by Monica Ali
Leaving home is a journey without end in this novel about
Bangladeshi immigrants in London's East End. An 18-year-old woman from Dhaka in
an arranged marriage with a man of 40 is practically immured in their flat, with
only one neighborhood friend, bearing children and listening to her husband's
dreams of being a success and then returning home.
Drop City by T. Coraghessan Boyle
''Drop City'' is a 1970's California commune of hippies who
migrate to Alaska believing that the lawless tundra will let them live high as
kites forever. At the heart of this novel are two love stories: one involving
two middle-class newcomers to the commune and the other a solitary Alaskan
trapper and a woman from Anchorage who seeks him out as the only safe haven in a
world melting down.
The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem
Everyone seeks his own Garden of Eden, but who would think
to find it in a single block of Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, in the 1970's, when New
York City was going down the tubes? In Jonathan Lethem's new novel it is there
for Dylan, a white geeky boy, and his friend Mingus, a hip black neighbor. These
boys' knowledge of life comes in piles of hoarded comics; graffiti, which they
streak together as if by a single hand across the borough; unending black and
white confrontations of will on the street; and black music, from jazz and blues
to hip-hop.
The Known World by Edward P. Jones
What makes this novel so startling is that the situation
Edward P. Jones imagines was reality in parts of this country in the 1850's:
there were black slave owners, more than a few, and a few were pretty well
heeled. Jones's story, centered on one such man in Virginia, exposes the heart
of slavery; there are few real villains in this book, because slavery poisons
the entire society, white and black, and for the same reason there can be no
real heroes.
New York Times Notable
Fiction Books of 2003:
Reviews written by The New York Times!
Any Human Heart by William Boyd - A novel whose
hero, a minor British writer and art dealer (and secret agent), becomes a sort
of stoic Everyman for the 20th century, meeting almost everyone (Ian Fleming,
Picasso, Hemingway, the Duke of Windsor, Virginia Woolf) and traveling to almost
everywhere; he has many successes in life, each one closely attended by yet
another fall.
Bangkok 8 by John Burdett - A talky, entertaining
novel set in Thailand about two decades after the Vietnam War, full of cops,
crooks and prostitutes; its narrator, a Bangkok police detective and son of a
respectable prostitute, solves a locked-door murder not through deduction but by
meditation and a sensitivity to reincarnation.
Best Friends by Thomas Berger. Contemporary
life takes another hit in this, the 22nd novel by the author of ''Little Big
Man''; its chief characters, in a variation of the eternal triangle, are two
well-off men and one wife, who appears for a long time to be losing a game she
is winning.
The Book Against God by James Wood.
Wood, a distinguished British critic interested in the expansive
19th-century novel about big things like literature and faith, has bitten the
bullet and written a big-thing novel, his first, which has to do with literature
and faith but is also, thank goodness, laden with wit, forceful images and
English eccentrics
A Box of Matches by Nicholson Baker. Baker employs
his specialty as a novelist, the exhibition of life where no life seems to be,
to explore the consciousness of a man who rises early, lights a fire and sits
around in a mindful state every morning till his matches are all spent.
The Bug by Ellen Ullman. A thrilling, intellectually
fearless first novel that reinvents the story of Frankenstein's monster as an
allegory of the birth of the computer among engineers in Silicon Valley; a Yale
Ph.D., hired to test computer codes for bugs, falls in love with the
''artificial reality'' inside the machine.
The Coffee Trader by David Liss. A historical novel
and an economically detailed romance of capitalism, in which a young Jew in
17th-century Amsterdam seeks to evade censure from the Jewish authorities and to
build a personal fortune by exploiting the rising popularity of coffee, which he
intends to buy cheap and sell dear.
Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo. An all-day (and
book-length) chauffeured trip across midtown Manhattan exposes DeLillo's cool,
New Economy protagonist to an assortment of characters in this critique of
hypercapitalism.
Creation by Katherine Govier. A wily, intricate,
speculative novel about John James Audubon, 48 years old with a wife and a
girlfriend; he lives in fear that his eyesight will fail, or he will die before
his work is done, or the birds will vanish. Govier depicts him as a man of
multiple fidelities, not really able to resolve them all but trying his best to
come clean.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by
Mark Haddon. Presented as a detective story, this funny, original first novel
stars a sort of autistic savant, 15 years old, whose grasp of social clues is
near zero (he cannot lie or understand a joke) but whose logical faculties are
dominant except when overloaded.
A Distant Shore by Caryl Phillips. In the sad and
ugly modern Britain of this novel by a Caribbean writer who has specialized in
the homelessness of the descendants of slaves, nothing redemptive happens in the
friendship of Dorothy, an Englishwoman and retired schoolteacher, and Solomon,
an illegal refugee from a war-blighted African nation; both are left to drift.
The Dogs of Babel by Carolyn Parkhurst. An inventive
first novel whose hero and narrator, a linguist whose wife has died in a fall
seen only by the family dog, resolves to find out what happened by teaching the
dog to talk; ultimately he realizes that the explanation that can sustain him in
his love and grief can come only from himself.
Elizabeth Costello by J. M. Coetzee. A haunting
short novel whose author was awarded the Nobel Prize last month; its title
character, an aging novelist who travels on the university lecture circuit (as
Coetzee himself has done), gets into trouble by embracing unpopular positions on
animal rights and the suppression of horrible facts. Compassionate in principle,
chilly in practice, her character could support an allegorical proposition:
people often fail to behave as they know they should.
Evidence of Things Unseen by Marianne Wiggins. This
panoramic, epically ambitious and erotically original novel follows a heartland
American couple from World War I to the atomic bomb project at Oak Ridge; Opal,
the practical half, keeps the books and fixes the truck; Fos, the visionary, is
attracted by light in all its forms.
A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies by John
Murray. Stories by a doctor whose understated authorial presence and gift for
description are strong enough to sustain an occasionally underconstructed
narrative.
Four Spirits by Sena Jeter Naslund. A historical
novel that brings dignity and moral complexity to a panoramic view of
Birmingham, its people and their daily struggles in 1963, when a church bombing
killed four black girls; the author herself grew up in Birmingham during the
civil rights era.
Genesis by Jim Crace. Mankind's baser instincts are
on full display in the form of Crace's protagonist, Felix Dern, an impossibly
fertile actor and singer in a metropolis that seems very familiar but different
in unnerving ways.
Getting Mother’s Body by Suzan-Lori Parks. This
first novel by a Pulitzer-winning African-American playwright takes a cheerful
tack across deep Faulknerian waters, relating the fortunes of the survivors of a
woman who was buried (as people think) in some very expensive jewelry.
Gilligan’s
Wake by
Tom Carson. A loopy, exuberant novel-type prose event that sees 20th-century
America through the lives of the castaways on ''Gilligan's Island.'' The
originals are augmented by culturally significant characters, from Amelia
Earhart and Holden Caulfield to Richard Nixon and Maggie the Cat.
Good Faith by
Jane Smiley. Joe Stratford, narrator and protagonist of this subtly polemical
novel (it is against greed), rests reasonably content with his life as a real
estate agent. It doesn't last; the prospect of big money opens before him, and a
former I.R.S. agent, now some kind of wise guy, enmeshes him in unblessed
doings.
The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard. In Hazzard's first novel in more
than 20 years, set in the still smoldering aftermath of World War II, a British
major of 32 falls in love with an impossibly precocious 17-year-old; the
numerous vicissitudes that follow are supported by the weight and scope of the
book's observation of a world and a time in chaos.
The Hills At Home by Nancy Clark.
Clark's funny, intelligent first novel reveals a special and particular
kind of life, that of an extended old New England family in their 200-year-old
clapboard homestead, where they survive miracles of inconvenience, eat tuna
wiggle or fish sticks and express invincible opinions about everything.
Jamesland by Michelle Huneven. Alice
Black, who cannot forget her descent from William James (people keep bringing
him up), has trouble being pragmatic about the paranormal in the Los Angeles of
this novel, where unlikely things (a deer in the house) seem to trump less
exotic ones (like mental illness and fear of mental illness).
L’Affaire by Diane Johnson. Johnson's
third witty and graceful novel about Americans in France is a comedy of manners
that concerns a self-made woman, a dot-com millionaire from Palo Alto who goes
to France seeking a life-changing love affair. Most of it happens at a ski
resort in the Alps, where cultural misunderstandings prevail by day, love
affairs by night.
The Light of the Day by Graham Swift. Told in a police-blotter argot so spare it reads like a sort
of gumshoe haiku, this moody novel about severed connections might well be
summarized thus: Woman kills husband. / Private eye falls hard for her: / Two
lives held in check.
Lives of the Circus Animals by Christopher Bram. Bram's exceedingly
clever novel, set in the world of the theater, is well paced and sexy (both gay
and straight); a character much like Ian McKellen is particularly acute about
narcissism, the great motor of the stage, which he sees escaping into more and
more of everyday life.
Long for this World by Michael Byers. The protagonist of Byers's first
novel is a medical geneticist whose special anguish is his inability to help the
victims of a rare genetic disease that kills them of old age by 19 at most; his
love for a particular patient calls him to risk his career.
Love by
Toni Morrison. All kinds of crime, perversion and soul-wrecking hatred inhabit
this short novel, in which the widow and granddaughter of a rich, charming and
long-dead resort owner struggle over his legacy. The action, which has to do
with a forgery scheme, throws up memories and revelations, each of which stirs
up new questions about the situation and the morality, or lack thereof, of the
novel's characters.
Love Me by
Garrison Keillor. Fame, seduction and downfall are the major motifs of this
novel whose Midwestern protagonist, fired by the success of his first novel,
moves to New York, obtains an office at The New Yorker and mislays his skills
somewhere. William Shawn, the magazine's famously retiring editor, is
represented as a big-mouthed, gun-toting tough, and his venerable magazine
undergoes a Mafia takeover.
Making Things Better by Anita Brookner. (Random House, $23.95.)
Brookner's protagonist, Julius Herz, has been left stranded by the deaths in his
family; now he can think of nothing to do in his life or with it. He courts a
woman he knows to be selfish and unable to love, and on Brookner's austere scale
of passivity this may be counted as a kind of victory; but she is far too honest
to say.
The Master Butchers Singing Club by Louise Erdrich.
Erdrich's latest novel revisits the fictional town of Argus, N.D., and
the familiar themes of love, death and redemption, but shifts the focus from the
town's Indians to its German, Polish and Scandinavian citizens.
The Monsters of St. Helena by Brooks Hansen.
The island chosen for Napoleon's final exile lends its hermetic isolation
to Hansen's novel, in which a defeated, domesticated Bonaparte plays with
children and writes his memoirs while his presence intrudes on the local haunt,
a Portuguese traitor stranded many years before.
My Life as a
Fake by
Peter Carey. This brisk, prankish novel by the author of ''True History of the
Kelly Gang,'' constructed on classical Ripping Yarn lines, proposes a
Frankensteinian monster in the form of an Australian poet, Bob McCorkle, who is
the creation of another Australian poet, Christopher Chubb, invented in part to
embarrass Chubb's editors. Whereupon a real-life person called Bob McCorkle
appears ex nihilo and proves to be a better poet than his creator, whose
daughter he appropriates.
The Namesake
by
Jhumpa Lahiri. This first novel by Lahiri, the author of the Pulitzer
Prize-winning ''Interpreter of Maladies,'' is a mild, graceful study in
dissonance: its Indian-American hero, Gogol Ganguli, is afflicted with a name
that feels profoundly alien and seems committed to wafting haphazardly through
life.
Office of
Innocence by
Thomas Keneally. This fictional chronicle of the sentimental education of a
priest mixes elements of melodrama, murder mystery and theological treatise, all
of them swirling around an earnest young curate whose indiscretions bring
scandal to the church and a killer to his confessional box.
Old School by Tobias Wolff. Wolff's first novel, which greatly
resembles his life as he has told it in two books of memoirs, concerns a prep
school boy, his lower-middle, partly Jewish background disguised, who is
obsessed with both writing and dissembling -- activities that have a great deal
in common.
One Last
Look by
Susanna Moore. A fine historical
and political novel, recorded by Lady Eleanor Oliphant, sister to the governor
general of India in the 1830's; its grand set piece is a state visit to the
Punjab to ally with a maharajah. Everything goes wrong in Afghanistan, though,
and terrible things are seen by those with the courage to look.
Oracle Night
by
Paul Auster. An up-to-date
metasomething novel on a dizzy rotation between life and invention, situated in
a writer's notebook; the writer, Sidney Orr, recently very ill, has lost his
will to write until he buys an exotic notebook in Brooklyn. Immediately stories
begin to proliferate, right from the bottom of the page upward, in a stew of
creation and discovery, communication and concealment.
Oryx and
Crake by
Margaret Atwood. Atwood returns to
a dystopian future in this bleak novel about a man who may be the last human
remaining on postapocalyptic earth.
Our Lady of
the Forest by
David Guterson. An eccentric, accomplished novel concerning a teenage runaway,
Ann Holmes, who wanders into the Pacific Northwest rain forest in November and
sees a vision of the Virgin Mary. Small, wet and weedy-looking, Ann has been a
druggie, a hippie and a rape victim; nevertheless, some thousand followers come
to watch her watching the Virgin in North Fork, Wash.
Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. Gibson's elegant, entrancing
seventh novel concerns a supersmart woman, a freelance marketing consultant who
covers the globe looking for the next big salable fad, trying all along to solve
the disappearance of her father, a retired C.I.A. man, in New York on Sept. 11,
2001.
The Photograph by Penelope Lively.
An engaging novel (the author's 13th) whose hero, a landscape historian,
finds in a closet a snapshot that suggests adultery by his wife (now dead) and
her brother-in-law; the more he investigates the dead woman, the more she seems
insubstantial when alive, a fluffy creature, casting no shadow and scarcely
attached to the ground.
Postcards
From Berlin by
Margaret Leroy. This unhappy-family
novel starts with a middle-class idyll and it's downhill from there as an
8-year-old daughter falls ill and then iller; a mother's dark secret -- the girl
was put in an orphanage for her own rotten mother's convenience -- seems to be
generating her daughter's sickness.
The Quality
of Life Report by
Meghan Daum. A fine comic first novel in which misguided fantasy betrays a young
New York television journalist, first by sending her to the Midwest, where folks
are simple and good, then by orders from New York to do a lifestyle series on
the simple, good folk.
Quicksilver by
Neal Stephenson. Nine hundred pages
of dizzying complexity -- rich with bibliographies, time lines and mathematical
diagrams -- that delve into the philosophy, economics and wars of the 17th and
18th centuries, and serve as a prequel to the cyberpunk world of Stephenson's
earlier fiction.
The Romantic by Barbara Gowdy. Obsession knows no greater exponent
than Louise, narrator and protagonist of this adroit novel that refuses to honor
the claims of adulthood. Abandoned by her mother at 9, Louise soon falls madly
in love with another family's mother, then with that mother's adopted son, and
remains consciously faithful to her doomed love ever after.
Samaritan by Richard Price. A sprawling cast of cinematic characters,
often little people who command feeling for a moment, then vanish, surrounds the
two chief characters of this urban North Jersey novel, in which the beating of a
television writer is investigated by an old friend turned police detective.
Saul and
Patsy by Charles Baxter. Circumstances, alternately aggravating and
ameliorating, seem to be in control of a young married-with-baby couple's life
in this quite irreverent novel, which shows throughout a healthy contempt for
youth and its sometimes forthright admiration of self.
Secret
Father by
James Carroll. The cold war and a father-and-son dyad, recalling in 1990 the
events of 1961 in Berlin, generate the elaborate plot of this political thriller
in which a missing roll of film seems to portend a new world war.
Set This House In Order by Matt Ruff. A heavily populated novel (its two principal characters,
Andrew and Penny, suffer from multiple personality disorder). When Andrew's
personalities begin to riot, he and they hit the dangerous road for his
childhood home while Penny does her best to keep up.
A Ship Made
of Paper by
Scott Spencer. In the author's eighth novel he reprises the theme of consuming
love, this time in the form of an affair between well-adjusted adults told from
both perspectives, and asks whether that love isn't worth the suffering it
causes to those around them.
Shipwreck by Louis Begley. Not fame, not wealth, not even a French
mistress can fend off the midlife writer's crisis that plagues Begley's latest
protagonist, a celebrated author who evokes the familiar contradictions of
Begley's lawyer character, Schmidt, but none of the sympathy.
Star of the Sea by Joseph O'Connor.
A ripping yarn, by an Irish critic and playwright, that is also an
agonizing inquiry into our vast tolerance for the suffering of others, in this
instance the starving Irish of 1847, morally observed by an American journalist
and the captain of a ship carrying ŽmigrŽs in steerage.
That Old Ace in the Hole by Annie Proulx. Proulx's new novel follows
the destiny of Bob Dollar, abandoned at 8 on a Denver doorstep, through the high
plains of Texas and Oklahoma, where he seeks locations for hog factories until
he encounters the real folks who live there and is caught up in their yarns and
legends.
The Time of
Our Singing by Richard Powers. This dazzling, difficult novel,
Powers's eighth, follows the lives of a talented mixed (he Jewish, she black)
couple in America from about 1939 on; their sufferings are reflected in musical
and scientific developments.
Train by
Pete Dexter. Set in 1950's Los
Angeles, where real life was basically film noir, this novel of harsh, precise
everyday violence by the author of the scary 1988 novel ''Paris Trout'' involves
a cynical detective, a young woman who surely deserves better than what she gets
and a black caddie, nearly 18, who is nice to animals and serves as the book's
moral center.
The Way To Paradise by Mario Vargas Llosa. Through intricate, alternate narrative loops, Vargas Llosa
re-imagines the last years of Paul Gauguin, spent in Tahiti and the Marquesas,
and the emergence of his Franco-Peruvian grandmother, Flora Trist‡n, as a
workers' rights activist.
A Whistling Woman by A. S. Byatt.
The bookish Frederica Potter, protagonist of this fourth novel in a
series that began 25 years ago, lives by interviewing many and various savants
on television, allowing the entry of much arcane information into the novel and
unleashing the author's satirical powers in every which direction.
The Wife by
Meg Wolitzer. A light-footed, streamlined novel that rushes in to shed new heat
on old themes like gender, writing and identity; Joan Castleman gives up her
writing career to service that of her husband, Joe, a jerk of many flavors, and
Wolitzer deploys a calm, seamless humor over the agony.
The Winter
Queen by
Boris Akunin. Wildly popular in
Russia, Akunin's detective novels, set in czarist times, offer entertainment to
readers fatigued with official truths. This one concerns Fandorin, a young
officer of good family who catches the case of another such who seems to have
died playing what they call ''American roulette'' with a revolver.
Yellow Dog by
Martin Amis. The awful people in
Amis's current excursion include an actor and writer who sacrifices political
correctness and becomes an antifeminist because of a brain injury; a vicious
journalist who hates women and excuses rape, apparently because he is genitally
underendowed; and a king of England, Henry IX, a good-natured fellow who suffers
from his boring job and a shocking invasion of his daughter's privacy.
New York Times Best Mysteries of 2003:
Reviews written by The New York Times!
The Babes in the Wood by Ruth Rendell. Supple prose, intricate
plotting and an ominous atmosphere draw us into this disquieting case of Chief
Inspector Wexford, involving two teenagers who disappear during ferocious
rainstorms that flood Kingsmarkham and drench the story with intimations of
nature's dark forces raging out of control.
Fear Itself by Walter Mosley. Paris
Minton, the lily-livered bookstore owner who wouldn't last a minute on the rough
streets of Los Angeles without his deadly friend, Fearless Jones, invites
trouble by trying to help a frantic mother locate the runaway father of her
child, in a noir tale driven by its high-stepping, fast-talking characters.
Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear. The resourceful heroine of this
haunting first novel applies her experiences as a battlefield nurse in World War
I to her new career as a private investigator, scandalizing society but offering
a humane psychological approach to a harrowing case involving physically and
mentally shattered war veterans.
Resurrection Men by Ian Rankin. It could just be John Rebus's paranoia
kicking in again, but the abrasive Edinburgh cop suspects he is under internal
surveillance when he is taken off a murder investigation for remedial training
at the Scottish Police College, along with five other officers in need of an
attitude overhaul.
Soul
Circus
by George P. Pelecanos. Fascinated with the way crime actually works, Pelecanos
takes apart the gun trade like an urban anthropologist, fitting the pieces into
the thriving drug industry and gang culture of a Washington neighborhood where
enterprising criminals work hard to make a dishonest living.
