After Reading Hundreds of Titles, These Are Our 15 Favorite Books of 2018

In this daring novel’s opening section, a young editor and aspiring writer falls in love with a much-older man: a sly, sagacious, and stratospherically famous fictional stand-in for the late Philip Roth (whom Halliday had dated). Halliday’s perceptiveness and pitch-perfect dialogue imbue their relationship with elegance and verve; their affair prompts the question, how do you make space for yourself with someone whose stature dwarfs your own? The second part is an elegiac first-person account of an Iraqi American economist detained at Heathrow on the way to find his brother in Kurdistan. Learning how these disparate plots intersect narratively and thematically is but one of the book’s many pleasures. 

This penetrating portrait of a young couple torn apart by a false rape accusation and the biases of our justice system has propelled master storyteller Jones into the top ranks of fiction writers. Upon selecting it as an Oprah’s Book Club pick, Oprah said, “It’s among Tayari’s many gifts that she can touch us soul to soul with her words.” Whether describing an ostensibly mundane trip to visit in-laws or composing epistolary confessions from prison, Jones enthralls and bids us to open our eyes.

An Anne Tyler novel is best experienced beneath a favored quilt, with no interruptions from people asking when dinner will be ready. Tyler’s 22nd work is another exquisite tale of a woman who’s led a quiet life with few expectations until one day she realizes it isn’t enough. What happens after Willa has this epiphany and relocates to a city thousands of miles away to care for a child that’s not her own is beside the point. What keeps us glued are the lovely, intricate details; the depiction of human emotion as odd and splendid; and the tiny flickers of hope that feel like bursts of joy.

When an international student turns up dead at an Iowa college, a Jamaican runner recruited to the school is overcome with dread—both because of the grisly nature of the murder and because the crime seems to solidify her mother’s anxiety that “she would lose her daughter tragically in America, a place that...took daughters and later spit out their bones.” From the daughters’ perspective, of course, their mothers’ traditions, ambitions, and jealousies will be what consumes them. The essence of Arthurs’s often-devastating, always-beautiful short fiction collection can be found in its finally tender illumination of the mother-daughter bond, and of both sides of the divide between Caribbean parents and their Americanized children.

Majestic oaks. Gold-leaf aspens. Delicate willows. What if our forests communed in a mystical dimension a twig away from our own? In a sweeping, inventive masterpiece—part speculative storytelling, part environmental manifesto—nine characters team up to protect virgin forests from Oregon to Brooklyn, and trees are both the victims and the heroes of the epic battle.

The island setting of Novey’s provocative page-turner goes unnamed—granting both the place and the novel a glimmering ethereality—but the themes brought to light are as clear and familiar as our newspapers’ front pages: specifically, the accountability of men in power. The timely tale centers on a popular progressive senator who, years earlier, assaulted and nearly killed the woman he was seeing—incidents only a handful of people know about. In prose as taut and lithe as gossamer, Novey, a poet and translator of Clarice Lispector, weaves a wondrous web of personal and political intrigue, featuring singular characters all negotiating the costs of keeping silent. 

In the wake of the 2016 election, Phoebe quits her job at the New York Times to search for a mentor’s missing daughter. Amid the crowded freeways and blanched light of L.A., she hires a strangely sexy, lone-wolf PI whose pet opossum sleeps in his desk drawer. Their quest to find the runaway takes them through a desert swarming with Burning Man–esque outlaws and abandoned mining camps, with the occasional reference to Edie Sedgwick and Leonard Cohen. The author of Motherless Brooklyn gives the missing-girl genre his own quirky, entrancing spin in this paean to SoCal noir in which Trump’s America is the scene of the crime.

“Our baby was born with a round face and dark curls and two eyes like lying-down teardrops,” observes Yonah, whose wife, Lucia, has a mental illness that sends her soaring to emotional heights, then crashing back down. So many of Lee’s sentences cry out to be underlined, reread, shared: “The warmth of her house smelled suspicious, like vitamins and beef broth and soap.” But proof of this debut novelist’s immense talent can also be found in her ability to pierce us with Lucia’s pain and warm us with a sister’s fierce devotion.

On the Road meets MAGA in a rollicking novel that compresses our troubled zeitgeist in a time capsule for the ages. Armed with his collection of rare watches, Barry Cohen, a 43-year-old finance bro, flees a failing business and a floundering family to go Greyhound across America, on the lam from his own conscience. Shteyngart’s comic flourishes render Barry a sympathetic man-child in a land promised solely to the alpha dogs among us.

After her Mormon-survivalist parents retreated with her into the Idaho wilderness—tending herbs and skinning deer, rejecting medical care and other outside support—Westover taught herself science and grammar, and plotted her escape. Like Hillbilly Elegy, this memoir thrillingly evokes the exultant climb out of poisonous isolation and into the life of the mind.

Outside the needle exchange where housecleaner Mona meets Mr. Disgusting, the recovering junkie she falls for, a sign reads "If God Gives You Lemons, Find a New God." Beagin’s rib-ticklingly funny-sad debut is replete with such melancholy witticisms; she works magic in the space between hilarity and heartbreak. The New Mexico sky under which she hopes to scrub away the dirt of her traumatic past is “a blithe, concentrated blue, the color of Windex.” Absurdly affecting, Beagin’s first novel (think Grace Paley by way of Sarah Silverman) is a marvel.

After magazine editor Willa and her professor husband lose their jobs and are forced to move into a ramshackle house inherited from a relative, they discover it’s not just their home that needs a total, down-to-the-studs renovation. Kingsolver, whose novels have shown her to be as much activist as artist, here brilliantly captures both the price of profound change and how it can pave the way not only for future generations, but also for a radiant, unexpected expansion of the heart. 

Tommy Orange’s vibrant, portentous debut blazes across our literary firmament like a comet. There There follows a cast of Native Americans in present-day Oakland, California as they prepare for an annual powwow, cobbling together lives along the margins while negotiating between white and nonwhite worlds: “It’s about layers. It’s about disappearing in the whir of noise and doing.” 

Imagine Colson Whitehead’s audacious genre-bending suffused with Paul Beatty’s dastardly satire and you might get something like Heads of the Colored People, a prismatic, breaking-all-the-rules debut collection. But Thompson-Spires is in a class of her own, a voice that hasn’t so much emerged as it has shouted from the rooftop to pierce the niceties of everyday American life; these twelve game-changing stories—which both lampoon and lament the toils and troubles of the Black middle-class identity—are both a herald of great things to come and a mic drop. 

Spanish writer Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s quartet of Cemetery of Forgotten Books novels comes to a close with the intricate and sublime The Labyrinth of the Spirits, in which the lead is played by the enigmatic Alicia Gris, who works as an investigator for Barcelona’s secret police. As with the previous novels (don’t worry—this one can be read as a standalone), Labyrinth is a bibliophile’s delight, filled with sly literary allusions and a blend of fantasy, historical, and metafiction. And at more than 800 pages, it will keep you busy during the long winter days.