From exciting debuts to mature masterworks, 10 novels stood out.
Dec. 13, 2013
The Luminaries
By Eleanor Catton (Little, Brown)
In this marvelously inventive novel that joyfully imitates the conventions of the great Victorian triple-deckers, nothing is quite what it first appears to be, but everything is illuminated.
Necessary Errors By Caleb Crain (Penguin)
Languidly paced and deeply immersive, this coming-of-age novel set in post-Communist Prague echoes Henry James's psychologically tangled fiction about unmoored expats.
Bogotá By Alan Grostephan (Triquarterly)
It should be nearly impossible for an outsider to inhabit the conditions of Third World poverty without a lingering whiff of condescension. Yet Alan Grostephan does just that in his starkly mesmerizing novel about a rural family's migration to the slums outside Colombia's capital. He endows his characters with the dignity of their individual dreams even as his realism dictates that most of those dreams must end in tragedy.
Enon By Paul Harding (Random House)
Even more memorable than his Pulitzer Prize-winning 'Tinkers,' Paul Harding's second novel is a profound and ultimately cathartic journey through the darkest recesses of grief.
Seiobo There Below By László Krasznahorkai (New Directions)
László Krasznahorkai's sentences are objects of wonder, and this teeming exploration of art and holiness marks an expansion of the Hungarian great's emotional range. Among the novels published in English this year, this is the one most likely to be recognized by future generations as a masterpiece.
The Woman Upstairs By Claire Messud (Knopf)
Nora Eldridge, the instantly archetypal heroine of Claire Messud's fifth novel, is an unassuming, single, middle-aged woman whose polite smile masks a maelstrom of rage and resentment. This novel is sure to become a cultural benchmark—the title a byword even—but will live because the story is so skillfully executed.
Quiet Dell By Jayne Anne Phillips (Scribner)
True crime provided the inspiration for a number of 2013's most notable page-turners, from Jennifer duBois's fictionalization of the Amanda Knox trial to Amity Gaige's version of the Clark Rockefeller case. None was as beautiful as Jayne Anne Phillips's re-creation of some 1931 serial killings. In a welcome reversal, the novelist sympathetically imagines the lives of the victims rather than of the murderer.
Ghana Must Go By Taiye Selasi (Penguin Press)
Irresistible from the first line—'Kweku dies barefoot on a Sunday before sunrise, his slippers by the doorway to the bedroom like dogs'—this bright, rhapsodic debut stood out in the thriving field of fiction about the African diaspora.
By Margaret Wrinkle (Atlantic Monthly Press)
Fiction about slavery is always vulnerable to easy pieties. But this novel, focused on the horrifying practice of slave-breeding, gracefully channels the long-gone voices of the owners and the owned. It is unsparing, dramatic and even genuinely hopeful.
The People in the Trees
By Hanya Yanagihara (Doubleday)
One part adventure tale, one part morality play, this novel about a startling scientific discovery among a lost tribe in Micronesia is by turns thrilling and disturbing. By twinning marvels with scourges, Hanya Yanagihara investigates not simply the ethical costs of scientific advancement but also the deep-seated antagonism between ethics and science.
WSJ Best Nonfiction 2013
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