LIST: Our 10 Best Fiction Books of the Year

1. Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner (Random House)

With the arrival of this critically acclaimed and best-selling novel, it was suddenly clear to fans of New York Times Magazine staff writer Brodesser-Akner’s celebrity profiles (Gwyneth Paltrow, Bradley Cooper) that she brings the same eye for internal contradiction, and generous humanity, to her imagined characters as she does to her real ones. Fleishman Is in Trouble introduces readers to a middle-aged dad (yes, that’s Fleishman), who gets dumped by his high-powered wife, heads into divorce, and delights in a new world of online dating. But the most interesting character is the novel’s narrator, Libby, an old friend of Fleishman’s from their year abroad in Israel, who has her own issues. Through Brodesser-Akner’s magical sensibility, what seems at first to be yet another novel about middle-age malaise turns into something more profound and universal.

2. Trust Exercise by Susan Choi (Henry Holt)

Adolescence at the competitive Citywide Academy for the Performing Arts (CAPA) could end up as Glee if the novelist weren’t the brilliant Choi, whose fiction, like her Pulitzer Prize finalist American Woman, upends narrative expectation. Trust Exercise deftly shifts time and perspective, and teen drama becomes a dark, edgy exploration of boundaries between coercion and consent, theater and reality, charisma and manipulation, and student and teacher. From her early focus on a drama teacher and two lovestruck teens, Choi flashes forward to a wider set of characters and highlights the malleability of memory and imagination.

3. The Topeka School by Ben Lerner (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

A great big American novel doesn’t come along often, but Lerner’s The Topeka School is one that is both an intimate portrait of a family and an exploration of larger concerns. Lerner, winner of a MacArthur “genius” grant, is known for his “autofiction,” but here he stretches that form into a big social novel, situated in the middle of Kansas at the end of the Clinton administration but extending through the arrival of Trump. The story is told through interwoven narratives, shifting perspectives between high school debater and cool kid Adam and his psychologist parents, including a mother who is an expert on the Oprah show. Toxic masculinity, the homophobic Westboro Baptist Church, Bob Dole, Donald Trump, and finally MAGA add a topspin to this dynamic novel about language, power, and the violence embedded into American culture.

4. The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste (W.W. Norton)

Mengiste begins and ends this riveting epic at a train station in 1974, but the heart of her second novel is set decades before, on the eve of and during the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. Mengiste reimagines this war through multiple perspectives – of both the poor and powerless and the affluent and influential. The most compelling parts of her wonderful novel, however, involve the women who worked as spies, caregivers, advisers, and warriors to save their nation from fascism. Her portrait of one young woman, Hirut, a heroic, vulnerable servant girl who fights for her country, is unforgettable.

5. Maggie Brown & Others: Stories by Peter Orner (Little, Brown)

In literary shorthand, Orner has been likened both to short story stars like Alice Munro and Raymond Carver, and to longer-form writers with recurring characters, like Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. But with this collection of 44 stories and the novella Walt Kaplan Is Broke, Orner displays a capacious talent that should be recognized as uniquely his own. His feats of compression and scope, distilling a vast range of human emotion in a few sentences, are extraordinary and provocative, and accentuated by wit, as evidenced by story titles like “Speech at the Urinal, Drake Hotel, Chicago, December 1980.” At one point in an emotionally rich story, “Ineffectual Tribute to Len,” the cab-driving narrator suggests the limitations of novels and writes to his publisher in defense of stories. “You say stories don’t sell,” he says. “I’ve seen the numbers of my story collections and they aren’t pretty; I know I’m basically a charity case, but don’t you see? It’s what Chekhov teaches.” Orner has metabolized Chekhov’s influence and made it his own.

6. The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott (Knopf)

This thrilling novel shifts between the Soviet Union and Washington, recounting the tense struggle over publication of Boris Pasternak’s once-controversial, now classic novel Dr. Zhivago. Prescott has a wonderful command of the battle over the book, how it was received in Russia, and how it became entwined with Cold War diplomacy. But she imparts a new energy by telling the story through the women who worked as secretaries but fed information to the CIA, including through Pasternak’s mistress, Olga, and made the cold, bitter Russian terrain a steamy intrigue-filled place.

7. Women Taking by Miriam Toews (Bloomsbury)

Toews, one of Canada’s most celebrated novelists, who was recently profiled in The New Yorker, has written a brilliant novel that should finally bring her the wide American audience she deserves. The book is inspired by real events in a fundamentalist Mennonite community in Bolivia, in which women and girls were drugged and raped by men in the colony but had only blood and bruises, not memories of the events. Rather than focus on the crimes, Women Talking gives voice to the victims. Toews spotlights the small chorus of women, from teenagers to grandmothers, over two days of deliberations about their futures, which are recorded by the schoolteacher, a man shunned by the community, but necessary because women are illiterate in this patriarchal society.

8. A Door in the Earth by Amy Waldman (Little, Brown)

Waldman follows her acclaimed 2011 debut novel The Submission with a knockout that deftly entwines the political and personal. Waldman, a former South Asia bureau chief for the New York Times, focuses on a recent college graduate who returns to her birthplace and finds purpose in the world. Her journey is inspired by the bestselling memoir of an American ophthalmologist who recounted his own heroic efforts to launch a women’s clinic in rural Afghanistan, which may evoke associations with Greg Mortenson’s discredited Three Cups of Tea. From that beginning, Waldman throws open her smart novel to capture an array of perspectives, from the village commander to the midwife, and exposes the tragic consequences of unbridled idealism, the dark side of American intervention, and the fantasies and lies that sustain an ongoing war.

9. The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday)

A recent Time magazine cover heralded “America’s Storyteller: By Mining the Past, Novelist Colson Whitehead Takes Readers into an Uneasy Present.” Like Whitehead’s groundbreaking The Underground Railroad, which won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, The Nickel Boys is a rare book that simultaneously climbs the bestseller lists, receives literary acclaim, and, most elusively, shifts the national conversation. While The Underground Railroad was a fantastical imagination of the Underground Railroad as physical rather than metaphorical, The Nickel Boys is rooted in the real-life horrific abuse and corruption of the now-shuttered Dozier School for Boys in Florida. Many great writers have graced the cover of Time over the past century, and Whitehead very much deserves to join their ranks.

10. Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson (Ecco)

Wilson has a gift for writing fiction with wit, humor, and great heart. In his new novel, two best friends at a tony Tennessee boarding school fall out, until years later, one, an heiress, recruits the other, a scholarship girl who is now at a dead-end in work and life, to become the governess for her stepchildren. The unusual 10-year-old twins could cause embarrassment for their father, a political figure, because of a disturbing, unexplainable condition: when flustered or angry, they spontaneously ignite in flames, which hurt houses, clothes, and possessions, but not humans. The twins have a remarkable effect on the quirky, sarcastic governess as they develop an emotional attachment to her, and are transformed.