New York Times - Best Books of 2009 - Fiction

Cohen’s middle-aged protagonist heads to Africa, leaving his wife back home in New England with a younger rival.

Baker’s ardent novel about poetry — with its hero trying, and mostly failing, to write an anthology introduction — actually does justice to poetry.

A graphic novel 10 years in the making combines a modernist style, a formalist structure and a story about a bristly academic.

Meloy’s calm, intelligent prose renders her stories’ self-sabotaging characters — lawyers, unfaithful spouses, eccentric older women, Montanans — eminently understandable.

Beneath the gaudy makeup of this dancing showgirl of a novel, set in an alternate-reality Manhattan, is the girl next door: a traditional bildungsroman with a strong moral compass.

Gerstler’s poems — skillful in every kind of comedy, yet deeply serious — show a fondness for animals without sentimentalizing them.

Gaitskill implicates the reader in what feels like a violation of her own characters, whose lives are more often broken than in any way admirable.

This polished story collection takes its sustenance from class conflict, rough men and strong women, and the intersection between hotheads and cool customers.

A heroine bent on reinvention is at the center of this densely stitched crazy quilt of a novel, which spans six decades and a wealth of genres while evoking a quintessential American mythology.

This novel’s central figure is a woman ostensibly afflicted with hyperthymia — an excess of happiness.

Philippe Petit’s 1974 high-wire walk between the twin towers is pivotal to all the lives in this deeply affecting New York novel.

This haunting novel is like a rough guide to transformation: moving from scenes of erotic decadence to scenes of squalor, the death it describes is that of craving, of intention, even of self.

In Waters’s novel of postwar anxiety, members of a decaying upper-crust English family start to come to sticky ends in their creepy mansion.

This collection, from a career now reaching nearly three decades, reminds us how broad McInerney’s scope has been and how confidently he has ranged across our national experience.

The student-hero of Auster’s masterly novel learns about love from several characters, but an affair with his sister permanently defines his personality.

The eight linked stories here follow the scheming of a rich and powerful Pakistani family and their employees.

The city of Istanbul is on exhibit in Pamuk’s novel of first love painfully sustained over a lifetime.

Nelson is drawn to the damage that results when strong women foolishly trust weak men.

An angry heroine is thrust into the volatile world of her dying husband’s family, which includes his “utterly identical” twin.

Improbably, this spare and wrenching novel lives up to its name, hopscotching through time and alternating among the lives of a British suffragist and her descendants.

It’s hard not to be seduced by D’Erasmo’s selfish hero, an artist whose hunger for expression, for a father and for a home embodies a sense of entrapment that could make anyone behave badly.

British and American spies clash in the buildup to the Beijing Olympics

Tolerant, passionate and humane, Thomas Cromwell is cast as the picaresque hero of this Man Booker Prize-winning novel of Henry VIII’s turbulent court