Best Books of the Decade

Ali Smith's Booker-nominated novel, The Accidental, is about a girl. The seemingly harmless stranger named Amber turns up at the door of an English country house and turns out, to crib a line from a Hollywood film, to be the rock that they broke themselves against. The book, about how people break down and the terrifying possibilities of who they might become, is inevitably fractured by the astonishing, dizzying talent of its writing.

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Following his spectacular debut novel, The Death of Vishnu, Manil Suri returns with a mesmerizing story of modern India, richly layered with themes from Hindu mythology. The Age of Shiva is at once a powerful story of a country in turmoil and an extraordinary portrait of maternal love. It is among the most compelling novels to emerge from contemporary India.

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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, was nominated for numerous other literary awards, and is widely considered to be Michael Chabon's best work to date. It is the story of two young Jewish cousins whose meeting in 1939 ignites a luminous career in comic books at a time in history when the art form exploded in American popular culture.

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Set during World War II in Germany, Markus Zusak's new novel is the story of Liesel Meminger, a foster girl living outside of Munich. Liesel scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can't resist-books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement before he is marched to Dachau.

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From the Chatham Isles in 1850 to 1931 Belgium, from the West Coast in the 1970s to present-day England, and from a Korean superstate of the near future to a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas ricochets it's way through time, space, and literary genres and characters in an extremely compelling "puzzle book" novel.

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Winner of 2001's National Book Award, Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections is a modern portrait of the family in decline. Gary is trying to convince his wife and himself, despite clear signs to the contrary, that he is not clinically depressed; Chip has lost his seemingly secure academic job and is failing spectacularly at his new line of work; Denise has escaped a disastrous marriage to fall into licentiousness; and Enid is burdened with her husband's downward spiral into Parkinson's disease.

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Narrated by a fifteen-year-old autistic savant obsessed with Sherlock Holmes, Mark Haddon's dazzling novel weaves together an old-fashioned mystery, a contemporary coming-of-age story, and a fascinating excursion into a mind incapable of processing emotions.

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The Enchantress of Florence is a sweeping and masterfully-written historical novel, set in sixteenth century Florence and Sikri, the seat of the Mughal Empire of the East. The plot orbits the fortunes of a young adventurer with many names, the Mughal emperor Akbar, and the enchantress Qara Koz; however, subplots abound, and even the most clever, insightful reader will not manage to guess the tale in its entirety.

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With only a yellowing photograph in hand, a young man - also named Jonathan Safran Foer - sets out to find the woman who might or might not have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Accompanied by an old man haunted by memories of the war, an amorous dog named Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior, and the unforgettable Alex, a young Ukrainian translator who speaks in a sublimely butchered English, Jonathan is led on a quixotic journey over a devastated landscape and into an unexpected past.

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In his outstanding debut story collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, Wells Tower captures a variety of experience that is as far-ranging as it is close to home. These stories of Viking marauders, teenage girls, and fractured families are violent and tender. They're stories told with the kind of honesty that makes us see our worst selves in the best possible light.

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