The Best Books of 2019: Fiction!

It was always too much to hope that 2019’s crop of the best fiction would be free from all of the genre’s besetting weaknesses, including tendencies to preen and preach, and there are no doubt fiction purists who’d argue that’s a good thing. Thankfully, although quite a few of the year’s novels couldn’t resist the stereotypical holding-a-mirror-to-the-face-of-currrent-society, the best of them steadfastly refused to settle for merely doing that, and the result was a strong year for fiction. These were the best:

10 What Is Missing by Michael Frank (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) - Michael Frank’s story of a father and son who become involved with the same woman while visiting Italy is built on a raft of coincidences, any one of which could have sunk the book. Instead, Frank crafts a formidably smart inquiry into what makes and distorts the very concept of family.

9 Opioid, Indiana by Brian Allen Carr (Soho) - The first of the list’s three books with a comma in the title, this story by Brian Allen Carr looks deceptively pandering on the surface: a hardscrabble 21st-century teenager navigating a near-dystopian world of debt, drugs, and delinquency. But Carr fills his novel with an absolutely winning around of heart and humor.

8 We, the Survivors by Tash Aw (FSG) - This story of a simple Malaysian man’s surprisingly complicated life is so skillfully wrought that it doubles as a deeply moving picture of modernity’s reckless momentum, all of it told with a careful, low-key eloquence. 

7 Red Birds by Mohammed Hanif (Black Cat) - Even back when Mohammed Hanif wrote A Case of Exploding Mangoes ten years ago, critics were making comparisons with Joseph Heller, but as this mordant, hilarious, and increasingly strange new narrative amply demonstrates, Hanif is far more stylistically daring than Heller ever needed to be; Red Birds is Hrabal-level hallucinatory satire about America’s Forever War in the Middle East.

6 Golden State by Ben Winters (Mulholland) - In this latest brilliant novel from Ben Winters, California is the titular independent country, an alarming fantasy-land in which it’s illegal to lie - unless you’re a cop in pursuit of liars. As he did so effectively in Underground Airlines, Winters uses this fanciful premise to dig deep into the warped aspects of our present era.

5 The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday) - Colson Whitehead’s beautiful, brutal novel about two boys sent to a sadistic reform school in 1960s Florida has all the building force of a modern-day morality play - in which not only the past but of course the present stands roundly indicted.

4 This Storm by James Ellroy (Knopf) - James Ellroy has become a literary taste that’s increasingly difficult to acquire, and This Storm, an LA novel set during WWII and the second installment in a projected quartet, is the first of the author’s books that shows tiny signs that ‘difficult to acquire’ may soon curdle into ‘impenetrably self-indulgent’ - but it certainly hasn’t happened yet: instead, there’s all the signature Ellroy genius for speed and character on display.

3 Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson (Grove Atlantic) - Like so many of the books on the list this year, this latest by Jeanette Winterson, although enormously inventive and sprawling over time and space, is first and foremost a work of straight-up contemporary social commentary, with a Brexit-moment scientist named Victor Stein conducting clandestine experiments that push the boundaries of what’s considered life.

2 Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh (FSG) - Amitav Ghosh’s brilliant novel uses a very easy narrative gimmick - highlight the violent complexities of the world by showing them confronting an extremely cloistered protagonist (in this case a fairly tepid rare book dealer) - to produce fiercely multifaceted and stubbornly memorable results.

1 Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann (Biblioasis) - This superbly successful example of complex ‘experimental’ fiction, the obviously-robbed rightful winner of the 2019 Booker Prize and the year’s best novel, famously at first seems to be the story of an ordinary Ohio housewife’s wandering thoughts while baking. The fact that it ends up being about, well, everything and still remains completely convincing is an unbeatable testament to Lucy Ellmann’s talent.