BEST BOOKS 2018

"The year 1947 marks a turning point in the twentieth century. Peace with Germany becomes a tool to fortify the West against the threats of the Cold War. The CIA is created, Israel is about to be born, Simone de Beauvoir experiences the love of her life, an ill George Orwell is writing his last book, and Christian Dior creates the hyper-feminine New Look as women are forced out of jobs and back into the home."--Provided by publisher.

From one of modern Russia's finest writers, a spellbinding collection of eighteen stories, her first to be translated into English in more than twenty years. Ordinary realities and yearnings to transcend them lead to miraculous other worlds in this dazzling collection of stories. A woman's deceased father appears in her dreams with clues about the afterlife; a Russian professor in a small American town constructs elaborate fantasies during her cigarette...

"Like his mentors, Patricia Smith and Rigoberto Gonzalez, Saeed writes poems that are lyrical, playful, musical, and political. It troubles expectations and asks the reader to challenge their assumptions about Blackness, sexuality, and socioeconomics. Saeed is responding here to white supremacy, heteronormativity, respectability politics, and the murders of Black people. In the service of equity and peace, Saeed elevates the matters that keep him...

What does it mean to lose your roots--within your culture, within your family--and what happens when you find them? Nicole Chung was born severely premature, placed for adoption by her Korean parents, and raised by a white family in a sheltered Oregon town. From childhood, she heard the story of her adoption as a comforting, prepackaged myth. She believed that her biological parents had made the ultimate sacrifice in the hope of giving her a better...

"We think we're all moving together through space and time at the same speed and in the same direction, yet the universe is far stranger than that. In her first North American collection, Vandana Singh's deep humanism interplays with her scientific background in stories that explore and celebrate this world and others and characters who are trying to make sense of the people they meet, what they see, and the challenges they face"--

"A gripping and timely novel that follows Sigrid--the dry-witted detective from Derek B. Miller's best-selling debut Norwegian by Night--from Oslo to the United States on a quest to find her missing brother ... Chief Inspector Sigrid Ødegård could be basking in the success of her recent mission to save an innocent child who'd gone missing in Oslo, but instead she is reeling from the deadly showdown that preceded that success. She has decided to...

"Whether collecting specimens along the banks of the Hudson River, lecturing before a class of rapt medical students, or breaking the fever of a young Philip Hamilton, David Hosack was an American visionary who has been too long forgotten. Alongside other towering figures of the post-Revolutionary generation, he took the reins of a nation. In unearthing the dramatic story of his life, [the author] offers a lush depiction of the man who gave a new...

Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn't commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft...

"Tells the story of the energy boom's impact on a small town at the edge of Appalachia--and one woman's transformation from a struggling single parent to an unlikely activist. Stacey Haney is a local nurse working hard to raise two kids and keep up her small farm when the fracking industry comes to her hometown of Amity, Pennsylvania. Intrigued by reports of lucrative natural gas leases in her neighbors' mailboxes, she strikes a deal with a Texas-based...