New York Times Notable Fiction of 2012

eBooks Includes:

ALIF THE UNSEEN - G. Willow Wilson
A young hacker on the run in the Mideast is the protagonist of this imaginative first novel.
AN AMERICAN SPY - Olen Steinhauer
In a novel vividly evoking the multilayered world of espionage, Steinhauer’s hero fights back when his C.I.A. unit is nearly destroyed.
ARCADIA - Lauren Groff
Groff’s lush and visual second novel begins at a rural commune, and links that utopian past to a dystopian, post-global-warming future.
BEAUTIFUL RUINS - Jess Walter
Walter’s witty sixth novel, set largely in Hollywood, reveals an American landscape of vice, addiction, loss and disappointed hopes.
BILLY LYNN’S LONG HALFTIME WALK - Ben Fountain
The survivors of a fierce firefight in Iraq are whisked stateside for a brief victory tour in this satirical novel.
BRING UP THE BODIES - Hilary Mantel
Mantel’s sequel to “Wolf Hall” traces the fall of Anne Boleyn, and makes the familiar story fascinating and suspenseful again.
BY BLOOD - Ellen Ullman
This smart, slippery novel is a narrative striptease, as a professor listens in on the sessions between the therapist next door and her patients.
CANADA - Richard Ford
A boy whose parents rob a bank in North Dakota in 1960 takes refuge across the border in this mesmerizing novel, driven by fully realized characters and an accomplished prose style.
CARRY THE ONE - Carol Anshaw
Anshaw pays close attention to the lives of a group of friends bound together by a fatal accident in this wry, humane novel, her fourth.
DEAR LIFE: Stories - Alice Munro
This volume offers further proof of Munro’s mastery, and shows her striking out in the direction of a new, late style that sums up her whole career.
THE DEVIL IN SILVER - Victor LaValle
LaValle’s culturally observant third novel is set in a shabby urban mental hospital.
ENCHANTMENTS - Kathryn Harrison
Harrison’s splendid and surprising novel of late imperial Russia centers on Rasputin’s daughter Masha and the hemophiliac czarevitch Alyosha.
FLIGHT BEHAVIOR - Barbara Kingsolver
An Appalachian woman becomes involved in an effort to save monarch butterflies in this brave and majestic novel.
FOBBIT - David Abrams
Clerks, cooks and lawyers at a forward operating base in Iraq populate this first novel.
GATHERING OF WATERS - Bernice L. McFadden
Three generations of black women confront floods and murder in Mississippi.
GODS WITHOUT MEN - Hari Kunzru
Related stories, spanning centuries and continents, and all tethered to a desert rock formation, emphasize interconnectivity across time and space in Kunzru’s relentlessly modern fourth novel.
HHhH - Laurent Binet (Translated by Sam)
This gripping novel examines both the killing of an SS general in Prague in 1942 and Binet’s experience in writing about it.
HOME - Toni Morrison
A black Korean War veteran, discharged from an integrated Army into a segregated homeland, makes a reluctant journey back to Georgia.
HOPE: A TRAGEDY - Shalom Auslander
A satire that imagines an elderly Anne Frank, alive and well and living in the attic of an American Jewish family, stays hilariously on the right side of bad taste
HOW SHOULD A PERSON BE? - Sheila Heti
The narrator (also named Sheila) and her friends try to answer the question in this novel’s title.
IN ONE PERSON - John Irving
Irving’s funny, risky new novel about an aspiring writer struggling with his sexuality examines what happens when we face our desires honestly.
A LAND MORE KIND THAN HOME - Wiley Cash
An evil pastor dominates Cash’s mesmerizing first novel.
MARRIED LOVE: And Other Stories- Tessa Hadley
Hadley’s understatedly beautiful collection is filled with exquisitely calibrated gradations and expressions of class.
NW - Zadie Smith
The lives of two friends who grew up in a northwest London housing project diverge, illuminating questions of race, class, sexual identity and personal choice, in Smith’s energetic modernist novel.
PURE - Julianna Baggott
Children battle for the planet’s redemption in this precisely written postapocalyptic adventure story.
THE ROUND HOUSE - Louise Erdrich
In this novel, an American Indian family faces the ramifications of a vicious crime.
SALVAGE THE BONES - Jesmyn Ward
A pregnant 15-year-old and her family await Hurricane Katrina in this lushly written novel.
SHINE SHINE SHINE - Lydia Netzer
This thought-provoking debut novel presents a geeky astronaut and his pregnant wife.
SILENT HOUSE - Orhan Pamuk (Translated by Robert Finn)
A family is a microcosm of a country on the verge of a coup in this intense, foreboding novel, first published in Turkey in 1983.
THE STARBOARD SEA - Amber Dermont
Dermont’s captivating debut novel, whose narrator is a boarding school student and a sailor, takes pleasure in the sea and in the exhilarating freedom of being young.
SWEET TOOTH - Ian McEwan
The true subject of this smart and tricky novel, set inside a cold war espionage operation, is the border between make-believe and reality.
SWIMMING HOME - Deborah Levy
In this spare, disturbing and frequently funny novel, a troubled young woman tests the marriages of two couples.
TELEGRAPH AVENUE - Michael Chabon
Chabon’s rich comic novel about fathers and sons in Berkeley and Oakland, Calif., juggles multiple plots and mounds of pop culture references in astonishing prose.
THE TESTAMENT OF MARY - Colm Toibin
This beautiful work takes power from the surprises of its language and its almost shocking characterization of Mary, mother of Jesus.
THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE HER - Junot Díaz
The stories in this collection are about love, but they’re also about the undertow of family history and cultural mores, presented in Díaz’s exciting, irresistible and entertaining prose.
TOBY’S ROOM - Pat Barker
This novel, a sequel to “Life Class,” delves further into the lives of an English family torn apart by World War I.
WATERGATE - Thomas Mallon
This novelistic re-imagining of the “third-rate burglary” proposes surprising motives for the break-in and the 18-minute gap, and has a sympathetic Nixon.
WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT ANNE FRANK: Stories - Nathan Englander
Englander tackles large questions of morality and history in a masterly collection that manages to be both insightful and uproarious.
THE YELLOW BIRDS - Kevin Powers
A young private and his platoon struggle through the war in Iraq but find no peace at home in this powerful and moving first novel about the frailty of man and the brutality of war.