FICTION

The Sea

John Banville

Alfred A. Knopf

Max, an almost completely unlovable art critic, returns to the landscape of his childhood as a way of dealing with adult grief. Banville reveals the cold, dispassionate reliability of the storyteller; behind him the great, fallible beauty of language; behind language, the wind, the weather, time and the sea.

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A Long Long Way

Sebastian Barry

Viking

This World War I story is told by young Catholic volunteer Willie Dunne, barely 18 when he leaves his father, his sisters and Greta, the girl he plans to marry, for the trenches. The glory of war loses its luster all too quickly: Willie’s innocence, goodness and gentleness are tested but do not fail.

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The Testing of

Luther Albright

MacKenzie Bezos

Fourth Estate/HarperCollins

How many chances do you get? Luther Albright, a decent man, gets nine. Nine chances to break through his paralyzing fear of intimacy and have real relationships with his patient wife and frustrated son. Bezos is a smooth and terrifying writer; she notices the tiniest moods and gestures in relationships, while keeping one eye on the world, the culture, the quality of light on the windowsill.

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Ice Haven

A Comic-Strip Novel

Daniel Clowes

Pantheon

The cheerless, flatly colored Ice Haven is a place where a greeting can merit an expletive in response and friends long for each other in quiet desperation. When a boy goes missing, another pretends to be his murderer to impress a friend. Clowes tells his tale with interwoven vignettes, each painting a society where feelings are best left unspoken, for if they’re blurted out, dreams will be shattered.

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The March

E.L. Doctorow

Random House

Doctorow has long relied on history to fuel his fiction; his best-known book, “Ragtime,” is a pastiche of the U.S. at the start of the 1900s, and in “Welcome to Hard Times,” “The Waterworks” and stories like 2001’s “A House on the Plains,” he re-creates the 19th century in astonishingly vivid terms. With “The March,” however, he ups the ante, using Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s slash-and-burn odyssey across Georgia and the Carolinas as an epic metaphor of American life.

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Johnny Mad Dog

Emmanuel Dongala

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Two teenagers are tested by a civil war in central Africa, a war not unlike the one the author and his family fled in 1997. Dongala’s Johnny is a teenage militiaman who had aspired to be an intellectual and now tries to find a moniker that best captures his killing life. Dongala has written a stark, at times curiously humorous exploration of the line between darkness and light.

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The Painted Drum

Louise Erdrich

HarperCollins

Erdrich returns to the mythic landscape of the Ojibwe with this multigenerational tale of betrayal, guilt and a sacred drum. Made from the bones of a dead girl and infused with the spirit of the wolf that killed her, the lavishly decorated drum is unearthed by an estate appraiser who hears it call to her. The drum’s history is unfurled in a tragic tapestry of violence, hopelessness and a lost way of life that still communicates the healing power of love.

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Our Ecstatic Days

Steve Erickson

Simon & Schuster

The year is 2004. A lake is rising and flooding Los Angeles from a hole at the intersection of Hollywood and Laurel Canyon boulevards. Kristin Blumenthal rows her 3-year-old son, Kirk, out to the middle of the lake and dives in. When she comes up, the boy is gone. In her pain, Kristin reinvents herself as Lulu Blue, dominatrix. Over the ensuing decades, the water rises and history is buried beneath an Age of Chaos. Erickson plays with text and time, running a silver thread of narrative across his novel’s pages.

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Extremely Loud &

Incredibly Close

Jonathan Safran Foer

Houghton Mifflin

How hard is it to write fiction about Sept. 11? Don’t ask Foer, whose novel is narrated by Oskar Schell, a 9-year-old whose father died when the World Trade Center fell. That’s a risky proposition, but Foer makes it work by immersing us in Oskar’s loss. This is what we often forget when it comes to the twin towers, that beneath all the rhetoric, the attack was a human tragedy, a notion the author invokes with the force of literature, allowing us to claim it as our own.

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Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro

Alfred A. Knopf

This is a chilling novel of biotechnology run amok: The story of three children raised in an idyllic British boarding school, Hailsham, as part of a harrowing effort to create clones as organ donors. At 31, Kathy looks back on her “happy” childhood at the school and tries, with her old friends Ruth and Tommy, to reconstruct the truth behind all the lies they were told.

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The History of Love

Nicole Krauss

W.W. Norton

First comes the story of cantankerous Leo Gursky, World War II refugee, retired locksmith and stalled novelist, obsessed with the thought that he might die any day, unnoticed. Teenager Alma Singer, meanwhile, spends her time trying to ease her widowed mother’s grief and understand her little brother’s messiah complex. Alma and Leo find themselves connected by a long-lost novel, also called “The History of Love,” and so do we, drawn into Krauss’ lyrical, bittersweet web.

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No Country

for Old Men

Cormac McCarthy

Alfred A. Knopf

If you thought “Blood Meridian” was a bleak, apocalyptic book, “No Country for Old Men” will have you convinced that McCarthy sees human civilization headed off a cliff. The protagonist’s discovery of drug money in the desert and his pursuit by trackers whose cold view of the universe might give “Meridian’s” Preacher a shiver makes this novel an exciting thriller, punctuated by the brooding monologues of a sheriff convinced that the human race is lawless and unredeemed.

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The Road to Esmeralda

Joy Nicholson

St. Martin’s

Failed writer Nick and his model girlfriend Sarah are Angelenos seeking an escape -- from private traumas and post-Sept. 11 paranoia. They plunge deep into the Yucatan and arrive at an eco-resort whose caretaker, Karl, works his diabolical charms on Sarah to Nick’s humiliation. Nicholson’s novel is darkly comic, creepy and always gripping.

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The People of Paper

Salvador Plascencia

McSweeney’s

Plascencia’s first novel takes us to an unreal El Monte, a place where carnation pickers wage war against Saturn, people made of paper are tended by an origami surgeon and other characters rebel against the tyranny of their author. Such strategies recall Borges and Garcia Marquez, while the book’s design and typography would make Laurence Sterne proud.

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Shalimar the Clown

Salman Rushdie

Random House

Rushdie comes close to the excellence of “The Satanic Verses” in this novel about murder, jealousy and star-crossed lovers in a Kashmiri village -- and the aging former U.S. diplomat who comes between them. The lovers, part of an acting troupe, are advised by their leader: “Do the impossible right at the beginning of the show. That’s what people pay to see. After that you’ll have them eating out of your hand.” Rushdie clearly follows that advice.

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On Beauty

Zadie Smith

Penguin

Using E.M. Forster’s “Howards End” as a template, Smith’s third novel is set principally in a New England college town and centers on the rivalry between two Rembrandt scholars -- one a hapless British liberal married to an unbuttoned African American, the other a right-wing Trinidadian. Smith manages to gore a great many sacred cows in this transatlantic comedy of manners.

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Trance

Christopher Sorrentino

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

“Trance” is a tour de force, a novel that reframes the saga of Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army as a quintessentially American passion play. Sorrentino collapses the boundaries between what we know and what we imagine until his story bleeds into legend, the first act of revolutionary insurrection to become a live television event. “Maybe they say they want to overthrow the government,” he writes of the SLA. “Maybe they even believe it. But if anything, these guys’ relationship to power is parasitic.... What they really excel at is preempting the regularly scheduled programming.”

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The Hummingbird’s Daughter

Luis Alberto Urrea

Little, Brown

Urrea tells the story of his Great Aunt Teresita, who, it was said, could raise the dead with her healing powers and was acclaimed as a saint in 19th century Mexico. Although the power of curanderas has been evoked in Rudolfo Anaya’s classic novel “Bless Me, Ultima,” Urrea makes the magical quest to understand his wonder-working ancestor uniquely his own.

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Europe Central

William T. Vollmann

Viking

Vollmann departs from the American milieu of his most recent works of fiction to take on Operation Barbarossa, the German army’s 1941 surge into Russia that culminated in its defeat there. His novel radiates with portraits of real-life figures, suggesting that in the hands of an author like Vollmann, history can become an enduring source of art.

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The Time

of the Uprooted

Elie Wiesel

Alfred A. Knopf

Gamaliel Friedman is a ghostwriter in more ways than one. An orphan of the Holocaust, he is forced to flee his native Czechoslovakia when the Nazis arrive and spends years in hiding. Arriving in America, he becomes a writer-for-hire while secretly working on a book about the meaning of exile in a world where he no longer feels alive. Wiesel’s stirring portrait suggests what it is like to live in a state bordering on the uncomfortably numb.