Fiction books of the year – review

Lionel Shriver: ‘exciting, infuriating and very funny’. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

One of the most exciting and infuriating books I have read this year is Big Brother by Lionel Shriver (HarperCollins), a very funny, ultra-original tour de force about a woman's relationship with her obese older brother. Loosely based on Shriver's own "big brother" (he died in his 50s), it plays on the "what if?" themes Shriver covers so perfectly. What if you had a sibling in that condition? Is it wrong to intervene? Or wrong not to? It has an extraordinary narrative twist that had me throwing the book across the room in disbelief and reluctant admiration.

Sisterland by Curtis Sittenfeld (Doubleday), the "novel about psychic twins which is not really about psychic twins", is a must-read: it's the best dissection of a life spent among small children I've ever read. Equally original and daring is Claire Messud's The Woman Upstairs (Virago), an extraordinarily brilliant book, fizzing with anger and wit, which reminded me of the energy of Zoë Heller's Notes on a Scandal (even though the ending made me very cross).

For an elegant meditation on war and its impact on family life, Elizabeth Day's lyrical Home Fires (Bloomsbury) comes highly recommended. Meg Wolitzer's The Interestings (Chatto & Windus) is a complex, cleverly interwoven analysis of the moment when the lives of six friends begin to unravel. Mark Lawson's The Deaths (Picador) is a must for anyone who hates their own obsession with Waitrose, a satire on Middle England where "every home is almost a village of its own".

Unexploded by Alison Macleod (Hamish Hamilton) is a quietly poetic deconstruction of a marriage imploding in Brighton during the second world war. Lion Heart by Justin Cartwright (Bloomsbury) is a madcap revision of Richard Coeur de Lion: think The Da Vinci Code for intellectuals. Blood & Beauty by Sarah Dunant (Virago) is a wonderful reimagining of the lives of the Borgias.

And, if you must have another doorstop in the year of the doorstop (after Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries won the Booker), then go for Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch (Little, Brown): a literary page-turner about love, betrayal and the art world. My own 500-pager of choice? Elizabeth Gilbert's The Signature of All Things (Bloomsbury). Don't read anything about it (spoilers are too easy with this novel), just read it. In some ways 19th-century botanist Alma Whittaker sees all life has to offer. In other ways she gets trapped in a binding closet. Hugely enjoyable.

From the Costa shortlist, Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O'Farrell (Headline) is a reliably great read, like all her books. This is the saga of an Irish family in London set in 1976. O'Farrell has a wonderful ear for dialogue and an eye for the irritating quirks of domestic life. Far less cheering but just as much of a page-turner is All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld (Jonathan Cape), a weird and wonderful novel about isolation, memory and a dog called Dog. It tells the story of a young woman trying to run away from a complicated past. She ends up on an unnamed island off the coast of Britain, tending sheep which keep mysteriously disappearing.

Of all the novels on the prize shortlists, I most loved two books which have been around for a while and are now in paperback. Where'd You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple (Phoenix House, shortlisted: Baileys prize), is a dazzling comic novel about a misunderstood architect. It's an eccentric and brilliantly accomplished story with a real screenplay quality to it. Just as funny (and just as American) is May We Be Forgiven by AM Homes (Granta, winner: Baileys prize), a hilariously clever analysis of two brothers. Of the two, AM Homes has more serious aims and her work just gets better. Great stocking fillers. Or get AM Homes's whole back catalogue for a more substantial gift.

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Fiction roundup: Sophie Kinsella, Jennifer Gilmore

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'Wedding Night' by Sophie Kinsella

Wedding Night by Sophie Kinsella
The Dial Press, 446 pp.
*** out of four

Lottie's first wrong move: buying her boyfriend, Richard, an engagement ring. Her next mistake: thinking he proposed ... when he just meant he was going on an out-of-town business trip. Her next, really big snafu: dumping Richard and hooking up with old flame Ben and marrying him on a whim. Fans of Sophie Kinsella's comic novels know laughs are about to ensue at the expense of our wrong-headed but adorable heroine. We're whisked off to Greece for a night of connubial bliss that will never happen if Lottie's practical sister, Fliss, has her way. It's a terribly silly but fun novel that's as light and bubbly as a glass of wedding champagne. — Jocelyn McClurg

The Mothers by Jennifer Gilmore
Simon and Schuster, 275 pp.
***

'The Mothers' by Jennifer Gilmore

Jennifer Gilmore mines her own experiences with domestic adoption for her third novel, an engrossing story of loss, love and motherhood. After several failed attempts at starting a family, Jesse and Ramon begin the process of open adoption (in which the birth parent or parents are involved), testing both their relationship and their emotional reserves. Gilmore does a wonderful job juxtaposing society's often unrealistic expectations of what a mother should be with characters who represent more realistic portrayals of what motherhood really is. The reader goes on a roller-coaster ride with the prospective parents and is left wondering: Is there only one path to becoming and being a mother?— Mary Cadden

The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner
Scribner, 383 pp.

***

'The Flamethrowers' by Rachel Kushner

The fearless if naïve narrator of Rachel Kushner's sensual, intense and political novel, set in the 1970s, is a young woman known only as Reno, because that's where she is from. She loves fast motorcycles and race cars and wants to create art out of Western landscapes. She notes it's "an irony but a fact that person had to move to New York City first, to become an artist of the West." In New York, she falls for an older and successful Italian artist who persuades her to visit Italy, where Reno is entangled in radical politics and a deadly kidnapping. The Flamethrowers' appeal is its dazzling, fluid prose more than a plot that turns elusive. Its last line is: "Leave, with no answer. Move on to the next question." Kushner is a writer for readers who don't need all the answers but welcome the next question. — Bob Minzesheimer

Woke Up Lonely by Fiona Maazel
Graywolf Press, 325 pp.
** ½

'Woke Up Lonely' by Fiona Maazel

In her ambitious if confusing second novel, Fiona Maazel wrestles with the central irony of modern life: Despite technological hyperconnectedness, people ache with loneliness. And nothing — relationships, family life, casual sex, 24/7 TV — alleviates this pandemic of isolation. The complicated plot involves spies, government agencies, dysfunctional families, hostages, and, yes, North Korea. At the center is a cult leader named Thurlow Dan. Offering to cure loneliness, his organization, Helix, is becoming a threat in the eyes of the government. The talented Maazel has plenty of imagination, but her novel is relentlessly bleak. For serious fans of experimental fiction only. — Deirdre Donahue

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Cassandra Clare has teen fiction down like 'Clockwork'

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There's no "magic formula" for a successful YA book, says Cassandra Clare. Here, Lily Collins and Jamie Campbell Bower star in a scene from the movie adaptation of her book 'The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones.' (Photo: Rafy Screen Gems)

'Clockwork Princess,' the third in Clare's Infernal Devices trilogy, to be released TuesdayHer first movie adaptation, 'City of Bones,' is due in August, with more optioned for big screenClare plans another series for middle school readers, written with 'Spiderwick Chronicles' co-author Holly Black

With more than 22 millioncopies in print worldwide of her two fantasy series, The Mortal Instruments and The Infernal Devices,author Cassandra Clare might be considered an expert on fiction that appeals to teens.

Clare, 39, whose final book in the Devices trilogy, Clockwork Princess, will be released Tuesday, says "there's no magic formula."

But what she's doing — imagining a secret society of young demon hunters, known as Shadowhunters, in a world of vampires, werewolves and warlocks — is working like magic both in bookstores and Hollywood.

The film adaptation of the first book in Clare's first series, The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, starring Lily Collins and Jamie Campbell Bower, will hit theaters Aug. 23.

Cassandra Clare has written multiple series and is working on film projects. (Photo: Theo Black)

Her second series, The Infernal Devices, a prequel to the first, also has been optioned for a possible series of films. (The title refers to an army of automatons out to destroy the Shadowhunters.)

And if that's not enough, Clare and Holly Black (co-author of The Spiderwick Chronicles) are collaborating on another series, Magisterium, aimed at middle schoolers and set in a world of dark magicians where child apprentices train to be warriors. The Iron Trail, the first of five books, is to be released in September 2014. It too has been optioned, and Clare has been signed to write her first screenplay.

Clare, a former writer for The Hollywood Reporter who lives in Amherst, Mass., says there's no simple explanation for her popularity, but she suggests that it has to do with her characters, often strong females, "whom my readers can relate to."

She says that "readers may suspend their disbelief when it comes to the fantasy and the magic, but they need to believe in the characters — teenagers who have some of the same concerns that they do."

Romance is a big part of both series. The first is set in contemporary New York; the second is set mostly in Victorian England.

She likes to mix "the real and the unreal, the famous and the forgotten" in her fiction. For example, in Clockwork Princess, an aesthetic werewolf named WoolseyScott lives in London at No. 16 Cheyne Walk, which, in real life, was once shared by writer Algernon Charles Swinburne and poet/painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Like Scott, she notes, Swinburne and Rossetti were members of "the aesthetic movement," which valued aesthetics in arts over political or social themes, but they were not werewolves — or, as she puts it, "proved not to be werewolves."

'Clockwork Princess' will be released March 19.

Clare cites several factors that explain why fantasy fiction aimed at teens has become so popular on page and screen:

- In a technological age "filled with computers and gadgets, readers yearn for some magic."

- As a genre, young-adult fiction is "genre-busting." Adult fiction, she says, tends to be labeled "either romance or sci-fi or historical fiction or literature. They're in different sections of bookstores. But YA novels, whether it's Twilight or The Hunger Games, combine all or most of those elements." Clare says her own series are a "combination of urban fantasy, adventure and romance."

- The generation of readers who grew up on Harry Potter, "the first big teen sensation, feel connected by what they read. They want to share their experiences, usually online …. I think you find a big overlap between kids who are into fantasy and sci-fi and kids who build their own online communities."

Clare isn't revealing much about Clockwork Princess but promises to resolve the series' love triangle involving heroine Tessa Gray, who's engaged to one boy but drawn to another, in "a way that no one has predicted yet."

As for her Instruments series' sixth and final book, City of Heavenly Fire, to be released a year from now, she says to expect "a hard-fought battle and a lot of epic romance."

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Book Buzz: Black Friday deals, bad sex in fiction

The Elf on the Shelf balloon floats in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York on Nov. 22. (Photo: Charles Sykes, AP)

1:33PM EST November 23. 2012 - Here's a look at what's buzzing in the book world today:

Literary parade: Happy day after Thanksgiving! Check out the bookish balloons that made an appearance at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, and read the story of how the Elf on the Shelf went from a self-published story sold out of the trunk of a car to a character so iconic it got its own float at the parade.

Black Friday: The best present is always a good book. Check out deals from publishers on this Black Friday.

John Quincy Adams: Watch USA TODAY's Bob Minzesheimer discuss John Quincy Adams with biographer Harlow Giles Unger on CSPAN's BookTV Sunday at 10 ET.

Bad sex in fiction: The British magazine Literary Review has announced its 2012 shortlist for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. Fifty Shades of Grey may be absent, but the list includes Tom Wolfe's Back to Blood and seven other contenders.

Tolkien trouble: The J.R.R. Tolkien estate and Tolkien's publisher HarperCollins are suing Warner Bros. for $80 million over digital licensing rights, focused on online slot machines.

Best books of '12 list: The Washington Post has released its year-end best books list, which includes offbeat picks Arcadia by Lauren Groff and Broken Harbor by Tana French.

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Book Buzz: Steinbeck fact or fiction, new book about heaven

John Steinbeck's 'Travels With Charley' was heavily fictionalized, it's been revealed on the books 50th anniversary. (Photo: Associated Press)

12:33PM EST November 26. 2012 - Here's a look at what's buzzing in the book world today:

New and noteworthy: Michael Connelly's new Harry Bosch book, The Black Box, is out today. Check out book editor Jocelyn McClurg's picks for the week. Plus, read USA TODAY's 3-star review of Friendkeeping, about the difficult art of maintaining friendships.

Steinbeck's story: On the 50th birthday of John Steinbeck's Travels With Charley, publisher Penguin admits the author heavily fictionalized the book from his 1960 road trip.

Bryce Cortenay dies: Courtenay, the Australian author of The Power of One, which was adapted into a 1992 film starring Morgan Freeman, has died at 79.

New YA imprint: HarperCollins announced today it's launching a digital imprint called HarperTeen Impulse that will focus on young adult short stories and novellas.

To heaven and back: The New York Times profiles Dr. Eben Alexander III, a neurosurgeon who has written the book Proof of Heaven, about his religious experience while in a meningitis-induced coma. The book is No. 10 on USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list.

Food for thought: Jami Attenberg, author of the food- and weight-focused novel The Middlesteins, writes about the power and meaning behind food in literature for The Wall Street Journal.

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Roundup: Historical fiction

Watergate stretches fiction a bit too far, The Gods of Gotham exudes Manhattan fiction, The House I Loved opens a window on a fascinating era, and The Technologists collects calamities.

Watergate
By Thomas Mallon; Pantheon, 448 pp., $26.95; *** out of four

The women of Watergate — first lady Pat Nixon, loyal secretary Rose Mary Woods and, most of all, Alice Longworth, the viper-tongued 88-year-old daughter of Teddy Roosevelt— steal the show in Thomas Mallon's surprisingly entertaining and warm-hearted Watergate. Mallon presents the story of the bungled burglary and cover-up that destroyed Richard Nixon's presidency through a variety of narrators. In this retelling, Nixon becomes a far more sympathetic, complex, far-sighted character than the moniker "Tricky Dick" would suggest. And wife Pat — who is patient, perceptive, exhausted — is the opposite of plastic. (Mallon gives her a secret lover, stretching fiction too far.) — Deirdre Donahue

The Gods ofGotham
By Lyndsay Faye; Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam, 414 pp., $25.95; *** out of four

If your concept of paradise is popping in a DVD of Gangs of New York while rereading Caleb Carr's The Alienist, then put Lyndsay Faye's The Gods of Gotham on your to-buy list. Set in 1845, it depicts the cultural cataclysm created in Manhattan by the Irish potato famine. At the center of the story stands Timothy Wilde, an American bartender who loses his life savings to fire. Forced by his politically savvy older brother to join the new police force, the just-minted copper ends up investigating why Irish immigrant children are being savagely murdered. Faye's language is appropriately florid, even flowery, dotted with slang and research. A treat for readers obsessed with Manhattan history. — Deirdre Donahue

The House I Loved
By Tatiana de Rosnay; St. Martin's Press, 222 pp., $25.99; ** out of four

The House I Loved sounds like it could slide right in to a 9 p.m. time slot on HGTV. But despite its homey title, the latest from Tatiana de Rosnay (the wonderful Sarah's Key) is anything but cozy. It's the rather dreary story of Rose Bazelet, determined to cling to the last brick when her house is set for demolition in Paris in the 1860s. The format — letters to her beloved, dead husband interspersed with first-person narrative — grates, as does a rather contrived "secret" that taunts the reader. As historical fiction, though, this old House does open a window onto a fascinating era: the tumultuous period when Emperor Napoleon III ordered up a new "modern" city, longtime residents be damned. — Jocelyn McClurg

The Technologists
By Matthew Pearl; Random House, 480 pp., $26; ** out of four

Readers will learn some interesting factoids about post-Civil War Boston, the founding of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and tensions between science and religion while reading The Technologists. Author Matthew Pearl also includes real-life figures such as Ellen Swallow, the first woman admitted to MIT. As a work of historical fiction, however, it's a long, hard slog dragged down by a cast of predictable characters and overwrought prose. The story opens in 1868 when a series of freak accidents imperils Boston: glass suddenly melts, burning eyeballs; compasses go wacky, causing ships to crash. Meanwhile, students at the fledging MIT battle contemptuous Harvard snobs. A group of plucky young engineers secretly investigates what is causing the calamities. — Deirdre Donahue

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Kristin Hannah knows what women want in fiction

BETHESDA, Md. – With her best-selling novels about strong women facing down whatever life throws at them, Kristin Hannah makes her fans cry. And they love her for it.

Toby Jorrin, for USA TODAY

Kristin Hannah's new novel, 'Home Front,' follows an Army helicopter pilot who must consider her duties to her family when she is deployed to Iraq.

Toby Jorrin, for USA TODAY

Kristin Hannah's new novel, 'Home Front,' follows an Army helicopter pilot who must consider her duties to her family when she is deployed to Iraq.

"Her writing literally makes me bawl," says Christy Enchelmaier, 29, a first-grade teacher in suburban Maryland. Hannah is one of Enchelmaier's favorite authors because "she doesn't sugarcoat things; she's very realistic."

On a recent frosty night in this Washington suburb, Hannah, 51, draws a crowd of nearly 100 like-minded women, hungry for the novelist's dramatic, issue-driven fiction, to a Barnes & Noble. It's the same female readership that has made Jodi Picoult a publishing superstar. Though there was the occasional husband in the audience, the crowd was overwhelmingly female and fanatic about Hannah, the author of 19 novels.

In her latest, Home Front (St. Martin's Press, $27.99), Hannah offers a heart-wrenching tale about a female Army helicopter pilot deployed to Iraq. The heroine, Jolene, is torn between her duty as a soldier and her obligations to her husband and their two young daughters.

Home Front made its debut last week at No. 7 on USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list, the first time Hannah has cracked the top 10. (This week, the novel drops to No. 25. Hannah's last novel, Night Road, about teen drinking and a tragic car accident, reached No. 13 on USA TODAY's list.)

Mother is always right

During her 2½-hour presentation and book signing, Hannah alternately charmed, amused and moved her audience. She made them laugh when she described how she didn't change a word in the first draft of the first novel she attempted. In one of the many rejection letters she received, one editor wrote Hannah, "You may have talent, but frankly, I can't tell."

She answered questions about how she writes: longhand on a yellow legal pad, often sitting in a lawn chair near the water. (She and her husband split their time between an island near Seattle and Hawaii.)

She also described how her decision to write fiction emerged from tragedy.

When she was 25, she was spending her days in law school and her nights in a Seattle hospital where her mother, then 46, was dying of breast cancer. To pass the hours, they decided to collaborate on a romance novel — a genre her mother adored.

The story, set in 18th-century Scotland, was just awful, Hannah says. But what she saw as a distraction for a dying woman, her mother saw as a vocation for her daughter. "She said I would become a writer."

After her mother's death, Hannah put the unfinished novel away. Two years later, it was Hannah's husband who suggested she make another attempt at writing fiction.

By then an attorney in Seattle, Hannah was put on bed rest for five months while she was pregnant.

Her growing fixation on daytime TV shows such as The Price Is Right made her husband desperate, Hannah says. After her son was born, Hannah knew two things: "I wanted to be a stay-at-home mother, and I needed to write." (Today, their grown son works in Hollywood.)

Hannah eventually did publish a historical romance novel in 1991, A Handful of Heaven, set in the Yukon Territory in the 19th century.

But she says she truly found her creative footing once she moved into contemporary women's fiction with 1999's On Mystic Lake. Her best-selling novels include Firefly Lane, which revolves around two best friends, and Winter Garden, about a Russian woman who hides her painful past from her daughters.

'Much more patriotic' now

Later, over dinner, Hannah expands on why she told the audience earlier that Home Front changed her more than any other book. "I was woefully uninformed about the daily sacrifices people in the military make," she says. Spending time with a female Army helicopter pilot in Washington state left her "much more patriotic."

But while it explores hot-button topics such as mothers in combat and post-traumatic stress disorder, the novel puts its real focus on the heroine and the emotional bonds she makes and breaks — as a daughter, a wife, a mother, a friend and a soldier.

Says Hannah, "I'm endlessly fascinated by the relationships that define us."

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Review-a-Day for Mon, Aug 29: Universe of Things: Short Fiction

by Gwyneth Jones A review by Matthew Cheney

The Universe of Things collects fifteen short stories published between 1985 and 2009, and one of the most remarkable qualities of the collection is the consistency of Gwyneth Jones's style over that time. With only a few exceptions, the stories, regardless of their point of view, are narrated in an objective, almost affectless tone, the sort of tone that attracts such adjectives as cold, hard, clear, emotionless.

The stories are not emotionless, though; readers' connections to them will depend very much on how well they respond to Jones's style, but the characters often face emotionally wrought situations. In "Grandmother's Footsteps", a woman perceives the house she is renovating to be haunted and a threat to herself and her family. It is a tale of ghosts and madness and maybe something in between, a cousin to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" and James Tiptree, Jr.'s "Your Faces O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light" -- but different from those masterpieces because the narrator's perception of the madness-haunting is restrained, almost reasonable, more like a scientist weighing observations than a person in the midst of deeply disturbing phenomena.

Which may, of course, be part of the point: Life is shell shocking. One of the stories that is most stylistically different from the others in the book, "The Thief, the Princess, and the Cartesian Circle," presents a woman who is a bit more thoroughly mad than the narrator of "Grandmother's Footsteps," and who escapes (or does she?) the realities of her life by imagining herself to be a princess. Jones deftly shifts between the diction of a fairy tale and a tale of contemporary realism, and when the tones shadow each other, what had previously been amusing in the story becomes unsettling:

Jennifer would walk away from this meeting alone and Ralph suspected what his life would be like, after today. He couldn't think of it. He wasn't brave enough. He wanted to stay forever in this steamy café, with this crazy woman; neither of them anywhere else to go.

The magician's staff described a circle in the air. Where it had passed, a white line stayed. The circle enclosed nothing.

Many of the tales in The Universe of Things depict family relationships, the sometimes-fraught power negotiations of husbands and wives, or the complexities of parenthood. "La Cenerentola" explores the landscape of motherhood and desire, hopes and dreams, in a near-future world of cloning and gene therapy where two women and their daughter encounter a widow with perfect twins and one other, less perfect, daughter (La Cenerentola is an opera by Rossini; the title translates as Cinderella). The story is nearly ruined by an over-explicit final paragraph, but until that point it is a model of how evocative Jones's restrained style can be.

"Blue Clay Blues" is among the most vivid and complete stories in the collection, and it, too, fuses the commonalities of parenthood to more extraordinary experiences. The setting is a future world ravaged by plague, where rich elites have holed up in self-contained environments and left the less fortunate masses to suffer. A reporter has gone out to investigate a source of almost magic energy known as "blue clay," and he's had to bring his young daughter with him, because it's his day to look after her. "Blue Clay Blues" is admirable for the fullness of its vision; Jones is aware of the ways technological change overlaps with social change, and even in a story under thirty pages long, she is able to suggest particularities of place and trends of race, class, and gender, giving the tale a stronger sense of verisimilitude than is available in many much longer works.

Quite a few of the stories in The Universe of Things are set in the worlds of some of Jones's novels, and readers' pleasure with most of these tales will likely be determined by their knowledge of the novels, mainly the Aleutian Trilogy (White Queen, North Wind, Phoenix Cafe), as some of the stories' depths are inaccessible without knowing how they fit into the larger context. The title story, though an Aleutian story, is one that stands well on its own, because at heart it is about a simple encounter between a mechanic and an alien's automobile. The implications are anything but simple, though, for Jones offers readers much to think about craft and value and self-respect, about alienness and empathy.

The narrator of The Universe of Things tells us that the mechanic "had been touched by the world of the other, and he simply had to bring away something: some kind of proof." Jones's best stories are that kind of proof for readers -- we glimpse a world of otherness, and when our eyes turn back to look at the ordinary, the invisibly everyday, it no longer looks the same.

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