2007 Notable Books--Outstanding Fiction

The American Library Association's Notable Books Council use the following criteria to select award winners. A book may be selected as notable for at least one, and preferably more than one, of the following reasons:

• it possesses exceptional literary merit;
• it expands the horizons of human knowledge;
• it makes a specialized body of knowledge accessible to the non-specialist;
• it promises to contribute significantly to the solution of a contemporary problem
  

Bigsby, Christopher, Beautiful Dreamer.
from Publishers Weekly "English author Bigsby unflinchingly explores a mushrooming tragedy that begins when a black man walks through the front door of a white-owned store in turn-of-the-century rural Tennessee."

Dean, Debra, Madonnas of Leningrad.
from Booklist "Her granddaughter's wedding should be a time of happiness for Marina Buriakov. But the Russian emigre's descent into Alzheimer's has her and her family experiencing more anxiety than joy."

Desai, Kiran, The Inheritance of Loss.
from Publishers Weekly "This stunning second novel from Desai (Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard) is set in mid-1980s India, on the cusp of the Nepalese movement for an independent state."

Doig, Ivan, The Whistling Season.
from Washington Posts' Book World "Ivan Doig writes about a vanished way of life on the Western plains with the kind of irony-free nostalgia that seems downright courageous in these ironic times. ... In pursuit of greater efficiency and rigor, the state has decided to close all its one-room schoolhouses."

Grenville, Kate, The Secret River.
from Publishers Weekly "Grenville's Australian bestseller, which won the Orange Prize, is an eye-opening tale of the settlement of New South Wales by a population of exiled British criminals."

Khadra, Yasmina, translated from the French by John Cullen, The Attack.
from Publisher's Weekly "Dr. Amin Jaafari is a man caught between two worlds; he's a Bedouin Arab surgeon struggling to integrate himself into Israeli society. The balancing act becomes impossible when the terrorist responsible for a suicide bombing that claims 20 lives, including many children, is identified as Jaafari's wife by the Israeli police."

Lansens, Lori, The Girls.
from Publishers Weekly "Conjoined twins Rose and Ruby Darlen are linked at the side of the head, with separate brains and bodies. Born in a small town outside Toronto in the midst of a tornado and abandoned by their unwed teenage mother two weeks later, the girls are cared for by Aunt Lovey, a nurse who refuses to see them as deformed or even disabled."

McCarthy, Cormac, The Road.
from Publishers Weekly "Violence, in McCarthy's postapocalyptic tour de force, has been visited worldwide in the form of a "long shear of light and then a series of low concussions" that leaves cities and forests burned, birds and fish dead and the earth shrouded in gray clouds of ash. In this landscape, an unnamed man and his young son journey down a road to get to the sea."

Meek, James, The People's Act of Love.
from Publishers Weekly "Set during the waning days of the Russian revolution, Meek's utterly absorbing novel (after The Museum of Doubt) captivates with its depiction of human nature in all its wartime extremes."

Mitchell, David, Black Swan Green.
from School Library Journal "Thirteen chapters provide a monthly snapshot of Jason Taylor's life in small-town England from January 1982 to January 1983. Whether the 13-year-old narrator is battling his stammer or trying to navigate the social hierarchy of his schoolmates or watching the slow disintegration of his parents' marriage, he relates his story in a voice that is achingly true to life."

Murakami, Haruki, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman.
from Publishers Weekly "Murakami's new collection of 25 stories, many of which have appeared in the New Yorker and other publications, also describes these epiphanic instances. ...Murakami's stories are difficult to describe and one should, I think, resist attempts to overanalyze them. Their beauty lies in their ephemeral and incantatory qualities and in his uncanny ability to tap into a sort of collective unconscious. In addition, a part of Murakami's genius is that he uses images as plot points, going from image to image."

Savage, Sam, Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife.
from Booklist "In Savage's darkly comic debut, the titular metropolitan lowlife is a rat, albeit one with lofty literary ambitions. The runt of 13 siblings spawned in the basement of a shambolic Boston bookshop, Firmin survives his lean first weeks by munching on the edges of books. He quickly develops a predilection for actually reading them, too."

Coming soon--Notable Nonfiction