Books of the Year
Suggestions for giving and getting
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Fiction
Brick Lane
by Monica Ali
Scribner
Reviewed by Benjamin Schwarz
"Meticulously following the circumscribed life of Nazneen, a sheltered, devoutly Muslim, married Bangladeshi garment worker, the novel depicts her experience through her own constricted and, to the reader, alien point of view.... This is a splendid novel and—despite (or, really, because of) its multicultural setting—an old-fashioned one."
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Any Human Heart by William Boyd
Knopf
Reviewed by Brooke Allen
"Boyd has named his book Any Human Heart, but Mountstuart is not exactly Everyman: he is far more generous, forgiving, and free than most of us. He is also more amusing, and more amused by life; he makes an extremely attractive central character. Boyd is one of the most skillful and appealing writers at work today, endowed with both a great natural vitality and an increasingly sophisticated humanism."
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The Great Fireby Shirley Hazzard
Farrar Straus and Giroux
Reviewed by Thomas Mallon
"Now Hazzard has at last, in the language of birth and publishing, delivered, and if The Great Fire lacks the astonishing densities of The Transit of Venus (a novel that, in its own astronomical terms, was really more like a swirling asteroid belt of connected stories), it still streaks through a reader's ken in the manner of a comet, quickly seizing the attention and emotions before disappearing, trailed by hopes for the characters' happiness—which, like a comet's return, the reader only half believes in."
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Nonfiction
The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage
by Paul Elie
Farrar Straus and Giroux
Reviewed by Benjamin Schwarz
"This is the sort of ambitious marriage of criticism, biography, and history of which Edmund Wilson's Patriotic Gore and To the Finland Station are the superlative examples.... Elie should be applauded for the reach—and grasp—of his literary ambition."
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Marianne in Chains: Daily Life in the Heart of France During the German Occupationby Robert Gildea
Metropolitan Books
Reviewed by Benjamin Schwarz
"In this stunning work Gildea, a professor of modern European history at Oxford, attempts to move "beyond praise and blame" to explore the ever shifting lines between accommodation and defiance, cynicism and loyalty, and prudence and altruism that the French negotiated through their ordeal. He succeeds brilliantly."
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Transformations of Love: The Friendship of John Evelyn and Margaret Godolphinby Francis Harris
Oxford
Reviewed by Benjamin Schwarz
"With a delicate but sure hand Harris has accomplished the highest and most difficult task of the historian: she has allowed us to understand the past on its own terms. Her piercing, quietly stylish work is without question one of the best histories of the year."
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Jonathan Edwards: A Lifeby George M. Marsden
Yale
Reviewed by Benjamin Schwarz
"Jonathan Edwards is America's most penetrating, rigorous, and subtle theologian, as well as its most literarily accomplished and influential. Marsden, the author of Fundamentalism and American Culture, one of the most significant works of cultural history in the past twenty-five years, has now crafted the finest biography of this towering figure."
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America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincolnby Mark A. Noll
Oxford
Reviewed by Benjamin Schwarz
"A comprehensive history of American Christian theology and its social context from the Revolution to the Civil War, this book is exasperating because it is at once important and impenetrable... Almost certainly the most significant work of American historical scholarship this year."
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Nelson: Love & Fameby Edgar Vincent
Yale
Reviewed by Benjamin Schwarz
"Vincent's extraordinary work does justice to this extraordinary man... Vincent writes with fluency and deploys his evidence with keen analytical ability and storytelling skill. He has written a great biography and a poignant love story; his last sentence will break your heart."
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