I didn’t read as much as usual in 2019, because I finished the manuscript of The Distant Dead in April. Deadlines — revisions, copy edits, first pass pages — followed in rapid succession, dictated by the summer 2020 publication date, and they didn’t leave much room at the margins. But I did manage to read some memorable books in the midst of this creative frenzy. Here are my favorites (in alphabetical order, because no way could I actually rank them):
Bearskin, James McLaughlin
This is a visceral book that reads like a throwback to an earlier time — the untamed West of the early nineteenth century, maybe, when men battled nature, their fellow man, and their own demons in equal measure. A fugitive from a Mexican drug cartel takes a job as caretaker for a family-owned wilderness preserve in Southwestern Virginia, where he has to deal with bear poachers, suspicious locals, and the ever-present possibility that his former bosses will find him and kill him. It’s well-paced, filled with tension, and the main character is a fascinating stew: a flawed man who finds within himself a sense of honor he never knew he possessed. The writing is potent and lovely, especially in its description of the wild Appalachian hill country and the people who live there.
The Butterfly Girl, Rene Denfield
Denfield has a profound empathy for the stranger, the outcast, and the unloved, paired with an unshakeable belief that hope and survival are always possible. The Butterfly Girl revolves around a series of murders of sex workers in a city that would rather avert its eyes from them and their fate, but it’s really about a group of children who have endured the worst society can inflict — sexual abuse, the foster care system, life on the streets — with their fierce desire to live undiminished. It’s also about how how self-made families can be carved from the rubble, and healing can begin. All of it is told with an authenticity born of personal experience and hauntingly poetic language. I’m still thinking about this book six months after I read it, and I’ll be thinking about it for a while yet.
The Last Equation of Isaac Severy: A Novel in Clues, Nova Jacobs
This Edgar-nominated mystery is a clever page-turner that spins outward from the funeral of a brilliant mathematician, where his granddaughter opens a mysterious, sealed letter, to a wild pursuit that takes her from Seattle to Paris to the La Brea Tar Pits, pursued at every turn by mysterious men who can’t — but should? — be trusted. It all swirls together in a caper in which the stakes are, literally and in more ways than one, life and death. It’s fun and well-crafted, and it’s filled with characters whose damaged psyches drive the plot forward and pose the question: are our lives foreordained by the genetic gifts our ancestors do, or don’t, leave us?
Light from Other Stars, Erika Swyler
I love a good scifi yarn, but this twisty, heartfelt, and richly imagined story is much more than “just” a good scifi yarn. The father-daughter relationship at its core is beautifully explored, especially the grief and fear every parent feels as they watch their child leave the safety of childhood to face the world in all its beauty and danger. There are also themes about the personal cost of pursuing your dreams and the sacrifices brilliant men and women often require of those who choose to love them. Add to this some truly creepy space-time continuum effects, a bookended pair of races against time, and a couple of big explosions, and you’ll understand why I spent 2019 handing this book out like candy.
November Road, Lou Berney
This novel won or was nominated for almost every major mystery and thriller award in 2019, and deservedly so. It starts by telling us who shot JFK, then follows Frank Guidry, a mid-level New Orleans mafioso, as he takes that knowledge on the lam in the days after the assassination. In a cynical attempt at camouflage, he attaches himself to a young mother and her two daughters, themselves on the run from an alcoholic husband and father. But as the makeshift “family” bonds over hundreds of miles of open road, the novel finds a quietly powerful emotional resonance. Watching Guidry, an amoral hustler, slowly confront the monster he’s allowed himself to become and imagine a new life as a better man is compelling and heartbreaking, and the suspense, as Berney periodically shifts his narrative lens to the hit man on Guidry’s trail, is brilliantly crafted.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong
This one makes the list as much for its bravery as for its lush lyricism. Vuong’s story of a Vietnamese boy groping his way toward sexual awareness and identity, shadowed by a complex mother damaged by her experiences during the Vietnam War, is so personal, raw, and honest that it took my breath away.
The Shakespeare Requirement, Julie Schumacher
This is a sequel to one of my favorite reads of the last half decade, Dear Committee Members. I missed the epistolary format that made the first book so magical, but using an omniscient third person narrator lets Schumacher get even deeper into the bitter-yet-idealistic heart of curmudgeonly English professor Jay Fitger as he battles his nemeses in the Economics department and the fog of well-meaning bureaucracy that threatens to strangle his small college. The sympathy with which Schumacher pits the defenders of the art of critical thinking against the forces of a high-tech, fidgety modern world is food for my Luddite heart.
Strangers and Cousins, Leah Hager Cohen
Oh, this book! The last book I read in 2019 was a complete surprise. It seems like a fun, comic story about an oddball family coming together at their crumbling ancestral home for a wedding, and it is that, but it’s also so much more. This proudly liberal family — the marrying couple is a biracial pair of women and the patriarch is a secular Jew — is also facing their own innate prejudices as their small town tries to fend off, or welcome, or flee, an influx of Orthodox Jews who are buying up property to create a Haredi community. There are echoes, too, of a tragedy nearly a century ago that casts a long shadow. Suffice it to say I picked up a domestic romp and put down a thoughtful exploration of what it means to welcome the stranger and the uncomfortable inflection point where America, a society in flux, now finds itself.
The Testaments, Margaret Atwood
I could hardly bring myself to read this after choking on the nihilistic television adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, but this sequel leavens the dystopia with just enough hope to settle my stomach. Atwood is at her very best here, especially as she examines the gritty and sometimes brutally pragmatic choices made by Gilead’s survivors: the ones who escape it, the ones who fight it, and—harrowingly—those who learn to thrive in its misogynistic system. It’s also a page-turning spy novel, a thriller, and a coming-of-age story.
The Wolf Wants In, Laura McHugh
I love exploring violence and betrayal in small towns in my own books, so I have to admire (envy?) anyone who does it as well as Laura McHugh. Her third novel — a mystery, but also a story about broken families and long memories — brings a dead-end, opioid-riddled Kansas town to rich, sympathetic life. Three seemingly unrelated tragedies weave together in a way that’s both surprising and believable; after all, in a town like this, nothing happens in a vacuum. McHugh also creates three sharply-drawn female characters who share a dogged persistence but are otherwise very different, and I rooted for all of them right through to the story’s satisfying end.