72. The Gathering by Anne Enright

Winner of the 2007 Man Booker Prize, this is Enright’s fourth book. Covering three generations of a large Irish Catholic family, the novel mostly explores what happens to Veronica Hegarty when her brother, Liam, commits suicide. Liam had escaped Dublin and his large, dominating family (his mother gave birth to twelve children and had seven miscarriages), but had become addicted to alcohol later in life. Found with stones in his pocket in the sea at Brighton, Veronica must travel to England to bring his body back to Ireland. During the trip and subsequent funeral, Veronica wrestles with the memory of a childhood secret Liam shared with her over thirty years ago.

Extremely dream like, this is a difficult novel to read, but worth the struggle. Enright’s writing is very poetic, original, and raw. Veronica struggles to understand her family, including her grandmother’s possible inappropriate relationship with a family friend, and why she is growing distant to her own husband and two daughters. For readers who enjoy Charles Baxter and Ali Smith.

71. Death from the Woods by Brigitte Aubert

While on vacation in Ireland with her boyfriend, Elise Andrioli is severely injured when a car bomb goes off, killing her partner and five others. When Elise wakes up, she is blind, mute, and is confined to life in a wheelchair due to becoming a quadriplegic. Back home in the Paris suburbs, she is cared for by a family friend and is leading a quiet life until one day outside a supermarket, a young girl, Virginie, whispers in Elise’s ear that she has witnessed a murder. The region has had young boys go missing into local woods, and later be found dead and mutilated. Virginie calls the killer, whom she apparently knows but is afraid to expose, “Death from the Woods”, and enlists Elise to help find the killer.

A taut cat and mouse type thriller, this suspenseful story has one of the most unique main characters I have ever read about. Even though she has extreme limitations due to her physical impairments, Elise uses her intelligence, memory, hearing, and wry sense of humor to piece this mystery together. The translation from French is handled fairly well, and although the end gets a little complex and far fetched, this overall is a unique foreign mystery that builds tension and atmospheric suspense well. The author, Aubert, won the 1997 Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere for this title.

70. Run by Ann Patchett

Bernard Doyle has always loved politics. A lawyer, he was also Boston’s mayor and has raised his three sons to become involved in politics. One wintry evening, he encourages his two adopted African-American sons, Tip and Teddy, to join him to hear a speech by Reverend Jesse Jackson. After the speech, Tip is almost hit by an oncoming SUV, until a mystery woman throws herself in front of the car and is hit instead. Who is this woman? Why does her eleven-year old daughter, Kenya, seem to know so much about the Doyle family?

Taking place over a day when Boston is brought to a standstill because of a snow storm, this is a beautifully written and engrossing story about what makes a family. Bernard has struggled to keep his family together after the death of his wife, Bernadette, when his boys were young. His son Sullivan is lost, and after a devastating accident, has taken to wandering around Africa, until he comes to Boston on the fateful night of the accident. Although raised to be politically active, son Tip wants to study fish, and Teddy is pondering life as a priest. Kenya has grown up always watching Tip and Teddy and yet is fiercely loyal to her mother, Tennessee, who is fighting for her life in the hospital. This novel also deals with issues such as race, identity, religion (especially Catholicism) and how parents love their children, whether biological or adopted.

69. The Memoirs of a Survivor by Doris Lessing

Lessing has referred to this fictional book as “an attempt at autobiography.” Set after an apocalypse of some sort, society in Lessing’s novel is moving out of the unnamed city. Most services have stopped, and electricity, food, and water are scarce. People stay in their homes, as large gangs of kids run through the city, stealing useless electrical gadgets from homeowners. An unnamed elderly woman lives in a small apartment, content to live her lonely life, when a young girl, Emily, comes to stay with her. Emily, at age twelve, soon joins up with the pack of roaming children and falls in love with the gang’s leader, Gerald. All the while, the elderly woman sits in her apartment and views endless “rooms” in her and Emily’s past beyond her apartment’s walls.

I chose to read this book after Lessing was honored with the Nobel Prize for Literature. I have read her before, with my favorite book being The Fifth Child. This was a difficult read, yet an ultimately rewarding read if you can stick with it. Topics such as a society falling apart, the role of women, loyalty, and fear are present and while I am not sure if it is truly autobiographical, it is a memorable contribution to apocalyptic fiction.

68. Uncertain Endings: the World’s Greatest Unsolved Mystery Stories by Otto Penzler

If you like mysteries, short stories, and especially stories in which readers determine how it will end, this is the perfect collection for you. Edited by Otto Penzler, the owner of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City, this book features nineteen short stories that tease, tantalize, and frustrate readers. Authors such as Ray Bradbury, O. Henry, Mark Twain, and Roald Dahl are included, as well as sequels produced for some of the most famous stories included in the anthology.

Penzler sums up the collection perfectly when he writes: “Here you will not find unsatisfying endings. You will find no endings.” Whether it be determining which brother killed Hosea Snow in Stanley Ellin’s “Unreasonable Doubt”, to finding out who is killing young women in Ray Bradbury’s chilling “The Whole Town’s Sleeping”, this is a work that will keep readers guessing. One of the most famous short stories ever written, Frank Stockton’s “The Lady, or the Tiger” is included, and the excellent rendition, “The Lady and the Tiger” by Jack Moffitt is considered better by some readers.

67. The Big Girls by Susanna Moore

Sloatsburg Correctional Institute is a women’s prison in upstate New York that houses the infamous Helen Nash, who killed her two children because God told her to protect them. Helen, a victim of severe childhood abuse and who hears voices she calls The Messengers, is new to the prison system and is struggling to fit into her new world of “families” and bribes. Dr. Louise Forrest, Sloatsburg’s psychiatrist, could have chosen a job anywhere, but instead chose the prison and becomes attached to Helen. Ike Bradshaw, a corrections officer in the prison, falls in love with Louise, but also is involved with many of the women in the prison. The famous movie actress, Angie Mills, becomes involved in the story line when Helen starts to write to her and later becomes convinced Angie could be her long lost sister.

At first, readers will have a hard time understanding why and how all the characters are connected. Over time, it becomes very apparent and the story starts to jell better. All four points of view alternate frequently and the character of Helen is especially drawn well. Readers become sympathetic with her horrible life and what she ultimately does to her family. I listened to the audio book version of this new novel and the narrators did an effective job in this alternating story. The character of Angie, and her shallow Hollywood views is especially funny and disturbing.

66. Without a Map by Meredith Hall

In 1965, Meredith found herself pregnant at the age of sixteen. During gym class, she refused to do a somersault and her pregnancy was exposed to the school. She soon found herself expelled from school, rejected by her friends, and forced to leave her mother’s home. The remainder of her pregnancy took place in her father’s home, where she was hidden upstairs and told not to go outside in case people saw a young pregnant girl walking around the neighborhood. Forced to give up her son for adoption, Meredith finished high school at a boarding school and then spent her twenties walking country to country in Europe. Eventually settling in Maine, she was divorced and raising two young sons when her first son found her and was reunited.

A bittersweet memoir full of heartache and loss, this is a sparse book that is ultimately uplifting to readers. I first read a portion of the book in the New York Times, where Hall wrote an essay on reconnecting with her adult son, who was actually raised in her father’s hometown and suffered from poverty and abuse during his childhood. For another take on adoption memoirs, check out A.M. Home’s story about finding her birth parents at: http://www.tcpl.org/sarah/2007/08/39-mistresss-daughter-memoir-by-am.html

65. Black Dog: a Crime Novel by Stephen Booth

The Peak District village of Edendale in northern England holds many small town secrets. Retired miner Harry Dickinson is walking his black Labrador one August evening when the dog comes back with a sneaker. This sneaker belongs to 15-year-old Laura Vernon, a local girl missing from her wealthy family’s house in the area. Many local suspects soon start to appear, including Laura’s boyfriend, the Vernons’ gardener, and even Harry Dickinson. Many of these characters have secret lives, culminating in a very atmospheric murder mystery.

This is the first in a series involving the British detective Ben Cooper. Ben’s father was also an officer, and died a heroic death while on duty. His mother suffers from severe schizophrenia and Ben’s family is left taking care of her and her increasingly disruptive behavior. While Ben is hoping to get a sergeant’s post, newcomer Diane Fry, from Birmingham teams up with Ben to help solve the missing girl’s murder. The chemistry between the two is very believable, and Diane doesn’t let Ben get away with much. The setting of the Peak District helps this mystery also and there are many descriptions of the hilly English countryside.

64. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Without a doubt, this book is one of the most controversial novels of modern times. It is also one of my favorite novels and one that I try to read every year. Humbert Humbert has a sexual obsession for girls between the ages of nine and fourteen – girls Humbert calls nymphets. When he moves to the quaint village of Ramsdale and rents a room from widow Charlotte Haze, he soon falls in love with her twelve-year-old daughter, Dolores (a.k.a. Lolita, Dolly, Lo, L). Humbert marries Charlotte, just so he can be near Lolita, and when Charlotte sends her away for the summer, Humbert is lost. Finding his secret diaries detailing his love for her daughter, Charlotte runs out of the house and is killed by a car, freeing Humbert to take custody of Lolita. The two then travel around the country by car, with Lolita seeming to be a prisoner of Humbert, until she escapes a few years later.

Full of exquisite wordplay, puns, and wry observations about America after World War II, this is a book that hooks readers into the haunting love story, and makes readers uncomfortable throughout their reading experience. At times horrific, other times melancholy, and still other times beautiful, this is a tragic look at a tortured affair. I love to listen to Jeremy Irons’ haunting narration of the audio book version, as well as to read the novel each year. My favorite review of the novel comes from Kirkus in 1958 which instructs: “Any librarian surely will question this for anything but the closed shelves. Any bookseller should be very sure that he knows in advance that he is selling very literate pornography.”

63. Don't Scream by Wendy Corsi Staub

Ten years ago, Rachel Lorant died in the woods of Cedar Crest on her birthday. Four of her friends, fellow sorority sisters of the Zeta Delta Kappa sorority, witness her fall and vow never to speak of her accidental death again. On the tenth anniversary of Rachel’s death, all four sorority sisters, Brynn, Fiona, Tildy, and Cassie, receive a birthday card – from Rachel. When the women start dying on their birthdays, the remaining survivors must decide if they should speak about the past and what happened that fateful night of Rachel’s death.

Full of many twist and turns, and plenty of red herrings, this is an enjoyable thriller perfect for this time of year. While the character Brynn is highlighted for much of the novel, and how she deals with the crime spree while having two small children, the other women are fully developed secondary characters that are very realistic. The pacing is very effective in moving readers along, and there is plenty of suspense and thrills to hook readers in. Perfect for readers who enjoy the suspense books of Carol Goodman.

62. A Three Dog Life by Abigail Thomas

One evening, Thomas’s husband, Richard, took their dog, Harry, out for a walk in New York City. When the doorman in the apartment building called Thomas to tell her that the dog came home alone and was in the elevator going up to their apartment without her husband, Thomas realized something seriously wrong had happened. Hit by a car and still bleeding in the city street, Richard would never be the same again. Traumatic head injury that led to extreme memory loss, rage, and paranoia forced Thomas to put her third husband into a brain injury home in upstate New York.

Stephen King endorses this memoir as one of the best he has ever read, and this truly is a spectacular exploration of what happens in a marriage when a partner is injured and must be taken care of. While this type of traumatic brain injury might have broken up a marriage, instead Thomas gives up her New York City apartment and moves upstate to be closer to her institutionalized husband. Visiting him several times a week and even bringing him to her new home for visits, this is both a heartbreaking and encouraging confessional memoir. Thomas is also the author of An Actual Life, which was reviewed at: http://www.tcpl.org/sarah/2007/02/5-actual-life-by-abigail-thomas.html.