MICHAEL'S FAVORITE FICTION OF 2015

 

This can't possibly be a "best of" list, because I didn't, for various reasons, squeeze in enough reading in 2015. But it is a "whole-hearted recommendations" list. Click on titles for full-length reviews:

 

“Landfalls” by Naomi J. Williams (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Hands down, my favorite novel of the year. A fictional account of a real 18th-century French maritime expedition exploring the Pacific Ocean before meeting its doom. Sly writing and startlingly different points of view make this a shape-shifting revelation of a book.

 

“Purity” by Jonathan Franzen (Farrar, Straus & Girous). Hands down, my second-favorite novel of the year.Franzen’s fifth novel finds parallels between Internet invasiveness and totalitarianism as it takes on toxic marriages, Wikileaks-style whistle-blowing and more, in a book that’s a globe-hopping existential screwball comedy.

 

“In the Country” by Mia Alvar (Knopf). A wonderful debut collection of stories by a Filipina-American writer, set in Manila, Bahrein and the U.S.A., about Filipinos struggling to make a go of it, whether at home or overseas.

 

“Voices in the Night” by Steven Millhauser (Knopf). A generous treasure trove of a story collection by the Pulitzer Prize-winning of "Martin Dressler." Millhauser has an unerring knack for drawing the fantastical out of the quotidian.

 

“The Sympathizer” by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Grove). Another knockout debut, this one by a Vietnamese-American writer. The choices, observations and, yes, sympathies of a covert communist agent embedded with South Vietnamese military intelligence become dizzyingly confusing when he joins the South Vietnamese exodus to the U.S., following the fall of Saigon in 1975. I wasn't able to review it, so the link is to David Takami's smart, savvy review in The Seattle Times.

 

“I Was a Revolutionary” by Andrew Malan Milward (Harper). This Kansas-set collection of linked stories, by a Kansas native who's now editor-in-chief of Mississippi Review, skips through time and points of view as it pieces together a deep history of a persistently contradictory state. Again, I didn't get the chance to review it, so the link is to a great piece that the Boston Globe ran on it.

 

“Act of God” by Jill Ciment (Pantheon). If the first line of this zany novel doesn't snag you (“The twins suspected it was alive, but they weren’t exactly sure if it was plant or animal”), its premise -- a fungal apocalypse unfolding in New York City -- surely will.

 

“The Book of Aron” by Jim Shepard (Knopf). A novel as canny as it is grim, as it sees the Nazi persecution of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto through the eyes of young delinquent boy who has his own peculiar slant on his life and his world.

 

“The Poser” by Jacob Rubin (Viking). A debut novel about a 1950s youngster who, as soon as he meets people, feels the urge to become them. His imitations are oddly poised between flattery and insult, and the fallout from them leads to the most unlikely of stage careers. A bracing, heady tale.

 

“The Harder They Come” by T.C. Boyle (Harper). Boyle's latest is a study of all-American crazies running amok in the woods of Northern California. Scary, hilarious, brilliantly assembled.