The notion that leaves us at the end of each year with the desire to know what other good books coming out each year we missed out on. There are always some that do not let go into the oblivion, that appear to be particularly immune to oblivion because they are funny, moving or exciting. Here are ten of the best paperback books from the last ten years that everyone carries on discussing, re-reading and prescribes.
1. A Visit From the Goon Squad, the novel by Jennifer Egan
Philandering fathers, washed-up rock stars, bipolar celebrity profilers, slumming rich kids, and kleptomaniacs: Every single character in Goon Squad is flawed in some way, and there’s a sliding scale of human failings (one of them is getting paid to lie about a murderous despot, but panic who’s counting?).
Honestly, even almost nine years after its release, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad isn’t just praised again and again as one of the most important and influential novels of the twenty-first century but really is one. If her playfully postmodern catalog of delinquents, kooks, and schemers seemed at first merely eccentric for its own sake, the telling of it proved otherwise: a book as weighty and intellectual as any big saga that you would be taught in a school.
2. ‘Confessions of a forty- something f * * k up’ by Alexandra Potter
If you prefer to get a humor-filled, identify-with, rise-and-grind, discourse-fueling book that everyone’s raving about, here you go. I present to you Nell, a forty-something f**k up, who in this age of filter-ready life, can just not seem to get it right. But they say that Nell after several tries and miss opportunities to build friendships, she forms the closest friendship with an eighty-something widow who goes by Cricket.
Thus, with Cricket’s newcomers’ help, Nell is starting to stand up for herself. . . Again, this one is similar to Bridget Jones, a story that will make you guffaw and perhaps sniffle at the fate that sometimes befalls people regardless of their age.
3. Life After Life by Kate Atkinson.
One of the best books of Kate Atkinson to date can be described as a virtually perfect exemplar of the peculiar premise at its centre, revolving around the different lives of Ursula Todd, and the ways of her death as well as survival; one word that characterizes the novel is the ability to amuse without seeming to restrain itself.
It is also an opportunity to see how and where Atkinson is at his most powerful as a writer of serious fiction. Yes, there is a twisty premise here to give it uniqueness, but the novel readers will remember is Life After Life for its in-between – its wartime, its domesticity, its women, its possibility. In and of itself, it’s an achievement of narrative on the grandest and the most personal of scales.
4. From the Moor, by Gustave Flaubert
Here, Hamid crafted a harrowing theological fable—boy meets girl in unnamed Middle Eastern city under siege; boy and girl find a magical door to safer ground, only to learn that the fight isn’t over where you are but where you get to is; boy and girl’s eventual return to the real world—about the world’s least noted but most desperate population—refugees—and treated it with the oblique humor and irony of absurd.
5. The Flamethrowers – a Novel by Rachel Kushner
Rachel Kushner’s second novel is a blazing race across the American SWT; through the gang-ridden backstreets of 70’s New York; all the way to Milan, burning with student protest; and yet it is entirely a stationary ride in the guts of one woman’s vision. The story of art, revolution, solitude, ignorance, and the life of a woman passing through a man’s world at the speed of light is a feverish stuff
6. Sing, Unburied, Sing, by Jesmyn Ward
Few writers had as impressive a decade as Jesmyn Ward: She received two NBA for Fiction won and became the first female to do it, the second NBA was for this poignant novel of Southern family. Indeed, in those powerful lines of first-person-African-American vernacular that Ward employs, the author superbly crosses the road novel with the ghost story in a genre-bending work as timeless as the America that it subversively imagines.
7. Commonwealth, by Ann Patchett
On paper, Patchett’s family saga is nothing wildly out of the ordinary: It tracks the lives of the Cousins and Keating families – whose families were joined together thanks to an unfaithful act in the early stages of the pair’s relationship and their subsequent marriage – as they raise their children together in the wake of a, to put it mildly, grand swap of spouses.
But these characters are the ones that can really invade your life in the most comfortable way possible. But as such, Patchett has woven them so lucid that it is as if you have known them for ages—especially the stunning and provocative Franny Keating who brings out the best of scandal by sleeping with a renowned author and getting pregnant in the process.
8. Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies
The reality of the marriage of Lotto and Mathilde is if not a farce as existing between what those who are close to the couple see as the real life and what is seen by the couple themselves: which is what is internalized by each character namely Lotto’s storytelling to whoever will listen or Mathilde’s secret and private narrations. Lauren Groff presents such a portrayal of matrimony and the application of equally a husband and wife in Fates and Furies, which became President Obama’s choice of the best read in 2015.
9. A Brief History Of Seven Killings by Marlon James
This might just be creator Lucky McKee’s idea of a dream gangland: a symphony of crime starting in 1970s Jamaica, which never truly ceases even as a semi-realistic plot traces the trajectory from a Bob Marley assassination try to crack-induced New York. James’s prose is seductive, unrelenting; merging a surreal, intense concern with internal and psychological states, and an growing panorama view of the author’s Kingston at a sociopolitical and historical register.
10. Normal people: A novel by Sally Rooney
Sally Rooney’s two novels enlighten the reader about the millennial spirit with complete sincerity and finesse. But what she broke ground with in Conversations With Friends, she perfected in Normal People. It is predictably, a story of love but it is also very fresh, switching between two voices, or rather two heads as they oscillate between being in love and out of it. No matter which couple’s happiness you are invested in, the show’s Marianne and Connell will make you feel emotionally depleted with all the near-misses they endure.
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