The top books of the year

Ask a roomful of people to name their favorite book of this or any year and you are likely to get a roomful of answers. We polled some of our regular book critics and staffers to compile this list of the top books of the year.

Included are small books and large; books that already have won major awards; and quiet but memorable works deserving of wider audiences.

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FICTION

“All the Living,” by C.E. Morgan (FSG). A lyrical first novel about a woman’s awakening and attachment to a small Kentucky town.

“American Rust,” by Philipp Meyer (Spiegel & Grau).With gritty landscapes of a Faulkner or Steinbeck, this debut novel is a taut thriller set in a steel town.

“American Salvage,” by Bonnie Jo Campbell (Wayne State University).Characters dig deep and seek salvation, or at least salvage, in this razor-sharp collection of stories about the post-industrial heartland.

“Await Your Reply,” by Dan Chaon (Ballantine). Three seemingly unrelated stories intertwine in this tension-filled novel of Internet crime, identity theft and other modern thrills.

“Blame,” by Michelle Huneven (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Precisely written, nuanced novel about a fatal accident and the surprising answer of who’s to blame in a story of autonomy and atonement.

“Brooklyn,” by Colm Toibin (Scribner). The literary legacy of Henry James again inspires Toibin (“The Master”), whose newest brief and atmospheric creation delivers cumulative rewards.

“Callisto,” Torsten Krol (HarperPerennial). This book comes at the irrational paranoia introduced in America’s soul after 9/11 from a satirical angle, and, set in a fictional Kansas, it’s likely to be remembered as penetrating the zeitgeist.

“Cardboard Universe: A Guide to the World of Phoebus K. Dank,” by Christopher Miller (HarperPerennial). One of the most entertaining books of the year, a send-up to end all biographical earnestness.

“Collected Stories of Lydia Davis,” by Lydia Davis (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) Davis’ three-decade focus on the short story gravitates to the short-short and even-shorter short, memoiristic mini-dramas with themes of unexacted revenge, miscommunication, romantic desperation and pop culture.

“Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned,” by Wells Tower (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Debut story collection that consistently surprises and disturbs as it resonates with emotional authenticity.

“The Financial Lives of the Poets,” by Jess Walter (Harper). A timely novel about the personal collapse of an axed newspaperman who turns to selling drugs to provide for his family.

“A Gate at the Stairs,” by Lorrie Moore (Knopf). A tense study of life post-9/11 on a Wisconsin campus infused with Moore’s trademark wit.

“Generosity: An Enhancement,” by Richard Powers (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Another smartnovel from a formidablewriter, this one exploring the collision of science, culture, writing, genomics and happiness.

“A Good Fall,” by Ha Jin (Pantheon). His best work so far, this collection includes immortal stories of the immigrant experience, comparable to the best of Malamud and Singer.

“Homer & Langley,” by E. L. Doctorow (Random House). Doctorow fills a New York brownstone with the detritus and mysteries of the entire mad 20th century in this mythic, funny and tragic riff on a pair of infamous hoarders and eccentrics.

“How to Sell,” by Clancy Martin (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Raucus novel by a Kansas City writer of a young man’s adventures in sex, drugs, deceit and the jewelry trade.

“In Other Rooms, Other Wonders,” by Daniyal Mueenuddin (Norton). A Pakistani writer’s elegant collection of short fiction. .

“The Lacuna,” by Barbara Kingsolver (HarperCollins). Kingsolver attempts to fill in some gaps in our understanding of the national allergy to those who dare to question our system of government in a book that mixes actual (Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Trotsky) with fictional characters.

“Last Night in Twisted River,” by John Irving (Random House). The very Irvingness of this 12th Irving novel makes it an important American read.

“Let the Great World Spin,” by Colum McCann (Random). A man walks on a wire strung between the World Trade Center towers, while below women turn tricks to survive, two brothers from Ireland try to do good, and mothers from radically different backgrounds come together when they lose sons in Vietnam. A beautiful novel of the past that seeded our present.

“Little Bee,” by Chris Cleave (Simon & Schuster). Alternating first-person narrators — a British magazine editor, a Nigerian refugee — tell the harrowing story of how they came to be connected in a novel that asks us to open our narrow borders to our larger, common connections.

“Love & Obstacles,” by Aleksandar Hemon (Riverhead).An inventive collection of linked stories informed by the Chicago transplant from war-torn Sarajevo.

“Lovers & Strangers,” by Grant Tracey (Pocol Press).Artfully constructed short stories thick with pop culture and deep in characters who grapple with timely, yet timeless, questions of love, intimacy, betrayal, sex and sexuality.

“The Maple Stories,” by John Updike (Knopf). Richard and Joan Maple began their tumultuous partnership in Updike’s first story about them more than half a century ago, but the 18 stories collected this year for the first time — mere months after the author’s death — chart a marital (and extramarital) journey that could be happening next door today.

“The Museum of Innocence,” by Orhan Pamuk (Knopf).In the first novel of the new century about which we can be sure it will be read at the end of the century, the Turkish writer explores class, identity and love.

“Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall,” by Kazuo Ishiguro (Knopf). Ishiguro explores identity, artistic integrity and success in five droll, enrapturing and meshed stories about musicians and muses.

“Once on a Moonless Night,” by Dai Sijie (Knopf). An exquisitely structured, dreamlike tale of strange and noble quests, not to mention love, that roams across centuries and touches down in China, Burma, Mali and Paris.

“The Original of Laura,” Vladimir Nabokov (Knopf). A beautifully printed objet d’art in its own right, the book of previously unpublished writings offers a thrilling insight into the great writer’s creative process, 28 years after his death.

“Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing,” by Lydia Peelle (HarperCollins). Peelle’s acute perception of a squandered world inspires unflinching and suspenseful stories that celebrate life’s endless improvisation and assertion.

“Shannon,” by Frank Delaney (Random House). A very Irish tale has a very American, though universal, theme: the search for ancestry and its healing power.

“The Skating Rink,” by Roberto Bolano (New Directions). Another newly translated Bolano novel, yes, but a really good one: a murder mystery set in a tiny Spanish town where a corpse is found in the middle of a secret ice skating rink.

“This Is Where I Leave You,” by Jonathan Tropper (Dutton). Despite the fact that you could cast this as a seriocomic venture for Carrey, Sandler or Ferrell, Tropper may have picked up where Anne Tyler left off awhile back, crafting laughter and tears in a claustrophobic dysfunctional family environment.

“Too Much Happiness,” by Alice Munro (Knopf). Ten new, provocative stories that hinge on the power plays between men and women, rendered in supple, knowing prose.

“Welcome to Oakland: A Novel,” by Eric Miles Williamson (Mad Dog Screaming Press). Working-class fiction is rare. Working-class fiction of such zest, evoking Nathanael West at his most frenzied, is even rarer.

“The Winter Vault,” by Anne Michaels (Knopf). In chiseled prose, the Canadian poet and novelist imagines the costs of the physical displacement of 27 villages to make way for Egypt’s Aswan High Dam and the emotional dislocation of two characters after their baby is stillborn.

“Wolf Hall,” by Hilary Mantel (Henry Holt). This year’s winner of Britain’s Booker Prize is a recreation of the court of Henry VIII from the point of view of the man in the background, Thomas Cromwell. Particularly recommended: the unabridged audiobook of this novel read by Simon Slater.

“The Year of the Flood,” by Margaret Atwood (Doubleday/Nan A. Talese). Leave it to Atwood to find humor in a post-apocalyptic world as she covertly, and brilliantly, address questions of how we need to live on an imperiled planet.

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CRIME & SUSPENSE

“Arctic Chill,” by Arnaldur Indridason (Minotaur Books). Scando-noir at its darkest, deepest best, by an Icelander and set in Reykjavik

“August Heat,” by Andrea Camilleri (Penguin ). Camilleri’s Sicilian Police Inspector Montalbano has a general low opinion of his countrymen as he faithfully carries out his duty to bring a semblance of order to a part of the world where daily life is infused with the tentacles of the Mafia and corrupt government officials.

“The Birthday Present,” by Ruth Rendell writing as Barbara Vine (Shaye Areheart Books). A fantasy kidnapping meant as a birthday present for a woman with unusual tastes goes terribly wrong.

“The Defector,” by Daniel Silva (Putnam). Israeli art restorer/spy Gabriel Allon must again face the Russian arms dealer who blames Allon for his lost fortune and family.

“Gone Tomorrow,” by Lee Childs (Delacorte Press). Jack Reacher tries to stop a woman he suspects of being a suicide bomber, only to learn that she’s part of a larger plot with international security implications.

“Risk,” by Colin Harrison (Picador). A New York insurance company lawyer’s life goes from staid to perilous when he investigates the death of a man involved with a Czech hand model and the Russian mob.

“Road Dogs,” by Elmore Leonard (Morrow). Three characters from earlier Leonard mysteries plan joint capers and individual double crosses.

“Safer,” by Sean Doolittle (Delacorte). A newcomer who refuses to kowtow to the demands of the head of the neighborhood watch committee finds his life in ruins in this harrowing tale of suburbia at its ugliest.

“Spade & Archer,” by Joe Gores (Knopf). The back story of Sam Spade’s life and career, told through his earliest cases.

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FOR YOUNG READERS

“Catching Fire,” by Suzanne Collins (young adult; Scholastic). This sequel to ” The Hunger Games ” ratchets up the excitement as Katniss and Petra are thrown back into a tournament to the death and the evil President Snow reveals how her rebel status threatens her very existence.

“The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate,” by Jacqueline Kelly (ages 9-13; Holt). Growing up in a Texas home with six brothers, Calpurnia realizes her mother’s wish for her to be a demure young lady is in direct contrast to her own desire to spend time discovering scientific wonders with her grandfather.

“Fire,” by Kristin Cashore (young adult; Dial). This prequel to “Graceling” reveals an exciting world of brightly colored monsters, strange lands and even stranger powers with a feisty heroine named Fire.

“The Georges and the Jewels,” by Jane Smiley (ages 9-12; Knopf). On the outside, this is a lyrical story about a young girl and a horse; on the inside, it’s about relationships and life through the eyes of a seventh-grader.

“Liar,” by Justine Larbalestier (young adult; Bloomsbury). Micah admits she’s a compulsive liar, so when her boyfriend turns up dead, readers will be unsure whether to believe her supernatural tale.

“The Magician’s Elephant,” by Kate DiCamillo with illustrations by Yoko Tanaka (ages 8-12; Candlewick). When Peter Augustus learns that the key to finding his long-lost sister is an elephant, he can only imagine how all the intriguing characters in his life will intersect in this lyrical, magical novel by a gifted storyteller.

“The Maze Runner,” by James Daschner (young adult; Delacorte). When 16-year-old Thomas awakes with no memory of his previous life, he joins a band of boys stuck inside an impossible-to-solve maze surrounded by a forest full of monsters.

“Scat,” by Carl Hiaasen (Knopf). In Hiaasen’s third novel for young adults, a middle-school protagonist struggling with anxiety about his father, who has lost his right arm in Iraq, is caught up in a caper about a missing teacher, a panther separated from her cub in the Everglades, and a pair of deliciously dumb bad guys trying to make big bucks at the expense of Florida’s delicate ecosystem.

“When You Reach Me,” by Rebecca Stead (10-13; Wendy Lamb/Random House). Life is tough for sixth-grader Miranda when she and her best friend, Sal, part ways, but even more troubling are the notes she receives that predict the future — with frightening accuracy. Middle-grade fiction ready-made for middle-age enjoyment because of its late- ‘70s setting and a plot driven in part by Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time.”

“Wintergirls,” by Laurie Halse Anderson (young adult; Viking). A heartwrenching novel about Lia’s struggle with anorexia and guilt when her best friend and fellow sufferer dies.

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NON FICTION/ HISTORY/ BIOGRAPHY/ MEMOIR

“The Adderall Diaries,” by Stephen Elliott (Graywolf). A fiction writer gets obsessed with writing a true crime book about a murder trial, which leads him to write this thrilling memoir about addiction, obsession, sex and redemption.

“After America: Narratives for the Next Global Age,” Paul Starobin (Viking). Far superior to Fareed Zakaria’s pretty good tome of the preceding year, this is likely to generate considerable thought in the years ahead about the rise of competing powers to America’s declining influence.

“Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife,” by Francine Prose (Harper). The prominent novelist and critic summarizes the history of the famous World War II diary in culture and the marketplace and also details how the voice of the diary’s author still resonates with students and readers today.

“The Bauhaus Group: Six Masters of Modernism,” by Nicholas Fox Weber (Knopf). A highly readable portrait of the lives, loves and ideas of the 20th-century thinkers who helped shape the century’s trends in art and design.

“The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America,” by Timothy Egan (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Egan (“The Worst Hard Time”) again displays his talent for turning national disasters, in this case, the Great Fire of 1910, into master storytelling about an event and its historical implications.

“The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman,” by Margot Mifflin (Nebraska). Engaging bio of a19th-century teenager from Independence, Mo., who survived a fatal Indian attack on her family and became the first white woman in America known to have displayed a tattoo, and done so for profit.

“Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater,” by Frank Bruni (Penguin). The former New York Times restaurant critic tells the irony of being a food critic with an eating disorder, which sounds oh-so-Oprah but reads much smarter than that.

“Chasing Icarus: The Seventeen Days in 1910 that Forever Changed American Aviation,” by Gavin Mortimer (Walker). Written with wit and barely suppressed enthusiasm, this true account of coinciding competitions for hot-air balloon, dirigible and airplane has yet to be discovered by the many readers who would be enthralled by it.

“Cheever: A Life,” by Blake Bailey (Knopf). You would have to be as unbalanced as Cheever to tackle all 800 pages of this in linear fashion, although it’s rare that a literary biography reads so effectively as a guilty pleasure.

“The Clinton Tapes,” by Taylor Branch (Simon & Schuster). Through a book that’s not quite memoir, not exactly history, Branch comes through with an insightful take on the Clinton presidency.

“Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression,” by Morris Dickstein, (Norton). This highly readable survey of the economics, politics, arts , daily life and social legacy of the 1930sis all too relevant today.

“A Day in the Life of Ancient Rome,” by Alberto Angela (Europa Editions). Many books, documentaries and movies claim to chronicle daily life in ancient Rome, but never has a book provided the encrustation of detail offered by this lively first-person narrative.

“Empire of Liberty,” by Gordon S. Wood (Oxford). A fine history of America’s formative years.

“The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt,” by T.J. Stiles (Knopf). Winner of the National Book Award, it’s a monumental biography of a 19th-century industrialist.

“Fly by Wire: The Geese, the Glide, the Miracle on the Hudson,” by William Langewiesche (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Insightful recounting by a top journalist and aviation expert of the Hudson River Airbus landing, made deeper by its interwoven threads on the evolution of aircraft, the history of plane crashes, the work of pilots and the changing airline industry.

“The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth and the Epic Story of the Map That Gave America Its Name,” by Toby Lester (Free Press). Europe’s discovery of the rest of the world during the Renaissance is combined with a history of mapmaking in one of this year’s most captivating and richly detailed histories.

“The Good Soldiers,” by David Finkel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). A closely observed, gripping and fearless account of what happens when 19-year-old soldiers from Fort Riley, Kan., deploy to the Baghdad front. War reporting at its best.

“The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon,” by David Grann (Doubleday). A rollicking good read about a British explorer’s last jungle journey.

“Manhood for Amateurs,” by Michael Chabon (Harper). A writer explores his journey into adulthood in 39 funny, often painfully honest personal essays.

“A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster,” by Rebecca Solnit (Viking). A riveting account of how people came together in post-Katrina New Orleans.

“The Peep Diaries: How We’re Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors,” by Hal Niedzviecki (City Lights). A cogent and lively argument about how the Internet, reality television and other cultural trends have transformed American consumers into voyeurs.

“Tom and Jack,” by Henry Adams (Bloomsbury). A former curator at Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum tells the complex and little-understood story of the virtual father-son relationship between Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock.

“Traveling with Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story,” by Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor (Viking). The “Secret Life of Bees” author and her equally talented daughter write a soul-lifting paean to motherhood that is half autobiographical reflection, half travelogue as they explore Greece, France and spiritual points in between.

“The Wayfarers: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World,” by Wade Davis (Anansi). Davis delves into the vast store of knowledge possessed by indigenous peoples in the Amazon, the Andes, the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Australia, Borneo, and the Arctic, portraying societies that do not seek to “improve upon nature, but to sustain the world.”

“The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America,” by Douglas Brinkley (Harper). A prodigious historian chronicles in full Roosevelt’s “great wildlife crusade,” predicated on his belief that conservation efforts are “essentially democratic in spirit, purpose, and method.”

“Zeitoun,” by Dave Eggers (McSweeney’s). A brilliant merger of fictional and non fictional techniques to bring alive the state of apocalypse after Hurricane Katrina.

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POETRY

“Chronic,” by D.A. Powell (Graywolf). Powell is one of the major poets of the generation now approaching middle-age, and this, his fourth book, which describes love found and lost, may be his best.

“The Collected Poems of C.P. Cavafy,” translated from the Greek by Daniel Mendelsohn (Knopf). There’s no better translator for the great modern Greek poet of homosexual desire than America’s finest classicist, critic and chronicler of 21st century homosexual desire.

“Museum of Accidents,” by Rachel Zucker (Wave Books). Zucker is both an innovative formal poet and a fearless confessional writer who chronicles domestic life, motherhood and marriage with all the fury of a war correspondent.

“The Poetry of Rilke,” translated and edited by Edward Snow (North Point). A longtime translator of the great German poet presents newly reworked selections from five of Rilke’s books, including “The Duino Elegies” and “Sonnets to Orpheus,” all of the poems appearing side by side in German and English.

“Reading Novalis in Montana,” by Melissa Kwasny (Milkweed Editions). This is environmental poetry at its best.

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GRAPHIC NOVELS/ NARRATIVES

“The Book of Genesis,” by R. Crumb (Norton). A master cartoon illustrator, with a penchant for lusty and crude honesty, makes a faithful rendering of the first book of the Old Testament.

“Stitches,” by David Small (Norton). An extraordinary, astounding and cinematically drawn memoir of illness and wretched family life by a noted illustrator who happened to be the son of a physician who done him wrong.