The Inheritance of Loss

By Kiran Desai (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006)

This dazzling young writer captures, with her fresh wit and real human sympathy, how extraordinarily small and interconnected our world has become. A family in the Himalayas clings to a remembered idea of the British empire, cherishing Marks and Spencer underwear and the BBC. A Marxist Nepali insurgency forms in the nearby hills. In New York a cook's son, an undocumented worker in the grizzly prep kitchens and basements of chic Manhattan restaurants, dreams only of returning to his impoverished father in India. This book reminds us there's no "post" in colonialism. --Kathleen Ochshorn

The Tin Drum

By Günter Grass (Pantheon Books, 1959)

The Road

By Cormac McCarthy (Knopf, 2006)

My new-book reading was set back by coming across a free copy of Günter Grass's The Tin Drum at a library giveaway in Burnet, Texas, of all places. I had just read Grass's controversial memoir in The New Yorker (about his being an S.S. member), and had missed the book its first time around -- though I saw the movie. Anyway, it's a sprawling, wonderful saga (600 pages) "told" by Oskar, humpbacked and stunted -- the ultimate outsider -- with powerful observations on war, guilt, love and life in the 20th century. Every page is filled with outrage, satire and sentiment; it took me forever to finish it, and I was sorry when I did. The best "new" book I read was Cormac McCarthy's The Road, a terse and passionately apocalyptic view of the world we're in now -- a dark follow-up to The Tin Drum, seen through the eyes of a father trying to walk his son through a wrecked landscape to safety. --Peter Meinke

The Shipping News

By Annie Proulx (Scribner's, 1992)

Dense and engrossing, this novel by the author of Brokeback Mountain follows a widower named Quoyle (the term means "a coil of rope") who moves with his two young daughters and aunt to Newfoundland, where he finds work as a reporter for a local newspaper while he tries to reconcile conflicting memories of his late wife. Proulx brings the steel-gray landscape of Newfoundland to life, essentially rendering it as another character, and one that reflects Quoyle's conflicted interior life. "Beyond the glass the seas lay pale as milk, pale the sky, scratched and scribbled with cloud welts. The empty bay, far shore creamed with fog." It may take a while to get used to the poetic prose, but once you become do, The Shipping News is a richly rewarding read. --Anthony Salveggi

Special Topics in Calamity Physics

By Marisha Pessl (Viking Penguin, 2006)

Marisha Pessl's debut novel -- imagine Nabokov mixed with Gossip Girl, plus a dash of Nancy Drew and a twist of Donna Tartt -- seemed a little self-consciously precocious to some readers. For one thing, the young narrator, Blue Van Meer, is a hyper-literate teenager who keeps footnoting her observations with book references. For another, the novel's table of contents is labeled "Core Curriculum (Required Reading)," with each chapter borrowing its title from classic lit. But the compulsive over-achieving is part of the point. Knowledge (all those books) is not the same as knowing, Pessl suggests; as Blue recounts the events that surrounded the mysterious death of her charismatic teacher Hannah Schneider, we see that everything she once assumed about her life -- about her brilliant professor father, about her classmates, about Hannah -- may be wrong. A funny, exhilarating read that hurtles along to a suspenseful, and satisfyingly inconclusive, conclusion. --David Warner

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

By Michael Pollan (Penguin Press, 2006)

Most of us don't know all that much about the food we eat. We go to the nearest Publix (or Rollin' Oats, if you're so inclined), fill our baskets with boxes of pasta and cans of soda, take the stuff home and eat it. How that food shows up in our grocery stores, though, remains a mystery to us. Michael Pollan's book, which follows four different meals from their origins as plants and animals to the dinner table, begins to fill this huge gap in our knowledge with a hefty dose of agricultural history, science, business and politics. You'll never look at the food on your plate in the same way again. --Caitlin Kuleci

The Almost Moon

By Alice Sebold (Little, Brown and Company, 2007)

"When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily." The first line of The Almost Moon lays the groundwork for the doom that unfolds in Alice Sebold's much-anticipated second novel. Sebold's protagonist is Helen, an art-school nude model dealing with middle-age ennui. From the murder of Helen's mother, the book winds itself through a 24-hour period of taboo-breaking -- and the freedoms that can sometimes result. At its heart, The Almost Moon explores the mother-daughter bond, exposing aspects that many prefer to leave unspoken. Sebold is a master at shining the bright light of consciousness on the dark undercurrents of relationships; those who like their reading skin-deep should stay away. If, on the other hand, you enjoy probing the murkier side of the human condition, The Almost Moon will satisfy. --Brandi Gross