THE BEST READS OF 2001

Books that somehow made me want to put
everything else on hold and read

NOVELS
The Distant Land of My Father / Bo Caldwell
Bitter Fruit / Achmat Dangor
The Siege / Helen Dunmore
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse / Louise Erdrich
Agapanthus Tango (published as The Great Inland Sea in the U.S. in 2005) / David Francis
The Corrections / Jonathan Franzen
Life of Pi / Yann Martel
Atonement / Ian McEwan
That They May Face the Rising Sun / John McGahern
Oxygen / Andrew Miller
My Name is Red / Orhan Pamuk
Bel Canto / Ann Patchett
Empire Falls / Richard Russo
Austerlitz / W.G. Sebald (trans. from the German by Anthea Bell)
The Death of Vishnu (W.W. Norton) / Manil Suri
John Henry Days / Colson Whitehead
Dirt Music / Tim Winton
August / Gerard Woodward

STORIES
Collected Stories / Saul Bellow (ed. Janis Bellow)
Among the Missing / Dan Chaon
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage / Alice Munro
Hotel World / Ali Smith

POETRY
Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems / Billy Collins

NONFICTION
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1917-2000 / Martin Amis
Borrowed Finery / Paula Fox
Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah / Tim Mackintosh-Smith
Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere / Jan Morris