THE BEST READS OF 2002

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

NOVELS
The Other Side of Silence / André Brink
The Shell Collector / Anthony Doerr
Middlesex / Jeffrey Eugenides
The Crimson Petal and the White / Michel Faber
Three Junes / Julia Glass
The Secret Life of Bees / Sue Monk Kidd
The Hamilton Case / Michelle de Kretser
The Impressionist / Hari Kunzru
Rush Home Road / Lori Lansens
If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things / John McGregor
Journey to the Stone Country / Alex Miller
Family Matters / Rohinton Mistry
Unless / Carol Shields
The Lovely Bones / Alice Sebold
The Last Crossing / Guy Vanderhaeghe
The Cutting Room / Louise Welsh

STORIES
Not the End of the World / Kate Atkinson
The Shell Collectors / Anthony Doerr
You Are Not a Stranger Here / Adam Haslett

POETRY
Moy Sand and Gravel / Paul Muldoon
Dart / Alice Oswald

NONFICTION
Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing / Margaret Atwood
Running with Scissors / Augusten Burroughs
White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India / William Dalrymple
Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking Around America with Interruptions / Jenny Diski
Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001 / Seamus Heaney
Things My Mother Never Told Me / Blake Morrison
The Writer and the World: Essays / V.S. Naipaul (ed. Pankaj Mishra)
Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town / Paul Theroux
Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self / Claire Tomalin