THE BEST READS OF 2003

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

Novels
Purple Hibiscus / Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Shipwreck / Louis Begley
Emma Brown / Clare Boylan
The Master Butchers Singing Club / Louise Erdrich
Mrs Kimble / Jennifer Haigh
The Great Fire / Shirley Hazzard
This Blinding Absence of Light / Tahar Ben Jelloun (trans. from the French by Linda Coverdale)
The Known World / Edward P. Jones
The Namesake / Jhumpa Lahiri
The Fortress of Solitude / Jonathan Lethem
Gilgamesh / Joan London
The Way the Crow Flies / Ann-Marie MacDonald
Living to Tell the Tale / Gabriel Garcia Márquez (trans. from the Spanish by Edith Grossman)
Astonishing Splashes of Colour / Clare Morrall
Personality / Andrew O’Hagan
A Distant Shore / Caryl Phillips
Shantaram / Gregory David Roberts
A Ship Made of Paper / Scott Spencer
The Colour / Rose Tremain
The In-Between World of Vikram Lall / M.G. Vassanji
The Book Against God / James Wood

Stories
The Stories of Richard Bausch / Richard Bausch
Little Black Book of Stories / A.S. Byatt
A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies / John Murray
Early Stories 1953-75 / John Updike

Poetry
The Strange Hours Travelers Keep / August Kleinzahler
Collected Poems / Robert Lowell (eds. Frank Bidart & David Gewanter)
The Brink / Jacob Polley
Walking to Martha’s Vineyard / Franz Wright

Nonfiction
A Pound of Paper: Confessions of a Book Addict / John Baxter
Dry / Augusten Burroughs
The Speckled People / Hugo Hamilton
Giving Up the Ghost / Hilary Mantel
Words of Mercury / Patrick Leigh Fermor (ed. Artemis Cooper)
The Afterlife: Essays and Criticism / Penelope Fitzgerald (eds. Terence Dooley & Mandy Kirkby)
A Writer’s World: Travels 1950-2000 / Jan Morris
Literary Occasions: Essays / V.S. Naipaul (ed. Pankaj Mishra) (2003)
The Opposite of Fate / Amy Tan