THE BEST READS OF 2006

Novels
Half of a Yellow Sun / Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Book of Chameleons (Arcadia Books) / José Eduardo Agualusa [trans. from the Portuguese, O Vendedor de Passados (2004), by Daniel Hahn]
A Sea Change / Michael Arditti
The Teahouse Fire / Ellis Avery
Thanksgiving Night / Richard Bausch
The Law of Dreams / Peter Behrens
The Ghost at the Table / Suzanne Berne
Theft / Peter Carey
Sacred Games / Vikram Chandra
The Meaning of Night / Michael Cox
Stone Cradle / Louise Doughty

The Bloodstone Papers / Glen Duncan
Gathering the Water / Robert Edric
The Lay of the Land / Richard Ford
Thirteen Moons / Charles Frazier
Intuition / Allegra Goodman
The Secret River / Kate Grenville
A Spot of Bother / Mark Haddon
When Madeline Was Young / Jane Hamilton
Amazing Disgrace / James Hamilton-Paterson
Imperium / Robert Harris
My Mother’s Lovers / Christopher Hope
Kalooki Nights / Howard Jacobson

This Time of Dying / Reina James
Gate of the Sun (trans. from the Arabic by Humphrey Davies) / Elias Khoury
The Other Side of the Bridge / Mary Lawson
The Inhabited World / David Long
Zoli / Colum McCann
The Road / Cormac McCarthy
After This / Alice McDermott
So Many Ways to Begin / Jon McGregor
Mother’s Boy / Stanley Middleton
Black Swan Green / David Mitchell
Suite Française / Irène Némirovsky
The Last of Her Kind / Sigrid Nunez
Black Girl White Girl / Joyce Carol Oates
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox / Maggie O’Farrell
Be Near Me / Andrew O’Hagan
The Light of Evening / Edna O’Brien
Special Topics in Calamity Physics / Marisha Pessl
The Echo Makers / Richard Powers
A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear (trans. from the Dari by Sarah Maguire and Yama Yari) / Atiq Rahimi
Everyman / Philip Roth
Mother’s Milk / Edward St. Aubyn
Kept / D.J. Taylor
Digging to America / Anne Tyler
The Ruby in Her Navel / Barry Unsworth
The Other Side of You / Sally Vickers
The Night Watch / Sarah Waters
Winterwood / Patrick McCabe
A Woman in Jerusalem (trans. from the Hebrew by Hillel Halkin) / A.B. Yehoshua

Stories
Moral Disorder and Other Stories / Margaret Atwood
Severance / Robert Olen Butler
Touchy Subjects / Emma Donoghue
Twilight of the Superheroes / Deborah Eisenberg
The Stories of Mary Gordon / Mary Gordon
All Aunt Hagar’s Children / Edward P. Jones
Matters of Life and Death / Bernard MacLaverty
Every Move You Make / David Malouf
The Unfinished Novel and Other Stories / Valerie Martin
The Collected Stories / John McGahern
Gallatin Canyon / Thomas McGuane
The View from Castle Rock / Alice Munro
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman / Haruki Murakami
Everybody Loves Somebody / Joanna Scott
Mothers and Sons / Colm Tóibín
Clouds and Eclipses: The Collected Short Stories / Gore Vidal

Best First Fiction
The Meaning of Night / Michael Cox
The Dream Life of Sukhanov / Olga Grushin
The Observations / Jane Harris
In the Country of Men / Hisham Matar
Creatures of the Earth: New and Selected Stories / John McGahern
The Last Town on Earth / Thomas Mullen
The Thirteenth Tale / Diane Setterfield
Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living / Carrie Tiffany
Fresh Apples (stories) / Rachel Tresize

Poetry
Selected Poems / John Burnside
The Book of Blood / Vicki Feaver
Dear Ghosts, / Tess Gallagher
Averno / Louise Glück
White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems, 1946-2006 / Donald Hall
District and Circle / Seamus Heaney
Without Title / Geoffrey Hill
After / Jane Hirschfield
The Silent Treatment / Richard Howard
Strong is Your Hold / Galway Kinnell
Curves and Angles / Brad Leithauser
Gethsemane / Dorothy Molloy
Waiting for the Night-Rowers / Roger Moulson
So What: New and Selected Poems, 1971-2005 (trans. from the Arabic by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi and Gabriel Levin) / Taha Muhammad Ali
Horse Latitudes / Paul Muldoon
New and Collected Poems, 1964-2006 / Ishmael Reed
Swithering / Robin Robertson
My Noiseless Entourage / Charles Simic
Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems / W.D. Snodgrass
Man and Camel / Mark Strand
Cracks in the Universe / Charles Tomlinson
God’s Silence / Franz Wright

Nonfiction
Let Me Finish / Roger Angell
The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire / Walter Benjamin
Flaubert: A Life / Frederick Brown
Running for the Hills / Horatio Clare
Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 / Christopher Clark
Seminary Boy / John Cornwell
The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857 / William Dalrymple
We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction / Joan Didion
Creationists: Selected Essays, 1993-2006 / E.L. Doctorow
Mirrors of the Unseen: Journeys in Iran / Jason Elliot
George Mackay Brown: The Life / Maggie Fergusson
Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain / Judith Flanders
John Fowles: The Journal, Volume 2 (ed. Charles Drazin) / John Fowles
The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History / Jonathan Franzen
Through the Children’s Gate: A Home in New York / Adam Gopnik
Incendiary Circumstances: A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times / Amitav Ghosh
William Empson: Volume II: Against the Christians / John Haffenden
Paris: The Secret History / Andrew Hussey
Ghost Train Through the Andes: On My Grandfather’s Trail in Chile and Bolivia (2006) / Michael Jacobs
North Face of Soho / Clive James
The Life of Kingsley Amis / Zachary Leader
In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India / Edward Luce
The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million / Daniel Mendelsohn
The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life / Edward Mendelson
Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond / Pankaj Mishra
Nomad’s Hotel: Travels in Time and Space (trans. from the Dutch by Ann Kelland) / Cees Nooteboom
Uncensored: Views and (Re)Views / Joyce Carol Oates
Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them / Francine Prose
Connemara: Listening to the Wind / Tim Robinson
The Caliph’s House: A Year in Casablanca / Tahir Shah
Casanova’s Women: The Great Seducer and the Women He Loved / Judith Summers
Cochineal Red: Travels Through Ancient Peru / Hugh Thomson
Shadow of the Silk Road / Colin Thubron
Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man / Claire Tomalin
Point to Point Navigation / Gore Vidal
Writers, Readers and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870-1918 / Philip Waller
Betjeman / A.N. Wilson
Stranger in a Strange Land: Encounters in the Disunited States / Gary Younge