THE BEST READS OF 2007

YES, IT’S THAT TIME OF THE YEAR AGAIN. Here’s a recapitulation of some of the books that were published in 2007 and the wonderful ones that took our breath away with their outstanding writing and stories. There is truly no greater pleasure than reading finely crafted prose by writers who not only care about good stories but the telling of them as well.

First Novels
1. Call Me By Your Name (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) / André Aciman
2. Lost City Radio (HarperCollins) / Daniel Alarcón
3. The Blood of Flowers (Little, Brown) / Anita Amirrezvani
4. A Golden Age (John Murray) / Tahmima Anam
5. Keeping the House (Random House) / Ellen Baker
6. Fieldwork (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) / Mischa Berlinski
7. The Lizard Cage (Harvill Secker) / Karen Connelly
8. The Welsh Girl (Houghton Mifflin) / Peter Ho Davies
9. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead) / Junot Díaz
10. The Ministry of Special Cases (Faber & Faber) / Nathan Englander
11. Bitter Sweets (Macmillan/St. Martin’s Press) / Roopa Farooki
12. According to Ruth (Harvill Secker) / Jane Feaver
13. Then We Came to the End (Little, Brown) / Joshua Ferris
14. The Book of Beasts (Coteau) / Bernice Friesen
15. Bearing the Body (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) / Ehud Havazelet
16. Winter Under Water (Picador) / James Hopkin
17. Loving Frank (Ballantine Books) / Nancy Horan
18. Wintering (Portobello Books) / Derek Johns
19. The God of Animals (Scribner) / Aryn Kyle
20. The Night Birds (Soho Press) / Thomas Maltman
21. Children of the Revolution (first published as The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears in the U.S. in March 2007) (Jonathan Cape) / Dinaw Mengestu
22. The Peacock Throne (Sceptre) / Sujit Saraf
23. Resistance (Faber & Faber) / Owen Sheers
24. The Septembers of Shiraz (Ecco) / Dalia Sofer
25. The Journal of Dora Damage (Bloomsbury) / Belinda Starling
26. The Gift of Rain (Myrmidon) / Tan Twan Eng

Novels
1. The Virgin of Flames (Penguin) / Chris Abani
2. The Friends of Meager Fortune (MacAdam Cage) / David Adams Richards
3. Goodbye Lucille (Jonathan Cape) / Segun Afolabi
4. Winterton Blue (Picador/Grove/Atlantic) / Trezza Azzopardi
5. The Air We Breathe (W.W. Norton) / Andrea Barrett
6. Skin Lane (Serpent’s Tail)/ Neil Bartlett
7. Away (Random House) / Amy Bloom
8. The Devil’s Footprints (Jonathan Cape) / John Burnside
9. Five Skies (Viking) / Ron Carlson
10. The Song Before It Is Sung (Bloomsbury) / Justin Cartwright
11. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (HarperCollins) / Michael Chabon
12. The Pesthouse (Picador) / Jim Crace
13. The Eyrie (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) / Stevie Davies
14. Falling Man (Scribner) / Don DeLillo
15. The Maytrees (HarperCollins) / Annie Dillard
16. The Empress of Weehawken (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) / Irene Dische
17. The Gathering (Jonathan Cape/Black Cat) / Anne Enright
18. Notes from an Exhibition (Fourth Estate) / Patrick Gale
19. A Free Life (Pantheon) / Ha Jin
20. Engelby (Hutchinson) / Sebastian Faulks
21. Oystercatchers (Fourth Estate) / Susan Fletcher
22. World Without End (Macmillan) / Ken Follett
23. Over (Chatto & Windus) / Margaret Forster
24. Tom Bedlam (Random House) / George Hagen
25. The Carhullan Army (Faber & Faber) / Sarah Hall
26. Late Nights on Air (McClelland & Stewart) / Elizabeth Hay
27. A Thousand Splendid Suns (Bloomsbury) / Khaled Hosseini
28. North River (Little, Brown) / Pete Hamill
29. Remembering the Bones (Atlantic Monthly Press/Sceptre) / Frances Itani
30. Mister Pip (John Murray/The Dial Press) / Lloyd Jones
31. Day (Jonathan Cape) / A.L. Kennedy
32. Consequences (Fig Tree) / Penelope Lively
33. Where White Horses Gallop (Key Porter) / Beatrice MacNeil
34. When We Were Bad (Picador) / Charlotte Mendelson
35. Landscape of Farewell (Allen & Unwin) / Alex Miller
36. South of the River (Chatto & Windus) / Blake Morrison
37. The Gravedigger’s Daughter (St. Martin’s Press) / Joyce Carol Oates
38. Divisadero (Alfred A. Knopf/Bloomsbury) / Michael Ondaatje
39. Run (Harper/Bloomsbury) / Ann Patchett
40. Exit Ghost (Houghton Mifflin) / Philip Roth
41. Bridge of Sighs (Alfred A. Knopf) / Richard Russo
42. Angelica (Random House) / Arthur Phillips
43. Peony in Love (Random House) / Lisa See
44. Secrets of the Sea (Harvill Secker) / Nicholas Shakespeare
45. The Visible World (Houghton Mifflin) / Mark Slouka
46. Death of a Murderer (Bloomsbury) / Rupert Thomson
47. Between Each Breath (Jonathan Cape) / Adam Thorpe
48. The Road Home (Chatto & Windus) / Rose Tremain
49. The Street of a Thousand Blossoms (St. Martin’s Press) / Gail Tsukiyama
50. If Today Be Sweet (William Morrow) / Thrity Umrigar

Fiction in Translation
1. All Whom I Have Loved (Schocken) / Aharon Appelfeld [trans. from the Hebrew by Aloma Halter]
2. The Yacoubian Building (Harper Perennial) / Alaa al Aswany [trans. from the Arabic, ‘Imarat Ya’qubyan (2002), by Humphrey Davies]
3. The Savage Detectives (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) / Roberto Bolaño [trans. from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer]
4. Collected Stories of Ivan Bunin (trans. from the Russian by Graham Hettlinger) (Ivan R. Dee) / Ivan Bunin
5. Nada (Modern Library) / Carmen Laforet [trans. from the Spanish, Nada (1944), by Edith Grossman]
6. Night Train to Lisbon (Grove Press) / Pascal Mercier (trans. from the German by Barbara Harshav)
7. Fire in the Blood (trans. from the French, Chaleur du Sand, by Sandra Smith) (Alfred A. Knopf/Chatto & Windus) / Irène Némirovsky
8. White Walls: Collected Stories (trans. from the Russian by Antonina W. Bouis and Jamey Gambrell) (New York Review Books) / Tatyana Tolstaya

Novellas
1. Song for Night (Akashic Books) / Chris Abani
2. On Chesil Beach (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday) / Ian McEwan
3. The Elephanta Suite (Hamish Hamilton) / Paul Theroux

Stories
1. The Friend of Women and Other Stories (Houghton Mifflin) / Louis Auchincloss
2. The New Granta Book of the American Short Story (Granta) / Richard Ford (ed.)
3. The People on Privilege Hill (Chatto & Windus) / Jane Gardam
4. Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black and Other Stories (Bloomsbury/Farrar, Straus & Giroux) / Nadine Gordimer
5. My Wife’s Lovers: Ten Tales (Black Ace Books) / John Herdman
6. The Frozen Thames (McClelland & Stewart) / Helen Humphreys
7. Transparency (Black Bay Books) / Frances Hwang
8. What You Call Winter (Alfred A. Knopf) / Nalini Jones
9. Walk the Blue Fields (Faber & Faber) / Claire Keegan
10. Missing Kissinger (Chatto & Windus) / Etgar Keret
11. The Complete Stories (Pantheon) / David Malouf
12. Valentines (Pantheon) / Olaf Olafsson
13. The Separate Heart and Other Stories (Jonathan Cape) / Simon Robson
14. Christmas Stories (Everyman’s Library) / Diana Secker Tesdell (ed.)
15. I Think of You (Bloomsbury) /Ahdaf Soueif
16. Cheating at Canasta (Viking) / William Trevor
17. The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories (Penguin Canada, 2007) / Jane Urquhart (ed.)
18. The Loudest Sound and Nothing (Faber and Faber, 2007) / Clare Wigfall

Poetry
1. Next Life (Wesleyan) / Rae Armantrout
2. Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2007) / John Ashbery
3. A Worldly Country (Carcanet) / John Ashbery
4. The Door (Virago Press) / Margaret Atwood
5. Collected Poems (Modern Library) / W.H. Auden (ed. Edward Mendelson)
6. Domestic Violence (Carcanet) / Eavan Boland
7. Gift Songs (Jonathan Cape) / John Burnside
8. Chinese Apples: New and Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf) / W.S. Di Piero
9. The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems, 1972-2007 (Graywolf Press) / Albert Goldbarth
10. Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005 (Ecco/HarperCollins) / Robert Haas
11. Pessimism for Beginners (Carcanet Press) / Sophie Hannah
12. The Collected Poems, 1956-1998 (Ecco) / Zbigniew Herbert (trans. from the Polish by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott and edited by Alissa Valles)
13. Waterlight: Selected Poems (Graywolf Press) / Kathleen Jamie
14. The Meanest Flower (Carcanet) / Mimi Khalvati
15. The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems (Louisiana State University Press) / David Kirby
16. My Body: New and Selected Poems (Hanging Loose Press) / Joan Larkin
17. Public Dream (Picador) / Frances Leviston
18. The Pomegranates of Kandahar (Chatto & Windus) / Sarah Maguire
19. Typewriter Music (University of Queensland Press) / David Malouf
20. Crocodiles and Obelisks (Faber & Faber) / Jamie McKendrick
21. Collected Poems (Faber & Faber) / Louis MacNeice (ed. Peter McDonald)
22. A Book of Lives (Carcanet Press) / Edwin Morgan
23. Look We Have Coming to Dover! (Faber & Faber) / Daljit Nagra
24. Sleeping and Waking (Flood Editions) / Michael O’Brien
25. The Drowned Book (Picador) / Sean O’Brien
26. Gulf Music (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) / Robert Pinsky
27. Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems 2004-2006 (W.W. Norton) / Adrienne Rich
28. Space Walk (Houghton Mifflin) / Tom Sleigh
29. Tilt (Jonathan Cape) / Jean Sprackland
30. Poems: New and Selected (1965-2006) (Overlook) / David Shapiro
31. Bird with a Broken Wing (Jonathan Cape) / Adam Thorpe
32. Selected Poems (Faber & Faber) / Derek Walcott (ed. Edward Baugh)
33. Like Something Flying Backwards: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe) / C.D. Wright

Nonfiction
1. Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey (Chicago University Press) / James Attlee
2. City Lights: Stories About New York (St. Martin’s Press) / Dan Barry
3. Charm City: A Walk Through Baltimore (Crown Journeys/Crown Publishers) / Madison Smartt Bell
4. The World in a City: Traveling the Globe Through the Neighborhoods of the New New York (Ballantine Books) / Joseph Berger
5. The Father of All Things (Pantheon) / Tom Bissell
6. The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781-1997 (Jonathan Cape) / Piers Brendon
7. Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capote (Random House) / Truman Capote
8. Inner Workings: Essays 2000-2005 (Harvill Secker/Viking, 2007) / J.M. Coetzee
9. Brother, I’m Dying (Alfred A. Knopf) / Edwidge Danticat
10. Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life (Oxford University Press) / Philip Davis
11. Classics for Pleasure (Harcourt) / Michael Dirda
12. Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World (Scribner) / Anthony Doerr
13. When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir (Picador) / Peter Godwin
14. Peeling the Onion (Harcourt) / Günter Grass [trans. from the German, Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (2006), by Michael Henry Heim]
15. God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Twelve Books/Atlantic Books) / Christopher Hitchens
16. Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts (W.W. Norton/Picador) / Clive James
17. Travels with Herodotus (Alfred A. Knopf/Allen Lane) / Ryszard Kapuscinski [trans. from the Polish by Klara Glowczewska]
18. Descents of Memory: The Life of John Cowper Powys (Duckworth/Overlook) / Morine Krissdóttir
19. Family Romance (Faber & Faber) / John Lanchester
20. Edith Wharton (Chatto & Windus) / Hermione Lee
21. The Wild Places (Granta) / Robert Macfarlane
22. Down the Nile: Alone in a Fisherman’s Skiff (Little, Brown, 2007) / Rosemary Mahoney
23. Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume I: The Young Genius 1885-1920 (Oxford University Press) / A. David Moody
24. The River Queen (Henry Holt) / Mary Morris
25. Ralph Ellison: A Biography (Alfred A. Knopf)/ Arnold Rampersad
26. John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand (Atlantic) / Richard Reeves
27. The Letters of Ted Hughes (Faber & Faber) / Christopher Reid (ed.)
28. The Discovery of France (Picador) / Graham Robb
29. In My Father’s House (Simon & Schuster) / Miranda Seymour
30. Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties (Ecco) / Robert Stone
31. Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism (Alfred A. Knopf) / John Updike