With 2016 winding down there are many lists of the best book of the year coming out. If you're looking for something good to read during your holiday breaks or while you stay inside out of the cold perusing some of these is a good place to start. NPR has put out there list, and they offer a good sort-able list of genres. Here are some selections from their fiction lists to consider picking up.
The Queen of the Night -
Alexander Chee
Lilliet Berne is a sensation of the Paris Opera, a legendary soprano with every accolade except an original role, every singer's chance at immortality. When one is finally offered to her, she realizes with alarm that the libretto is based on a hidden piece of her past. Only four could have betrayed her: one is dead, one loves her, one wants to own her. And one, she hopes, never thinks of her at all.
The Wonder -
Emma Donoghue
Lib Wright, a young English nurse trained by the legendary Florence Nightingale, is sent to rural Ireland to observe Anna, a young girl who is said to have eaten nothing for four months. Lib fully expects to expose Anna's "fast" as a hoax, but her long hours with the girl erode all of her earlier assumptions about Anna, the Irish, and herself.
The Gustav Sonata -
Rose Temain
Gustav Perle grows up in a small town in Switzerland, an only child, and befriends Anton Zweibel, a Jewish boy his age. Moving backward to the Second World War years and the painful repercussions of an act of conscience, and forward through the adult lives and careers of the two men, one who becomes a hotel owner, the other a concert pianist, this novel explores the intensity of a childhood friendship as it is lost, transformed, and regained over a lifetime.
Dark Matter -
Blake Crouch
One night after an evening out, Jason Dessen, forty-year-old physics professor living with his wife and son in Chicago, is kidnapped at gunpoint by a masked man, driven to an abandoned industrial site and injected with a powerful drug. As he wakes, a man Jason's never met smiles down at him and says, "Welcome back, my friend." But this life is not the one he knows. His wife is not his wife; his son was never born; and he's not an ordinary college professor, but a celebrated genius who has achieved something impossible. Is it this world or the other that's the dream? How can he possibly make it back to the family he loves?
Smoke: A Novel -
Dan Vyleta
In an alternate England, where people who are wicked in thought or deed are marked by the Smoke that pours from their bodies, Thomas, Charlie, and Livia notice that some people appear to be able to lie without triggering Smoke. As they dig deeper, they discover teachers who have mysterious ties to warring political factions, a sumptuous estate which hides attic rooms and laboratories, revolutionaries who are fighting against a secret police force. They begin to suspect that everything they have been taught about Smoke is a lie; but if that is a lie, what else about their world is lies? What is their place in the struggle between faith and reason, between good and evil? And who can they trust?
The Trespasser -
Tana French
Being on the Murder Squad is nothing like Detective Antoinette Conway dreamed it would be. Her partner, Stephen Moran, is the only person who seems glad she's there. The rest of her working life is a stream of thankless cases, vicious pranks, and harassment. Antoinette is savagely tough, but she's getting close to the breaking point. Their new case looks like yet another by-the-numbers lovers' quarrel gone bad. Aislinn Murray is blond, pretty, groomed to a shine, and dead in her catalog-perfect living room, next to a table set for a romantic dinner. There's nothing unusual about her--except that Antoinette's seen her somewhere before.
Another Brooklyn -
Jacqueline Woodson
For August, running into a long-ago friend sets in motion resonant memories and transports her to a time and a place she thought she had mislaid: 1970s Brooklyn, where friendship was everything. August, Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi shared confidences as they ambled their neighborhood streets, a place where the girls believed that they were amazingly beautiful, brilliantly talented, with a future that belonged to them. But beneath the hopeful promise there was another Brooklyn, a dangerous place where grown men reached for innocent girls in dark hallways, where mothers disappeared, where fathers found religion, and where madness was a mere sunset away.
Semiosis by Sue Burke
The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal
Black Star Renegades by Michael Moreci
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