Booklist Editors' Choice: Adult Books

In this sublimely intricate and compulsively readable tour de force of Dickensian bravura and genre-blending splendor, Harkaway tells the tale of a mild-mannered London clockmaker faced with saving humanity from extinction.

This beautifully crafted novel invokes the fragility of community as it follows Bit Stone, the first child to be born in the late 1960s on an upstate New York commune called Arcadia, from childhood through the year 2018.

Inspired by newspaper stories from the last four centuries, Donoghue’s masterful short story collection explores the unexpected in people’s lives in such varied settings as Victorian England, Civil War–era Texas, and early twentieth-century New York City.

Doig’s latest historical novel set in the fictional Two Medicine Country in northern Montana stars an affable bartender and his precocious 12-year-old son, whose coming-of-age takes place in a saloon. Rich in character and detail.

In 1962, an American movie starlet arrives at a small hotel on the Italian coast, there to recuperate from a disaster on the set of the movie Cleopatra. A sparkling reimagining of history.

Tyler’s sparkling, covertly philosophical tale about a man who refuses to be defined by his disability or denied communication with his deceased wife reveals how ill-prepared we are for life’s contrary demands.

Written in a voice that is at once hopeful, cautious, and completely lost yet utterly knowing, Fountain’s novel delivers a brilliant, powerful examination of how modern warfare affects soldiers who have returned home.

This second volume in the author’s planned trilogy brilliantly reconstructing the life of Henry VIII’s secretary Thomas Cromwell follows Wolf Hall (2009) and tells the story of the fall of Anne Boleyn.

Freeland offers an engaging, deeply analytical look at the history, politics, and economics behind the rise of the super-elites, drawing parallels between current inequality and the Gilded Age of the late 1800s.

Galuszka investigates the 2010 Upper Big Branch Mine disaster in this bracing inquiry into the corporate culture at Massey Energy and how the coal industry conquered a landscape’s body and soul.