New York Times : The 10 Best Books of 2005

New York Times : The 10 Best Books of 2005
The editors' choices include books by Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan, George Packer and Joan Didion.

Fiction

  • KAFKA ON THE SHORE
    By Haruki Murakami

    Alfred A. Knopf, $25.95.
    This graceful and dreamily cerebral novel, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel, tells two stories - that of a boy fleeing an Oedipal prophecy, and that of a witless old man who can talk to cats - and is the work of a powerfully confident writer. (村上春樹海辺のカフカ』)

Kafka On The Shore (Leather Bound)

Kafka On The Shore (Leather Bound)

  
Kafka on the Shore (Vintage International)

Kafka on the Shore (Vintage International)

 

  • ON BEAUTY
    By Zadie Smith
    Penguin Press, $25.95.
    In her vibrant new book, a cultural-politics novel set in a place like Harvard, the author of ''White Teeth'' brings everything to the table: a crisp intellect, a lovely wit and enormous sympathy for the men, women and children who populate her story.
  • PREP
    By Curtis Sittenfeld
    Random House, $21.95. Paper, $13.95
    This calm and memorably incisive first novel, about a scholarship girl who heads east to attend an elite prep school, casts an unshakable spell and has plenty to say about class, sex and character.

Nonfiction

  • THE ASSASSINS' GATE
    America in Iraq
    By George Packer
    Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26
    A comprehensive look at the largest foreign policy gamble in a generation, by a New Yorker reporter who traces the full arc of the war, from the pre-invasion debate through the action on the ground.
  • DE KOONING
    An American Master
    By Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan
    Alfred A. Knopf, $35
    A sweeping biography, impressively researched and absorbingly written, of the charismatic immigrant who stood at the vortex of mid-20th-century American art.
  • THE LOST PAINTING
    By Jonathan Harr
    Random House, $24.95
    This gripping narrative, populated by a beguiling cast of scholars, historians, art restorers and aging nobles, records the search for Caravaggio's ''Taking of Christ,'' painted in 1602 and rediscovered in 1990.
  • POSTWAR
    A History of Europe Since 1945
    By Tony Judt
    The Penguin Press, $39.95
    Judt's massive, learned, brilliantly detailed account of Europe's recovery from the wreckage of World War II presents a whole continent in panorama even as it sets off detonations of insight on almost every page.
  • THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING
    By Joan Didion
    Alfred A. Knopf, $23.95
    A prose master's harrowing yet exhilarating memoir of a year riven by sudden death (her husband's) and mortal illness (their only child's).