A bookcase Image by Getty/Matthew Horwood/Contributor

By PJ Grisar November 22, 2019

Stories of escape, abduction, friendship, growth and crisis make up The New York Times’s 10 Best Books of 2019, announced November 22.

The Times’s fiction picks include Ben Lerner’s “The Topeka School,” the writer’s third novel. In it, Lerner, through the voices of several characters, evokes the Kansas of his Clinton-era late adolescence. The novel’s kaleidoscopic prose touches on major hallmarks of the Jewish canon: Freud, sex, parents and psychologists — the parents are the psychologists — all make appearances.

On the nonfiction front, Rachel Louise Snyder’s “No Visible Bruises,” an examination of the domestic violence epidemic, reveals the broader societal context for the phenomenon. The compassionately-reported book is a vital resource to readers looking to understand a pervasive problem.

Forwarding the News

Thoughtful, balanced reporting from the Forward and around the web, bringing you updated news and analysis each day.

Terms(Required)

I agree to the Forward's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

Email(Required)

Also recommended is Leo Damrosch’s “The Club,” about the boisterous meetings of such English luminaries as writer Samuel Johnson, historian Edward Gibbon and economist Adam Smith. Damrosch brings these figures to vivid (sometimes raucous) life.

Adam Higginbotham’s “Midnight in Chernobyl” is a riveting companion piece for Craig Mazin’s Emmy-feted HBO miniseries about the 1986 Ukrainian nuclear disaster. The event has new resonance given today’s headlines, as does Patrick Radden Keefe’s “Say Nothing,” which revisits a 1972 murder in Northern Ireland — an area still dealing with the fallout of the Troubles.

The Times list allowed itself the rare work of science fiction with Ted Chiang’s story time travel story collection, “Exhalation,” blurbed by President Barack Obama.

A number of books on the list have been nominated for — or already received — high profile awards. Sarah M. Broom’s memoir, “The Yellow House,” won a National Book Award for nonfiction earlier this week, while Julia Philips’s debut “Disappearing Earth,” about the disappearance of two girls from a far-flung Russian peninsula, was a finalist for the fiction category.

Booker Prize longlisters “Lost Children Archive” by Valeria Luiselli and “Night Boat to Tangier” by Kevin Barry also made The Times’s list.

PJ Grisar is the Forward’s culture fellow. He can be reached at [email protected]

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’re in the middle of our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we have a very ambitious goal of $127,000 by April 22.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on. Make a Passover gift today!

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Make a Passover Gift Today!

$90 $180

$360

Other amount