PW Best of 2007

The complete list is here, but these are some on their list that I’m interested in.

Fieldwork
Mischa Berlinski (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
This first novel about an anthropology student in northern Thailand who “goes native” has it all: story, mystery characters, suspense, resolution.

The Savage Detectives
Roberto Bolaño (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Chilean-born novelist Bolaño (1953–2003), beautifully translated by Natasha Wimmer, deliriously tracks Mexico City poets Arturo Belano (Bolaño’s alter ego) and Ulysses Lima as they travel the globe over 20-plus years.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Junot Díaz (Riverhead)
Díaz’s fierce, funny and tragic first novel, starring a sci-fi-and-fantasy–gobbling nerd-hero, is just what readers have held out for since Drown.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Mohsin Hamid (Harcourt)
Hamid’s intelligent war on terror novel is written from the perspective of a young Pakistani whose sympathies, despite his fervid immigrant embrace of America, lie with the attackers.

The Archivist’s Story
Travis Holland (Dial)
Set in 1939 Moscow, the story of a disgraced literature professor who’s in charge of destroying anti-Soviet writings and decides to save an unfinished manuscript of Isaac Babel’s captures the mood and realities of life in Soviet Russia.

What the Dead Know
Laura Lippman (Morrow)
In this outstanding stand-alone thriller, a driver who flees a car accident breathes new life into a 30-year-old mystery—the disappearance of two young sisters at a shopping mall—when she tells the police she’s one of the missing girls.

White Walls: Collected Stories
Tatyana Tolstaya (NYRB)
Beautiful, imaginative and disconcerting, the Russia of Tolstoy’s great-grandniece is a labyrinth of eras, treasures and horrors: past and present, shabby and brutal, magical and otherworldly.

The Cloud of Unknowing
Thomas Cook (Harcourt/Penzler)
In the beginning it’s unclear if a crime occurred at all, then it appears that there was not just one murder but two, three or even four in this unusual, chilling mystery from Edgar-winner Cook.

Elijah of Buxton
Christopher Paul Curtis (Scholastic)
Using the witty vernacular of an 11-year-old freeborn boy, Curtis brings together an arresting historical setting (a real-life haven for runaway slaves in mid-19th-century Canada) and physical comedy before launching a plot that changes the tenor of the novel from folksy to harrowing. 

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