594. Have You Read? The New York Times' Best Books of the Year (So Far)

September 18: Tayari Jones, Kin. ISBN 978-0525659181. “My first word was ‘mother,’ spoken out loud and with texture. MOTHER.” But this girl child, Vernice, calls for her murdered mother in vain. It is Louisiana in the 1950s, and the orphaned narrator must find another relationship comparable in intensity to the mother-child bond. This she finds in Annie, another motherless daughter. Both young women undertake psychological journeys to fill the void left by the absent mothers, at the same time forming their own bond of sisterhood.

October 16: Daniyal Mueenuddin, This is Where the Serpent Lives. ISBN 978-0525655152. In Rawalpindi, Pakistan, it is the early 1950s, and a three-year-old boy is alone in a bazaar. Lost or abandoned children were no rarity in those turbulent times, but this child is different: he has shoes. The author himself, in an NPR interview, describes these shoes as “a question mark . . . put in front of” one of the merchants, Karim Khan, a purveyor of tea and curry and “a good man.” Khan informally adopts the boy and thus begins the formation of what Mueenuddin calls a “dysfunctional family” comparable to Pakistan itself.

November 6: Ben Lerner, Transcription. ISBN 978-0374618599. As the novel opens, the narrator is on a train, on his way to interview a ninety-year-old author. Because the narrator is facing backwards on the train, he cannot read the author’s latest book – this type of motion makes him nauseous. His young daughter explains this problem succinctly: in this position, he is “facing the past.” The narrator must face the past via a triangular relationship – the novelist, the narrator himself, and the novelist’s son -- and somehow preserve it. But the narrator’s task is complicated by the malfunctioning of his cell phone. Can these three men understand each other without the help of technology? And if they do, how will they preserve it?

December 11: Caro Claire Burke, Yesteryear. ISBN 978-0-593804216. The narrator of Burke’s novel imagines herself as that paragon of female virtue, “a flawless Christian woman. The manic pixie American dream girl of this nation’s deepest, darkest fantasies. The mother every woman wanted to be, and the wife every man wanted to come home to.” Nostalgia for an imagined past, a yesteryear when women knew, and were content to occupy, their subservient place in the world is at the heart of this satire. The title of Sophie Gilbert’s review in The Atlantic concisely summarizes the novel’s trajectory: “What Happens When the Tradwife Dream Goes Wrong?”