The truth is, there’s enough great fiction out there that it makes sense to reach for a certain breadth, balance and variety. This year’s Booker Prize short list was so good, it’s tempting to simply reproduce it, but an all-Brit list would be as cockeyed as, say, an all-male one. In the end, we’ve kept the Booker crowd down to just two. Hillary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” was neck and neck with A.S. Byatt’s “The Children’s Book,” but a shade more celebrated, which tipped the balance in favor of Dame Antonia.

Behind all the more ephemeral trends — vampires, Swedish mysteries, etc. — most readers still seek the same thing in great fiction: a sojourn, however brief, into another world and into the hearts and minds of the people who inhabit it. Here’s our list of five books that made that happen in 2009.

“The Children’s Book” by A.S. Byatt
This ravishing epic of the Edwardian era traces the lives of several interlocking families, at the center of which is Olive Wellwood, who is based on the great children’s novelist E. Nesbit. The novel begins with an idyllic amateur production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in the English countryside and winds through a series of often disturbing revelations about the participants. Their shared obsessions include fairy tales, the Arts and Crafts movement, social utopias and sex, but perhaps the most striking of all Byatt’s themes is the drive to create and how it shapes (some would say distorts) the personalities of those possessed by it; nobody writes better about this than she does. This a classic Byatt fusion of fact and uncannily luscious imagery, mixed in the ideal proportions: not too hot, not too cold — just right.

“Await Your Reply: A Novel” by Dan Chaon
This elegant page-turner begins with three seemingly disconnected characters — a man in search of his long-lost twin, a high school girl getting the hell out of Pompey, Ohio, and a college student succumbing to the criminality he believes is in his blood — all fleeing across forgotten stretches of the American heartland. Its theme is identity and the theft thereof, but also our national dream of jettisoning our old selves and becoming someone new. Chaon is that rare novelist who can combine intricate, suspenseful plotting with fully realized characters and unfussily lovely prose, but his great achievement here is the tenderness with which he explores the enigma at the center of the novel: What does it really mean to have a self, and what do you have left if you’re foolish enough to throw it away?

“Chronic City” by Jonathan Lethem
A great New York novel should aim for the universal by way of the parochial. The Manhattanites in Lethem’s near-future/alternative-now metropolis experience all the crises and travails of 21st-century life in a slightly more concentrated form. (It takes a novelist of exceptional talent and nerve to make you believe that matters of moment can hang on the outcome of an eBay auction.) A former child star coasting on his fading fame, a brilliant but terminally eccentric rock critic, a sarcastic ghostwriter and an activist turned municipal bureaucrat stumble through a city riddled with unreliable rumors, insufficiently explained disasters, dilettante millionaires, imperious celebrities and other signs and wonders. What they — what all of us — yearn for in a world full of engineered appearances and emotions is the truly beautiful and the truly moving. Can they find it, and will they even recognize it when they do? On this you can count: “Chronic City” is the real thing.
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“Love in Infant Monkeys: Stories” by Lydia Millet
This collection begins with a short story about Madonna going on a grouse hunt, which might sound like an inauspicious start for a book whose theme is loss on an epochal scale. Guess again: With immense confidence, Millet takes a motley assortment of famous or pseudo-famous figures — Thomas Edison, David Hasselhoff, the zoologist from “Born Free,” a Sharon Stone impersonator — and gives each a transformative encounter with an (often imperiled) animal. The result, a cumulative effect formed by all the stories in the collection, draws illuminating connections and comparisons between the trivial and the eternal. Millet’s vision is startling, as often tragic as it is hilarious (and she can be very, very funny), but always shot through with the mystery of existence, a gift we can barely manage to appreciate even as we carelessly steal it from the rest of the earth’s denizens. “Love in Infant Monkeys” is a slyly and unsentimentally profound exploration of what human beings can (but very seldom do) learn from our fellow creatures.

“The Little Stranger” by Sarah Waters
Waters takes one of narrative literature’s most venerable genres — the ghost story — into fresh territory. Haunted houses usually stand as metaphors for misbegotten psychosexual situations. In “The Little Stranger,” Waters masterfully redeploys the gothic tale to address the great theme of the British novel: class. During the lean years after World War II, a rural physician ingratiates himself into the remnants of a local “old family” as they rattle around their decrepit but still beautiful mansion. In time, eerie manifestations of some indistinct yet malevolent force begin to torment the house’s aristocratic residents. What — or, rather, who — is causing the strange noises and mysterious stains? At once innovative and genuinely creepy, “The Little Stranger” is an astonishing performance, right down to its devastating final sentence.
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“Somewhere Towards the End” by Diana Athill
Bookstores are overflowing with memoirs about childhood, adolescence, the romantic misadventures of early adulthood and the trials of parenting. But what does life look like from the tenth decade? Most of us do hope to find out, but are otherwise reluctant to think about it. This memoir is a heartening answer to the questions many are afraid to ask. Athill, a British editor, has led an unconventional life with unexpected results and harbors no expectations of an afterlife, yet the generosity, dignity, frankness and, yes, wisdom she has attained in her 90-some years are qualities everyone can aspire to in their own old age. You won’t find the usual “inspirational” self-help nostrums in this slim book, but rather eloquent, honest, long-view ruminations on the meaning of love, sex, work, family and art. Athill doesn’t preach; she doesn’t have to. Just spending a few hours in her company is endlessly enlightening.
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“Columbine” by Dave Cullen
The 1999 mass murder at Columbine High School in Colorado was an event at once freakish and quintessentially American. It was also a reporter’s nightmare, with hundreds of eyewitnesses, conflicting accounts of what happened and why, law enforcement gaffes, groundless rumors and theories propagated by the media and, eventually, the dueling agendas of the survivors. Full disclosure: Dave Cullen did much of his initial reporting on Columbine for Salon, but this book, the definitive account of the shootings, takes the story much, much further. Meticulously reported, “Columbine” assembles all the substantiated facts, then forges them into a propulsive narrative, woven from nine strands corresponding to nine individuals, each of whom had his or her own distinct experience of that terrible day. Then Cullen delves beneath the events themselves (dispelling many myths in the process) to consider the killers’ motives, carefully and persuasively arguing for his own conclusions. Thirteen people lost their lives before the two teenage murderers committed suicide, and Cullen’s thoughtful account pays them the tribute of the truth.
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“The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science” by Richard Holmes
Holmes is best-known for his entrancing biographies of the Romantic poets. With “The Age of Wonder,” he turns his pen to the visionary scientists of his favorite period — the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th. It’s a story of intrepid (not to mention lusty) explorers, tripping chemists and eccentric stargazers, set in a time when the discovery of a new planet (Uranus, by the master astronomer William Herschel and his sister Caroline) filled people with both wonder and dread — an emotional cocktail otherwise known as the Romantic sublime. For a few decades, poets and scientists felt they were united in a journey that linked empirical discovery with the boundless scope of the imagination. Holmes captures the heady mood of the era, moving sinuously from Tahiti, to the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, to the ballooning exploits of the Montgolfier brothers to the African ordeals of Mungo Park, with cameo appearances by the likes of Coleridge and Byron. Seldom have science and art been so gloriously married.
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“Tall Man: The Death of Doomadgee” By Chloe Hooper
An utterly riveting combination of true crime, courtroom drama and social exposé, Hooper’s exquisitely written book details the 2004 death of an aboriginal man while in the custody of Australian police, and that tragedy’s harrowing aftermath. The setting is Palm Island on the Great Barrier Reef, a one-time paradise that for 50 years was Australia’s Australia, a “tropical gulag” where uppity Aborigines were sent when they objected to the appalling treatment they received at the hands of the state. With spare, sure strokes, Hooper paints a situation that is anything but clear-cut: The material evidence was damning, but the cop accused was known for his services to the community, and many of the witnesses against him were drunk and susceptible to social pressures. Hooper, a novelist enlisted by the dead man’s family and their crusading lawyer, had only the sketchiest knowledge of her nation’s treatment of its indigenous people when she began the book; for an American, reading about it is a lot like looking at our own country’s troubled racial history through a refracted, yet illuminating lens.

“A New Literary History of America” by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, eds.
Granted, this collection of 200 short essays is so wide-ranging (with entries lighting on everything from Mark Twain and Emily Dickinson to the Winchester rifle, Alcoholics Anonymous and “Deep Throat”) that it might have been better titled “The New Cultural History of America,” but it’s so vast, inquisitive and richly surprising than any minor irregularity in labeling must be instantly forgiven. Neither reference nor criticism, neither history nor treatise, this volume is a genre-defying, transcendent fusion of them all, a treasury to keep by your bedside. Read an installment every night and end the year with a much deeper understanding of the exhilarating and heartbreaking nation it chronicles. Inevitable, necessary and profoundly welcome.
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