Erasure
by
Percival Everett
Faber and Faber, 01/01/2001
Thelonious "Monk" Ellison's writing career has bottomed out: his latest manuscript has been rejected by seventeen publishers, which stings all the ...
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Literary Fiction
The Catcher in the Rye
by
J. D. Salinger
Back Bay Books, 01/30/2001
Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York ...
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Literary Fiction
Moth Smoke
by
Mohsin Hamid
Picador, 02/03/2001
Through a brilliant array of voices and perspectives, debut author Mohsin Hamid tells the story of one love-struck Daru Shezad, who when fired from ...
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Lives of Girls and Women
by
Alice Munro
Knopf, 02/13/2001
Rural Ontario, 1940s. Del Jordan lives out at the end of the Flats Road on her father's fox farm, where her most frequent companions are an eccentric ...
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Literary Fiction
Critics' Consensus:
Biography/Memoir
Debut Author
Kissing the Virgin's Mouth: A Novel
by
Donna M Gershten
Harper, 02/20/2001
Kissing the Virgin's Mouth is the fictional memoir of Guadalupe Magdalena Molina Vásquez -- wife, scoundrel, courtesan, and mother. In a world ...
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Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
After You'd Gone
by
Maggie O'Farrell
Viking, 03/15/2001
A young woman named Alice Raikes boards a train to Scotland to visit her family. But when she arrives, she witnesses something so shocking that she ...
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Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution
by
Diane McWhorter
Simon & Schuster, 03/15/2001
"The Year of Birmingham," 1963, was one of the most cataclysmic periods in America's long civil rights struggle. That spring, King's child ...
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Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
The Right Hand of Sleep
by
John Wray
Knopf, 04/17/2001
Oskar Voxlauer is in flight from his past—from his bourgeois Austrian upbringing; from horrific memories of fighting on the Italian front in 1917...
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Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
A Single Shard
by
Linda Sue Park
Houghton Mifflin, 04/23/2001
Tree-ear, an orphan, lives under a bridge in Ch'ulp'o, a potters' village famed for delicate celadon ware. He has become fascinated with the potter's ...
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Critics' Consensus:
Historical Fiction
My Garden
by
Jamaica Kincaid
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 05/15/2001
Jamaica Kincaid's first garden in Vermont was a plot in the middle of her front lawn. There, to the consternation of more experienced friends, she ...
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The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America
by
Bill Bryson
William Morrow, 05/15/2001
Following an urge to rediscover his youth, Bill Bryson left his native Des Moines, Iowa, in a journey that would take him across 38 states. Lucky for ...
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Essays
Mansfield Park (Dover Thrift Editions: Classic Novels)
by
Jane Austen
Dover Publications, 05/18/2001
A poor relation, dependent on the goodwill of her aristocratic relatives, the sweet, sensitive, and frequently ignored Fanny nevertheless eventually ...
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Literary Fiction
Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America
by
Louis Menand
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 05/30/2001
The story told in
The Metaphysical Club runs through the lives of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., a Civil War hero who became the dominant legal thinker ...
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Critics' Consensus:
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Slammerkin
by
Emma Donoghue
Harcourt, 06/15/2001
Slammerkin: A loose gown; a loose woman.
Born to rough cloth in Hogarth's London, but longing for silk, Mary Saunders's eye for a shiny red ribbon ...
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Critics' Consensus:
Historical Fiction
Bombay Time: A Novel
by
Thrity Umrigar
Picador, 07/06/2001
A rich, moving, and deeply felt first novel,
Bombay Time portrays the lives of longtime residents of a middle-class apartment building, and their ...
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Critics' Consensus:
Literary Fiction
Debut Author
Sloppy Firsts: A Novel
by
Megan McCafferty
Three Rivers, 08/28/2001
My parents suck ass. Banning me from the phone and restricting my computer privileges are the most tyrannical parental gestures I can think of. Don't ...
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Literary Fiction
Debut Author
Carter Beats the Devil
by
Glen David Gold
Hyperion, 09/01/2001
An amazing, richly evocative novel of magic and history in the tradition of E. L. Doctorow and Caleb Carr.
America in the 1920s was a nation ...
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Critics' Consensus:
Historical Fiction
Debut Author
Kit's Wilderness
by
David Almond
Laurel-Leaf, 09/11/2001
"It was very deep, Kit. Very dark. And every one of us was scared of it. As a lad I'd wake up trembling, knowing that as a Watson born in Stoneygate I...
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The Half-Finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas Tranströmer
by
Tomas Tranströmer
Graywolf Press, 10/01/2001
The contemporary Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer has a prestigious worldwide reputation; many expect that he will someday win the Nobel Prize for ...
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Poetry & Novels in Verse
Short Stories
Critics' Consensus:
Biography/Memoir
Debut Author
