by Wallace Stegner
Wallace Stegner's Pultizer Prize-winning novel is a story of discovery—personal, historical, and geographical. Confined to a wheelchair, retired historian Lyman Ward sets out to write his grandparents' remarkable story, chronicling their days spent carving civilization into the surface of America's western frontier. But his research reveals even more about his own life than he's willing to admit. What emerges is an enthralling portrait of four generations in the life of an American family.
by Tom Rachman
People keep asking me for a good book at work and I kept saying, The Imperfectionists is the best book I have read all year. Then it became that it was the best book I read last year. Then the best book I read in 2010. Now I just tell them it’s a great book and they should just read it. It doesn’t hurt that the style seems to deliberately be a version of Winesburg, Ohio – using several short pieces, all of which easily could stand on their own as short stories, to tell a novel-length tale. It is not just that the stories are inter-related (all of them deal with a failing international newspaper set in Rome and each story focuses on a different person at the paper, one of whom isn’t an employee but an oddly dedicated reader), but that the stories build on each other. That is what turns it into an amazing novel. You can read any story at any time and it will be enjoyable, with wonderful characterization and story-telling. But when read in order, they tell a magnificent tragic tale of this poor paper and its inevitable slide into decay.
The Imperfectionists is a first novel and it got amazing press and word-of-mouth (including a front page review on The New York Times Book Review), but sadly, it was over-shadowed by Franzen’s novel.
By Maria Semple
Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she's a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she's a disgrace; to design mavens, she's a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom.
Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette's intensifying allergy to Seattle--and people in general--has made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands. A trip to the end of the earth is problematic.
To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents, secret correspondence--creating a compulsively readable and touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter's role in an absurd world.
Maria Semple's first novel, This One is Mine, was set in Los Angeles, where she also wrote for television shows including Arrested Development, Mad About You, and Ellen. She escaped from Los Angeles and lives with her family in Seattle, where her second novel takes place.
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