(Oprah.com) -- Most Ambitious Book of 2011: The Tiger's Wife
By Tea Obreht
When her grandfather dies far from home under mysterious circumstances, Natalia sets off on two life-changing journeys: one across her homeland, the former Yugoslavia, and another into her family's history, revisiting stories that her grandfather used to tell her. As long-hidden secrets come to light, Tea Obreht's The Tiger's Wife (Random House) deftly walks the line between the realistic and the fantastical. Natalia's grandfather was a brilliant doctor and practical man (his motto: "I prepare, I think, I explain") who scoffed at superstition throughout most of his life. Yet his recollections take on the magical sheen of folklore, as in the tale of the "deathless man," a wayfarer who never ages, and another in which a deaf-mute woman grows so attached to a stray tiger that her neighbors believe she's become its wife. These strange and beautiful stories from the past eventually converge with Natalia's present, revealing oddly comforting truths about death, belief in the impossible, and the art of letting go. In Obreht's expert hands, the novel's mythology, while rooted in a foreign world, comes to be somehow familiar, like the dark fairy tales of our own youth, the kind that spooked us into reading them again and again.
-- Stephan Lee
Oprah.com: The gift book guide
Most Of-The-Moment Book of 2011: The Leftovers
By Tom Perrotta
October 14: The date of the Sudden Departure, or a "Rapture-like phenomenon." Millions of people around the world -- dignitaries, celebrities ("the nerdy guy in the Verizon ads"), and regular folks -- simply vanish. But Tom Perrotta's The Leftovers (St. Martin's) is less concerned with the inherent religious issues than with the lives of the suburbanites left behind. Kevin Garvey, the newly elected mayor of Mapleton, strives for a return to normalcy even as his children become unmoored -- his daughter, Jill, goes from model student to troubled teen, and his college-age son runs away to follow a crackpot "healing prophet." There are other, community-based post-Rapture changes as well, including the Guilty Remnant, a cult that sends silent, chain-smoking, white-wearing Watchers to patrol neighborhoods and remind survivors that "the old world is gone." Soon Kevin's wife joins the G.R., and he can only stumble forth into a relationship with a woman who's still grieving the sudden disappearance of her husband and children. Perrotta, always a master chronicler of listless suburbia, has written an affecting, often funny story of people reeling from loss and searching for a future. The Leftovers is an apocalyptic novel for people who wouldn't be caught dead -- or even Raptured -- reading such a thing.
-- Stephan Lee
Oprah.com: How to embrace the present moment
Most Layered Book of 2011: Ten Thousand Saints
By Eleanor Henderson
"On the last morning of 1987 and the last morning of Teddy's life, the two boys lay side by side, a pair of snow angels bundled in thrift-store parkas," Eleanor Henderson writes in Ten Thousand Saints (Ecco), forecasting the death that will spark the next year's events in this irresistibly rich and engrossing novel. The story moves from Lintonburg, Vermont -- where 15-year-old Teddy and his best friend, Jude, pass the time getting high, being roughed up by jocks, and yearning vaguely for the mysterious pleasures of girls -- to Manhattan's (pregentrified) Lower East Side, where Teddy's 18-year-old brother, Johnny, works as a tattoo artist and plays in a hard-core punk band. Manhattan is also where Jude's father, Les, an amiable pot dealer, has lived since abandoning his family years earlier. On New Year's Eve, Eliza, Les's almost-stepdaughter, visits Lintonburg and relieves Teddy of his virginity during a party. Hours later, Teddy dies under heartbreakingly stupid circumstances. This all happens in the first two chapters. The rest of the poignant, complex story unfolds over the following year, as Eliza, Jude, and Johnny form a tight but fraught bond in Teddy's memory -- and Les belatedly tries to act like a dad. Henderson brilliantly evokes the gritty energy of New York City in the '80s, and the violent euphoria of the music scene. The hard-edged settings highlight the touching vulnerability of young characters, who are -- behind the sex, drugs, and punk rock -- innocents aching for something unnameable, always just beyond their grasp.
-- Karen Holt
Oprah.com: Oprah's 10 favorite books from the past decade
Most Cinematic Book of 2011: Rules of Civility
By Amor Towles
In Amor Towles's debut novel, Rules of Civility (Viking), post-Depression Manhattan -- the glittering metropolis of cocktails, jazz clubs, and glamorous apartment towers guarded by knowing doormen -- is also the city of profound reinvention. Towles's fascinating narrator, Katey (née Katya) Kontent, works as a secretary at a white-shoe law firm, where she deftly hides the fact that she's the daughter of immigrant laborers. Refreshingly unconcerned about becoming an old maid -- she just turned 25! -- she nevertheless finds herself in competition with her roommate for the affections of one very attractive patrician named Tinker Grey. ("How the Wasps loved to nickname their children after the workaday trades: Tinker. Cooper. Smithy.") The charming and cerebral Katey appears to have the edge, until Eve is badly injured in a car accident in Tinker's roadster. Guilt-ridden, he moves Eve into his elegant Central Park West apartment; she gets better, they begin to travel together. As Katey learns about their escapades in Europe and the finer New York suburbs, she tries to make do with other privileged, sometimes more callow boys, but time has changed everything, including her. In the crisp, noirish prose of the era, Towles portrays complex relationships in a city that is at once melting pot and elitist enclave -- and a thoroughly modern heroine who fearlessly claims her place in it.
-- Lisa Birnbach
Oprah.com: Award-winning books: How many have you read?
Most Deceptively Deep Book of 2011: Blueprints for Building Better Girls
By Elissa Schappell
Elissa Schappell is not for the fainthearted. In this collection of eight revelatory, risky stories, we meet the girls that all mothers fear their daughter might become -- or, to varying degrees, the girls we might have become ourselves. One turns to hate to cover her vulnerability, while another suffers from an eating disorder, in some part due to her mother's all-consuming embrace. The most shocking story follows a college coed through her days of binge drinking and blacking out during a relentless parade of frat house parties. Surprisingly, it's also the most moving. Schappell has the ability -- and the guts -- to cut straight through the "girls gone wild" images that inevitably throb to mind (ouch) and show us the tender and often hopeful human beings that live inside these women-to-be.
In one upsetting scene, a group of angry, male bar patrons chases the coed and her friends across a deserted parking lot. As she jumps into a car to escape, the coed feels her mother's treasured strand of pearls break and must leave those pearls rolling hopelessly across the asphalt -- save for one, about which she wonders if she has any right to even keep. "Maybe some farm kid walking down the street would find it..." she says. "And then they'd think that maybe the world wasn't as ugly as they thought it was. Maybe there was magic in it after all."
A rule for us all: There is always magic in a gift from your mother. Always.
-- Leigh Newman
Oprah.com: The best nonfiction books of 2011
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