Whittling down a best-books list can be uncomfortably arbitrary. So let’s just say that the titles presented below, in alphabetical order, were “the best” at capturing my attention in this most distracting of years.
THE ABSTAINER, by Ian McGuire. (Random House, 320 pp., $27.) Manchester, England, in the mid-1860s is gripped by political violence that Head Constable James O’Connor may be ill equipped to handle. An Irishman, he must cope with suspicious British colleagues, rebellious fellow countrymen and his own past fondness for the bottle. And then an assassin arrives, all the way from America.
BLACK BOTTOM SAINTS, by Alice Randall. (Amistad, 368 pp., $26.99.) A rambunctious portrait of the “caramel Camelot” that was Detroit’s Black Bottom neighborhood from the late 1930s to the late 1960s. Narrated by a fictional version of the real-life impresario Ziggy Johnson, it’s a series of mini-biographies inspired by the Roman Catholic book of saints and a Black bartender’s classic collection of cocktails.
THE BLIND LIGHT, by Stuart Evers. (Norton, 544 pp., $27.95.) A portrait of two families disastrously linked by the fear that gripped post-World War II British society: the prospect of nuclear annihilation. Drummond Moore and James Carter come from radically different backgrounds, but their service together on a civil defense training base known as Doom Town will warp their relationship for decades to come.
THE COLD MILLIONS, by Jess Walter. (Harper, 352 pp., $28.99.) Walter sends two fictional brothers into the free speech riots that seized Spokane, Wash., in the early years of the last century. A labor struggle pitting workers against the powers that be, this confrontation also provided a platform for a charismatic historical figure named Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.
