Anthony Doerr is the author of the story collections Memory Wall and The Shell Collector, the novels All the Light We Cannot See and About Grace, and the memoir Four Seasons in Rome. He has won four O. Henry Prizes, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Librarys Young Lions Award, the National Magazine Award for fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Story Prize. Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife and two sons.
Clear (2024) Carys Davies "Clear is a compact, taut and brilliant novel with an ingenious premise: one man is sent to evict another from his land, but suddenly requires the second man's aid. Everything gets more complicated from there. The book is about belonging, a dying language, secrets, and a pistol in a box. I loved every page."
Shark Heart (2023) Emily Habeck "Shark Heart is a fantastical, original, and beautifully-written novel of abandonment, love, and Ovidian transformation. It explores illness, caretaking, devotion, magical thinking, and loss--and of course great white sharks--in ways that are funny, sad, and surprising. Every page bursts with heart."
Lone Women (2023) Victor LaValle "If the literary gods mixed together Haruki Murakami and Ralph Ellison, the result would be Victor LaValle."
All the Secrets of the World (2022) Steve Almond "I devoured All the Secrets of the World in a couple of big, greedy bites. It is at once a media critique, a coming-of-age story, a meticulously plotted police procedural, an exploration of racial paranoia, and a haunting account of lust and longing on the fringes of what is allowable. Most of all, it's a deeply compassionate book that shows how policies can trickle down into the lives of individuals and strip them of their humanity."
The Cold Millions (2020) Jess Walter "The Cold Millions is a literary unicorn: a book about socio-economic disparity that’s also a page-turner, a postmodern experiment that reads like a potboiler, and a beautiful, lyric hymn to the power of social unrest in American history. It’s funny and harrowing, sweet and violent, innocent and experienced; it walks a dozen tightropes. Jess Walter is a national treasure."
Lake City (2019) Thomas Kohnstamm "Lake City is a darkly funny and extremely relevant debut novel about American inequality and moral authority, featuring a sad-sack antihero who takes way too long to grow up. When he finally does, the results are beautiful, and the book ultimately becomes an elegy for a now-gone Seattle, and a lesson in how the place we’re from never fully lets us go."
The Winter Soldier (2018) Daniel Mason "Part mystery, part war story, part romance, The Winter Soldier is a dream of a novel."
Mr. Dickens and His Carol (2017) Samantha Silva "Mr. Dickens and His Carol is a charming, comic, and ultimately poignant Christmas tale about the creation of the most famous Christmas tale ever written. It’s as foggy and haunted and redemptive as the original; it’s all heart, and I read it in a couple of ebullient, Christmassy gulps."
Mischling (2016) Affinity Konar "One of the most harrowing, powerful, and imaginative books of the year."
Barkskins (2016) Annie Proulx "Magnificent... Barkskins flies... One of the chief pleasures of Proulx’s prose is that it conveys you to so many vanished wildwoods, where you get to stand ‘tiny and amazed in the kingdom of pines.’ This is also the great sadness of Barkskins. The propulsive tension here is generated not by wondering what will happen to each character, but by knowing that the forests will be leveled one after another... If Barkskins doesn’t bear exquisite witness to our species’s insatiable appetite for consumption, nothing can."
Slade House (2015) David Mitchell "I gulped down this novel in a single evening. Intricately connected to David Mitchell’s previous books, this compact fantasy burns with classic Mitchellian energy. Painstakingly imagined and crackling with narrative velocity, it’s a Dracula for the new millennium, a Hansel and Gretel for grownups, a reminder of how much fun fiction can be."
Of Sea and Cloud (2014) Jon Keller "...a gorgeously written exploration of faith and loyalty, love and dishonesty.... I will never forget these characters, these waters, or the harrowing dramas unfolded upon and beneath them."
The Plover (2014) Brian Doyle "Brian Doyle writes with Melville's humor, Whitman's ecstasy, and Faulkner's run-on sentences...Few contemporary novels shimmer like this one."
(b.1973)
