Signs of Life 2008: The Best Books We Read This Year

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Hillary Jordan
Song Yet Sung by James McBride
[Riverhead, 2008]
I gobbled down Song Yet Sung in two sittings, and if I hadn’t had dinner plans, it would have been one. This engrossing tale follows the desperate flight of a beautiful, prescient runaway slave in 1850s Maryland. McBride has created a cast of indelible characters, led by heroine Liz Spocott, who is wracked by visions of a terrifying (and to the modern reader, all too familiar) future; and Patty Cannon, the slave trader who is hunting her, and who makes Nurse Ratched look kindly by comparison. Love and hatred, compassion and betrayal, terror and redemption: All the good stuff is here.
Hillary Jordan is the author of Mudbound, the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association Fiction Book of the Year and winner of the 2006 Bellwether Prize for Fiction.

Laura Tohe
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
[Little, Brown Young Readers, 2007]
I always thought Sherman Alexie was a better poet than fiction writer, but with his latest book, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, he proves he can also write young-adult fiction. The protagonist, a Spokane Indian born with “grease on the brain” (cerebral spinal fluid), lives with so many minuses against him you wonder how he keeps from taking an overdose of glass cleaner. Alexie is like a conductor waving his wand between the utterly tragic despair of rez (reservation) life and the elusive hope that may be found off the rez. Every time he made me want to cry, he brought me back with humor and his poetic eye that expresses what it means to be a human being at any age.
Laura Tohe is a poet. She wrote the English-and-Navajo libretto for Enemy Slayer: A Navajo Oratorio, which premiered in 2008. It’s the first major symphonic work with text by a Native American writer.  

Roy Blount Jr.
Lamentations of the Father by Ian Frazier
[Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008]
As an American I cannot fail to recommend a book in which an essay on the American essence begins:

George Washington dabbed a few drops of fragrance behind his ears and turned from his dressing table to face the handsome Marquis. The question remained unspoken between them, hanging in the candlelight.

“More brandy, General?” The Marquis broke the silence.

“No thank you. I don’t like what it does to my face.”

Also collected here is the author’s confession that he was married “for a time to the actress Elizabeth Taylor.” So don’t get any ideas.
Roy Blount Jr. is a humorist, sportswriter, poet, performer, lecturer, dramatist and the author of many books. His latest, Alphabet Juice (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), was reviewed in the November issue of Paste.  

Tom Bissell
Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein
[Scribner, 2008]
How do Republicans sell themselves, election after election, as vanguards of a middle class for which they do nothing? Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland answers this question and many, many more. I cannot recall reading a book that better explained my own country to me, or that made me more sympathetic to people whose views and politics are quite different from my own. Above all else, it made me realize that the 1960s—with its burning ghettos, endless riots, numerous assassinations and disintegrating commonwealth—makes our cultural contretemps rather mild by comparison.
Tom Bissell is the author of Chasing the Sea; God Lives in St. Petersburg: and Other Stories; and The Father of All Things. In 2006, he was awarded the Rome Fellowship by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He currently lives in Tallinn, Estonia.

Thomas Cahill
The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry
[Viking Adult, 2008]
The Secret Scripture is a great novel about a 99-year-old woman, an inmate at an Irish mental hospital. Most of the story is told in her words as she writes a secret memoir, trying to understand the truth of her life. The other voice is that of her therapist, almost as keen to resolve the mystery. In her youth, the woman was wrongly committed, but only toward the end do we discover how such an injustice was perpetrated. The resolution is shocking, but the ending is exalting. Along the way are some of the most beautifully formed prose passages I have ever read.
Thomas Cahill is the author of How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe and other best-sellers, most recently Mysteries of the Middle Ages: the Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe.

Charles McNair  
How The Soldier Repairs The Gramophone by Sasa Stanisic
[Grove Press, 2008]
Editors selected a stock photo for the cover of this remarkable debut novel. It shows a man in a suit playing an accordion, ocean behind him, sand under his feet. By freakish chance, the man in the photo turned out to be Daniel Handler, who—as Lemony Snicket—penned a hugely popular children’s series. This same sense of unbelievable, wonderful chance infuses Stanisic’s novel, a piercing and intelligent account of a young Bosnian watching his country fall into chaos. It’s the best novel I’ve read from continental Europe in 10 years—Márquez meets Grass, with a talented writer still in his 20s playing the chords.
Charles McNair is Paste’s books editor and the author of Land O’ Goshen, a novel.