5. Alice Sebold: The Lovely Bones [Little, Brown] (2002)
Sebold’s first book, Lucky, was a memoir in which she grappled with being raped as an 18-year-old in same spot where another girl had recently been raped, murdered and dismembered. Knowing that, it’s hard not to feel an even stronger tie to The Lovely Bones’ narrator, young Susie Salmon, who peers down on her grief-wracked family from a fantastical, personalized heaven after her own brutal rape and murder. Darkly delicate, wise and heartbreaking, it’s as much a tribute to the living as the dead. Rachael Maddux
4. Arthur Philips: Prague [Random House] (2002)
They’re expatriates, the band of protagonists in Arthur Philips fine first novel, shakily finding their ways in a strange new city and within their strange new lives. And as they do so, the city (Budapest, not Prague, despite its titualr status) itself shifts around them, reeling from the recently sloughed-off burdern of facism and war—trying to find itself, too, suddenly a stranger in its own streets. Rachael Maddux
3. Zadie Smith: White Teeth [Random House] (2000)
In these disparate but deftly interwoven stories of several families—cultural mutts, all of them—living in North London, Zadie Smith’s detailed descriptions of the alternately excruciating and enlightening interpersonal relationships touch upon the turmoil of being a biracial adolescent and the genesis of an Islamic fundamentalist make White Teeth at once a perfectly suited artifact of our decade’s cultural tensions, and a timeless story deserving of its place in the canon of decades to come. Emily Riemer
2. Junot Diaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao [Riverhead] (2007)
There’s a curse, and there’s a nerd. And through the huge, ungainly body of one, we learn about the other—and, along with it, about science fiction, high school, heartbreak and all the blessings and burden of family, ethnicity, history, life. It’s a story about storytelling itself, how to reconcile all these other lives with our own (brief or wondrous or otherwise), its lessons illuminated in the voices of Junot Diaz’s round, warm characters, funny and fraught and realer than real. Rachael Maddux
1. Jonathan Safran Foer: Everything Is Illuminated [Harper Perennial] (2002)
“We shared it with our loved ones, pressing it into their hands like a locket. This astonishing story of self-discovery—of loss and hope and faith and sacrifice—is the story of every immigrant, every wanderer and sad romantic. It is fiction and fable. It is ancient and modern. It is guileless. It reminds us who we were and where we came from, and it shows us how to love for all time.” Nick Marino, Paste #58 (read more)