Six Fantastic Overlooked 2015 Books

We can't all read everything, and often, some terrific novels slip through the cracks. Here are six I was lucky enough to catch this year — all that didn't get nearly the recognition or readership they deserved. If you're looking for a diamond in the rough, check out any of these six fantastic books.

Days of Awe, by Lauren Fox — This great novel about grief cracks my list for a couple of reasons: 1) It's one of the funnier sad novels I've read in a long time, and 2) It takes place in Milwaukee — which gets it many bonus points in my book! This is a hip, modern story about adult friendships tested by tragedy — and it packs rather the emotional punch. Fox is a smooth, witty, smart writer.

The Knife, by Ross Ritchell — Ritchell, who is a former special forces soldier, writes his debut novel about special forces troops operating in "Afghanipakiraqistan" — the nebulous theater of war these days. It's an ultra-authentic-feeling war novel, but what I liked about it most is that it really gets to the heart of the moral dilemma some soldiers wrestle with regarding killing and death. The novel is also pitch perfect in terms of capturing the camaraderie of soldiers at war. If you're a fan of modern war novels, give this one a shot. And if you liked the movie Zero Dark Thirty, there's a good chance you'll dig this too.

Foreign Gods, Inc., by Okey Ndibe — Cheating a little here, because this was a late 2014 novel, but I read it in paperback in 2015, so it counts. It's a strange story, mixing myth and reality, about a Nigerian immigrant taxi driver who returns to his tiny village to steal the village's god, in the hopes of selling it to a NYC art dealer. As you can imagine, things don't go as planned. (And I don't mind admitting, I was drawn to this novel by its terrific cover art.)

Beneath the Bonfire, by Nickolas Butler — This terrific collection of short stories will also be on my overall "Best of 2015" list (stay tuned). Butler's follow-up to his novel Shotgun Lovesongs, which was also one of my favorite books of last year, definitely cements his place as a must-read writer for me. He's really terrific, and if you liked Shutgun Lovesongs, you'll love this collection, too — the setting (rural and small-town Wisconsin) and characters are rather recognizable.

Bonita Avenue, by Peter Buwalda — Almost nobody read (or has even heard of ) this crazy Dutch novel about a terribly dysfunctional family. But if you're a sucker for a story about bad things happening to bad people as a result of making really, really bad decisions, this is a novel for you. Part Philip Roth (sexual deviance), part Jonathan Franzen (dysfunctional family), part Coen Brothers (violence!), but all grouchy Dutch! 

All My Puny Sorrows, by Miriam Toews — I read this for a book club, and wasn't expecting to enjoy this tale of sisterhood, one of whom is desperately depressed, as much as I did. It was a tough read at times, not pulling any punches in how it treats the issue of suicide. And the questions it makes the reader consider aren't easy either: What would you do if someone you loved simply didn't want to live anymore? But ultimately, it feels complete and profound, and with characters who stay with you.

The Tsar of Love and Techno: On Art, Life, War, and Peace (Phenomenal!)

If you read Anthony Marra's much-acclaimed 2013 novel A Constellation of Vital Phenomena — a harrowing, beautiful, brilliant novel about the wars in Chechnya — then, like me, you've been waiting patiently for his next thing. Thankfully, the wait wasn't long. Here it is — a collection of interconnected stories (truthfully, this reads more like a novel than a short story collection) titled The Tsar of Love and Techno that is, in a word, phenomenal.

There are nine distinct stories, but characters recur, constantly building the overall story — similar to, say, Jennifer Egan's, A Visit From the Goon Squad. At the center is a minor work by a Russian painter — a landscape scene of a meadow outside of Grozny that carries significance in many different ways to many different characters over the course of the book. The stories range from the Siberian nickel-mining and former Gulag town of Kirovsk in both pre-WWII and present day, to the streets of St. Petersburg, and to Grozny, Chechnya at various times.

What's wonderful about this book is how tightly knit and neatly nested these stories are. A brief anecdote about one character in one story becomes the basis for another story later. This is a character-driven book, and these are wonderful people — a Russian movie star/beauty queen, a Russian oligarch billionaire, an "art-restorer" in the time of Stalin whose job is to touch up art to remove dissidents...and also to make Stalin look better, a Grozny bureaucrat and art lover, a Russian gangster and soldier-for-hire named Kolya (if there's a "main character," its him), a St. Petersburg scam-artist named Sergei, who gets a list of Americans to scam from Tom Hanks' Facebook fan page (because those people MUST be naïve...hilarious.) These wonderful characters flit in and out of each others' lives, constructing a cornerstone theme about how life imitates art imitates life until the two are nearly indistinguishable. Also, war is horrific.

If you've read Vital Phenomena, you know this: Marra is a supremely talented writer. Perhaps the one thing I loved most about this book is his ability to evoke such a range of emotions throughout this collection as a whole, but often on the same page. One of the stories — perhaps my favorite, titled "The Grozny Tourist Bureau," — is about a fellow who is put in charge of revamping Grozny's lagging tourism industry after the wars are over and Grozny is basically a pile of rubble. It's by turns hilarious and heart-breaking, and I loved it.

I'm always a little skeptical when a writer publishes a collection of stories immediately after a hugely successful novel. But this isn't just a collection of previously published pieces. It's possible some of these were published elsewhere first (I don't want to find out, to be honest), but this book has such a deliberate, purposeful feel. It is easily one of my favorites of the year — extremely highly recommended. (By the way, its current Goodreads rating is 4.42, and it made it on NY Times list of 100 Notable Books, so it's not just me who thinks this books is terrific.)

Avenue of Mysteries, and Its Place in the John Irving Oeuvre

There's no pulling punches on this one: John Irving's new novel, Avenue of Mysteries, is bad. It's my least favorite of all the books of his I've read — which is 10 of his 14 novels. Yes, indeed, Avenue of Mysteries takes its place at the butt end.

It's a nearly focus-less, spaghetti-at-the-wall story, but with a totally cliché overarching theme of the intersection of dreams and memories. An aging writer named Juan Diego travels to the Philippines to honor a promise he made as a boy. During this trip, he periodically falls asleep and dreams of his childhood in Oaxaca, Mexico. His sister Lupe (the two kids are orphans) can read people's minds. They love dogs. Juan Diego is a good reader. They are devoted to Our Lady of Guadalupe. There are ghosts, demons, arguments over Catholicism, arguments over where writers get their ideas (autobiography vs imagination), there is deviant sex, there is a Jesuit-in-training who falls in love with a transvestite prostitute, there are circus performers and lions, the AIDS epidemic, Viagra, etc., etc., etc. 

It's an utter mess. And the worst part? You'd think with all these disparate elements, Irving could at least spin us a good yarn. But no. The story itself — about Juan Diego wondering around in the Philippines with two mysterious women with whom he periodically has sex and the bildungsroman-esque flashbacks/dreams to his childhood in Mexico — is, with a few exceptions here and there (the 75 or so pages about the circus were great!), totally snooze-inducing. It's long, it's often repetitive (he re-uses the same phrases, or tells us the same piece of information several times, often multiple times in the same chapter or on the same page, as if we've forgotten, and he's reminding us...or he just needed a bit of editing), and, at the end of the day, just not the same quality of story for which Irving is known.

So this makes four of Irving's last five novels that haven't even approached the level of his most famous and best works, like A Prayer for Owen Meany, which is still one of my Top Five favorite novels of all time. The Fourth Hand (2001) was okay, but just sort of odd, and a bit thin. Until I Find You (2005) was long and repetitive — my second least favorite of the 10 of Irving's novels I've read. Last Night In Twisted River (2009), however, was fantastic. I really loved it, and I thought this heralded a return to form for Irving. But then In One Person (2012) was decent, but uneven, and then with Avenue of Mysteries (2015), Irving just went off a cliff.

Is this it for him? It's definitely a conspicuous downwards trend. Indeed, I can't even say for sure that Irving, one of my erstwhile favorite writers, is a must-read for me anymore if he publishes anything new. All I do know is that reading this made me really sad, and if you're on the fence about reading it, my recommendation is to read something better.

The Mark and the Void: Satire of the Banking Crisis

If there's only one good thing to come out of the Great Recession, it's this hilarious novel. You may remember Paul Murray from Skippy Dies, a terrific, goofy novel about Irish prep school kids. Well, The Mark and the Void is terrific and goofy, too — but with a much more "serious" subject. I's a satire of two professions: Bankers and novelists. And you'll be surprised to find they have more in common than you might think.

"The financial corporation has become a machine for producing unreality," Murray tells us at one point, paraphrasing a philosopher several characters in the novel admire. And that's it: Just as writers produce fiction — which, frequently, life imitates — so too do bankers produce fiction which has real-life consequences. The entire world economy was brought to its knees by bankers inventing new investing mechanisms, and selling them to each other and naive consumers, and then betting they'd fail, and then inventing new ones, and going so deeply in debt that the only way to get out was to go further in debt so they'd be bailed out by government (which spent money much-needed for social services to save billionaires). All this ultimately created a vicious circle that is so absurd when you think about it (or read Murray's novel that makes it funny in a laugh-or-you'll-cry way), it really is the stuff of bad fiction.

Our protagonist here is a French banker named Claude, who works at a mid-sized investment bank in Dublin called Bank of Torabundo (Torabundo is a fictional island in the Pacific with lax tax laws. The bank is incorporated there. And Dublin has notoriously loose banking laws, so of course that's where the bank is headquartered.) One day, a novelist named Paul introduces himself, telling Claude he's working on a novel about an Everyman banker, and would like to shadow Paul for a few days to learn about what he does. Let's just say Paul has an ulterior motive.

And we go from there, alternating between Paul and Claude's often hilarious burgeoning friendship, and Claude's day-to-day often hilarious and absurd banking duties. Claude also has a love interest — a beautiful Greek waitress and painter. And he enlists the inept Paul's help to get the girl, often with truly comic consequences.

There is some real comedy gold in this novel — one example is a fake Forbes profile of the bank's new CEO, who broke into banking after professional golfing, who was rewarded with his new post because he crashed another bank, and whose wives keep "committing suicide." Another is a scene in which the Wolf of Wall Street-like dude named Howie takes a bunch of potential investors out for a crazy night of booze, coke, and strippers. It's exactly as you would imagine it.

I loved this book — it's a really, really smart satire populated with wonderful characters. And I learned more about the actual causes of the banking crisis from this novel than anywhere else. It finally makes sense how utterly absurd (and absurdly criminal!) it was/is. Very, very highly recommended.

A Brief History Of Seven Killings: Brutal, Mesmerizing, Masterful

Late in Marlon James's amazing Booker Prize-winning novel, A Brief History Of Seven Killings, a Jamaican character tells an American journalist,

"Jamaica can get shoot through your veins and become like every dark sweet thing that not good for you." 

Not only is that sentence a near-perfect thematic description of this hard-to-put-down 700-page novel as a whole (the allusion to drugs is intentional, of course), but also it's exactly how I feel about the novel itself. This is a novel, and these are characters, that will stick with you for a long time. I don't know if it was "good" for me, per se, but I know I enjoyed the hell out of it.

The closest comparison I can think of to this novel of Jamaican gangsters, CIA agents, double-crossing drug dealers, and one enterprising Rolling Stone journalist is that it's a Jamaican version of the HBO show The Wire. This novel, like The Wire, turns stereotypes on their heads (gangsters that read Bertrand Russell, gay hit men, etc.) in a complex plot where everyone has an agenda and loyalty is a sliding scale. I loved The Wire, but I liked this even more — the characters here are even more complex, there's even more moral shading, and it's a plot with even more scope and reach than could ever be done in a TV show. We go from the mid-1970s Kingston, to the late 1970s Kingston, Montego Bay and Miami, to the crackhouses of mid-80s and early-90s New York City.

That said, the first 300 pages take place over only two days in early December, 1976 in Kingston. We meet several characters — street kids, dons, enforcers, American journalists, CIA agents, Cuban "consultants," an upper class Jamaican woman, politicians, and even a ghost!  The diverse characters, who take turns narrating their own stories in their own voices, are what makes this novel great. The distinction and variety of these voices (James writes his Jamaican characters in Jamaican "dialect," but it's not difficult to read, and you get used to it quickly) really draw you in, which is quite a feat. Sometimes, novels with lots of narrators keep you at arm's length, because you're more invested in some characters than others. Not so here — each of these is interesting for his/her own reasons, and I never started reading a section thinking "Ugh, can't wait to get through this guy's story to get back another."

And but so, the Kingston gangs have close ties to Jamaican politics (if you're going to read this, and I highly recommend you do, do some quick Wikipedia-ing on the Jamaica Labour Party and the People's National Party), and with an election coming up, and a concert (Smile Jamaica), the eyes of the world are on Kingston. The real fulcrum of the plot and what sets everything spinning is a real-life event — an attack on reggae legend Bob Marley at his Kingston home just days before the concert and weeks before the election. This scene and its immediate aftermath are depicted from several perspectives in about 50 I-forgot-to-breathe pages that are truly, unimaginably great. These pages are when I knew I loved this novel. From there, we go 1979 in Jamaica, then to New York and Miami as the gangs team up with the Columbian drug cartels and take over parts of New York. But the attack on Marley looms large through the rest of the novel, even after Marley's 1981 death, literally until the last page.

One word of warning: This book is intensely violent — so it's not for the faint of heart in that regard. And the plot is complex, but certainly not impenetrable. You just have to keep in mind characters' motivations, loyalties, and why you think they're doing what they're doing. Just trust James that things will make sense.

So it's certainly not a novel everyone will be interested in, or like...but I loved it! It just feels like something so cool and inventive and unlike anything I'd read before (which, amusingly, is in stark contrast to most people's impression of Man Booker winners). I'd been trying to talk myself into reading this since it first came out last year, and I'm super glad I did. So if you're on the fence too, just take the plunge. It's an immensely rewarding reading experience.