By Stephen King (Scribner, $35)
Notable Fiction of 2011
The prolific author’s latest novel — the tale of a small-town teacher who travels back in time to prevent JFK’s assassination — is rich with the pleasures we’ve come to expect from King: characters of good heart and wounded lives. — Jeff Greenfield
By Chad Harbach (Little, Brown, $25.99)
An accomplished first novel about the changing fortunes of a college baseball player offers lessons that reach far beyond the diamond. — Dennis Drabelle
By Edith Pearlman (Lookout, $18.95)
In this story collection, which was a National Book Award finalist, Pearlman presents her characters — widows, historians, children, musicians — in prose as spare and eloquent as that of her contemporary Joan Didion. — Marcela Valdes
By Diana Abu-Jaber (Norton, $25.95)
With exquisite patience and psychological precision, Abu-Jaber unravels the mystery of a young woman’s decision to run from her Miami home, destroy her parents’ happiness and remain at risk. — Ron Charles
By David Ignatius (Norton, $25.95)
Washington Post columnist Ignatius brings a straight-from-the-case-file feeling to his eighth spy novel, a taut political thriller that turns on a botched CIA operation. You emerge from its pages as if from a top-level security briefing. — Dan Fesperman
By Yannick Murphy (Harper Perennial; paperback, $14.99)
A small-town New England veterinarian’s life is upended when his son is badly injured in a hunting accident. Murphy brings emotional heft, humor and off-hand poetry to this tale of redemption. — Michael Lindgren
By David Vann (Harper, $25.99)
Vann’s story of a family’s unraveling in southern Alaska explores emotionally raw territory — conflicted feelings of love and our friable ties to those we care for most. — RC
By Michael Ondaatje (Knopf, $26)
A playful novel with bite, this introspective story from the author of “The English Patient” moves gracefully through a three-week adventure when the narrator was an 11-year-old boy, traveling on a steamer from Sri Lanka to England— RC
By Esmeralda Santiago (Knopf, $27.50)
The conquistadora of this sweeping historical novel is an alluring, flawed heroine — a strong, intelligent and enigmatic woman who becomes the master of a 19th-century sugar plantation in Puerto Rico. — Eugenia Zukerman
By Tom Carson (Paycock, $24.95)
A satiric revue of the American Century starring an elderly version of “The Great Gatsby’s” Pamela Buchanan. The literary heroine is now a blogger, and her narration of some defining moments of the 20th century is as witty as Wilde, as punny as Joyce. — Steven Moore
By Donald Ray Pollack (Doubleday, $26.95)
Set in the backwaters of the rural Midwest, Pollack’s gritty novel lives up to its title: The book is rife with evil, darkness and blood — lots of it. His portrait of small-town America might be stark, even shocking, but it is also irresistible. — Robert Goolrick
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