The Globe's Books team is sent thousands of books every year: novels and poetry, mysteries and histories, memoirs and coffee-table books, erotica, exotica, graphic novels, self-published books, books sophisticated and crude, even textbooks. From this rich array we select only the most promising for reviews - and then only those that wowed our professional readers for our annual 100 list. Herewith, the foreign fiction titles reviewers couldn't put down, couldn't stop talking about, and insist you stock up on, too.
American Dervish
By Ayad Akhtar,
Little, Brown
This thrilling novel incorporates the vital ingredients of fine storytelling: a powerful coming-of-age story, mesmerizing protagonists and writing that ranges from haiku-like interior monologues to the faultless mimicry of the spoken language of a community of Pakistani immigrants in American suburbia. -- Nazneen Sheikh
The Fat Years
By Chan Koonchung, translated by Michael S. Duke,
Doubleday
This brave, audacious and radical satire skewers the "counterfeit paradise" that is the 21st-century China of material growth and prosperity under totalitarian governance. The Fat Years centres on the erasure from sanctioned memory of the events surrounding June, 1989, including the massacre on Tiananmen Square. That, amazingly, is not fiction. -- Charles Foran
What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank
By Nathan Englander,
Knopf
Nathan Englander's collection returns to the same fertile territory as his first book of stories: Religious Jews in crisis, the ephemeral nature of the written word and, most pointedly, the enduring trauma of the Holocaust are explored with abundant humour, tenderness and heartache. -- Jonathan Papernick
Watergate
By Thomas Mallon,
Pantheon
This novel's brilliance rests upon Mallon's ability to weave Watergate's oft-told events into a moral tapestry that feels wholly new. One curious side effect is to remind us just how progressive many of Richard Nixon's policies were, from his stewardship of the environment to his "opening" of communist China. -- Stephen Amidon
At Last
By Edward St. Aubyn,
Farrar, Straus, Giroux
This last of five novels centred on the life of upper-class Englishman Patrick Melrose deals with the death of Patrick's mother. Readers who do not know the other novels will still enjoy At Last's humour, thoughtfulness, amusing characterizations and intelligence. -- André Alexis
Arcadia
By Lauren Groff,
Voice
We follow the lives and times of Abe and Hannah Stone, and their son Bit, at first on a commune on a crumbling estate in 1968. Bit grows up, but the family finally walks out on Arcadia's souring dream, only to return late in their lives to live in an off-grid cottage on the estate's grounds. -- J.C. Sutcliffe
Enchantments
By Kathryn Harrison,
Random House
It's Jan. 1, 1917, and Rasputin's frozen body has just been fished out of the Neva River. His daughter Masha, 18, came to St. Petersburg after her father mesmerized the Russian court. But without Rasputin, there's no one to care for Russia's crown prince. So Masha inherits the job. A beautifully sculpted novel. -- Jerome Charyn
The Lifeboat
By Charlotte Rogan,
Reagan Arthur/Little Brown
When the Empress Alexandra is sunk in mid-Atlantic in 1914, we follow, through the not-quite-reliable eyes of Grace Winter, the failing fortunes of the 39 passengers of a lifeboat. Rogan's thrilling debut novel is very fine at detailing the sheer arduous, draining physicality of the ordeal. -- Martin Levin
Waiting for Sunrise
By William Boyd,
HarperCollins
It is Vienna, 1913, and German-speaking English actor Lysander Rief is seeking psychoanalysis. He meets a mysterious woman, who lures him into a sexual adventure, then charges him with rape. He eventually ends up behind enemy lines in search of a traitor. Sex, spies and suspense, this novel has it all. -- Giles Blunt
Canada
By Richard Ford,
HarperCollins
Dell Parsons, the narrator, is a recently retired, 66-year-old American English teacher living in Windsor. He is remembering the year he and his twin sister, Berner, turned 15, a time when a pair of significant and traumatizing events took place. A majestic, generous novel that encompasses the full range of human life. -- Jane Urquhart
The Hunger Angel
By Herta Müller, translated by Philip Boehm,
Metropolitan Books
The Hunger Angel is based on the memories of Müller's fellow German-Romanian poet Oskar Pastior, who, like her novel's Leo, was carted off to a labour camp at 17. He, too, felt estranged from his home village. As a young gay man, he could never show his true self even to his relatives. -- Anna Porter
Flight
By Adam Thorpe,
Jonathan Cape
Bob Winrush is a 51-year-old cargo pilot carrying suspicious loads in exchange for envelopes fat with cash. But after turning down a particularly nasty job, he realizes that everyone associated with that job has been turning up dead. Bob suspects he's next, so he takes flight to the windswept Hebrides. -- William Kowalski
A Hologram for the King
By Dave Eggers,
McSweeney's
The 50-ish Alan Clay is divorced and untethered, a debt-ridden American in the twilight of a consulting career. His latest assignment: securing an IT contract in King Abdullah Economic City in Saudi Arabia. Clay thinks that if he lands the deal, the monetary windfall will cure "everything that ails him." -- Cynthia Macdonald
The Red House
By Mark Haddon,
Doubleday Canada
An affluent doctor invites his rather less affluent sister and her husband and three children to join him and his new wife and stepdaughter at an English countryside "vacation" home for a week, creating a potentially explosive mixture leavened by humour, grief and desire. -- Aritha van Herk
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
By Rachel Joyce,
Doubleday
Harold Fry and his wife are astonished by the arrival of a pink letter, addressed to Harold, from his old friend Queenie, dying of cancer and saying goodbye. Harold writes back and sets off to post his letter, but decides to deliver it in person in distant Berwick-upon-Tweed. He writes: "Hold on – I'm comin'." -- Donna Bailey Nurse
The Lower River
By Paul Theroux,
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Ellis Hock, his marriage and business finished, impulsively decides to return to the impoverished African village where, as a volunteer, he had built a clinic and school and been blissfully happy. But he finds Africa "chewed, bitten, burned, deforested and dug up," and mourns "the village that had disappeared utterly." -- Jeffrey Meyers
Sweet Tooth
By Ian McEwan,
Knopf Canada
Cambridge graduate Serena is recruited to MI-5 in 1972, and soon joins a project code-named Sweet Tooth, in which large sums of money are given to intellectuals on the non-communist left. Asked to verify the suitability for the project of young writer Tom Haley, Serena becomes embroiled in attraction and intrigue. -- J.C. Sutcliffe
NW
By Zadie Smith,
Hamish Hamilton Canada
Set mostly in working-class housing in London, NW is full of voices from everywhere: Ghanaians, Jamaicans, Rastas, ginger-haired Irish, litigators, junkies, students, parents and grown children. Smith's democratizing omniscient narrator slips from one consciousness to the next, giving everyone his or her say. -- Lisa Moore
Bring Up the Bodies
By Hilary Mantel,
HarperCollins
This sequel to Wolf Hall (both novels won Man Booker Prizes), tracks the year leading up to the execution of Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII's second wife. We see and analyze events through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell, Henry's adviser. But here Mantel focuses rigorously on Henry's growing desire to be rid of Anne. -- Guy Gavriel Kay
This is How You Lose Her
By Junot Díaz,
Riverhead
Yunior, possibly Dominican-American Junot Diaz's alter ego, a "polymathic voice," was narrator of his excellent first novel, and narrates many of the stories in this collection. But Diaz, a master of voice and tone, is definitely not repeating himself. -- Zoe Whittall
HHhH
By Laurent Binet, translated by Sam Taylor,
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Laurent Binet's astonishingly strange and self-attentive novel narrates the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazis' notorious "Butcher of Prague," Himmler's right-hand man and architect of the Final Solution. -- Michael LaPointe
Flight Behavior
By Barbara Kingsolver,
HarperCollins
If anyone could pull off a philippic on the ecology of the Earth, it would be Barbara Kingsolver, and this she does in Flight Behavior, possibly the first novel to deal specifically, determinedly and overtly with climate change. -- Kathleen Byrne
The Round House
By Louise Erdrich,
Harper
Louise Erdrich's tale of life on a North Dakota reserve, continuing the complex and sensitive saga of native Americans that she began with Love Medicine in 1984, works wonderfully as social commentary, as a mystery and as literary fiction. -- Candace Fertile
Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm
A New English Version, by Philip Pullman,
Viking
Sex. Violence. Horror. On the 200th anniversary of the Brothers Grimm, Philip Pullman retells their stories – and reminds us that fairy tales tap into appetites and fears that are not for kids only. -- Catherine Bush
The Uninvited Guests
By Sadie Jones,
Knopf Canada
On the day of Emerald Torrington's 20th birthday party, a railway accident leaves the family responsible for a group of dazed third-class passengers. Sadie Jones's novel of disasters, dinner and an English country house is polished, charming and beautifully crafted. -- J.C. Sutcliffe
Waterline
By Ross Raisin,
HarperCollins
Mick, a run-down, middle-aged Glaswegian, struggles to deal with his wife's death, caused by the asbestos he worked with. He skips town and gets a job washing dishes in London, then winds up homeless. It is a portrait of grief as haunting as it is elegant, yet it somehow manages to crackle with energy. -- Michael Hingston
Treasure Island!!!
By Sara Levine,
Europa Editions
An unnamed twentysomething New York woman is so enthralled by the adventures of young Jim Hawkins with Long John Silver and the other inhabitants of Treasure Island that she resolves to pattern her life on the book and, more specifically, on young Master Hawkins. -- Martin Levin
The Street Sweeper
By Elliot Perlman,
Bond Street
Australian writer Elliot Perlman's novel is a superb multistrand epic that stretches across continents and over a century of history, focusing on the Holocaust and the African-American civil-rights struggle, and intertwining them in a way that brings out their similarities. -- Sara Johnson
The Odds
A Love Story,
by Stewart O'Nan,
Viking
Art and Marion Fowler, a middle-aged couple on the brink of divorce, head to Niagara Falls, Ont. Their primary destination is a casino where they plan to multiply their remaining cash in hopes of saving their house and their marriage. -- Donna Bailey Nurse