The Best Books to Give This Year

Thrillers

• To Tell You the Truth, Gilly Macmillan
• The Talented Miss Farwell, Emily Gray Tedrowe
• Little Cruelties, Liz Nugent
• House of Correction, Nicci French
• Before the Ruins, Victoria Gos
• The Killings at Kingfisher Hill, Sophie Hannah
• The Girl in the Mirror, Rose Carlyle

Who knows what the next few months will bring? It’s time to activate our Emergency Winter Thriller Protocol, which involves a fuzzy blanket, the comfort clothing of your choice, a hot drink and a tall stack of diversionary books with pleasingly unrealistic plots.

Every unreliable narrator is unreliable in her own way, and Lucy Harper, the heroine of Gilly Macmillan’s riveting TO TELL YOU THE TRUTH (Morrow, 320 pp., $26.99), brings a particular talent to the job. She’s a best-selling crime-fiction novelist whose popular detective, Eliza Grey, also happens to be her own imaginary friend. It seems that Lucy, who talks to Eliza as if she were a real person and even occasionally sees her, has trouble differentiating between fact and fiction.

Hollywood

• The Nolan Variations: The Movies, Mysteries, and Marvels of Christopher Nolan, Tom Shone
• Made Men: The Story of “Goodfellas”, Glenn Kenny
• Murder and the Movies, David Thomson
• Shit, Actually, Lindy West
• The Camera Lies: Acting for Hitchcock, Dan Callaha
• Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise, Scott Eyman
• Just as I Am, Cicely Tyson

The American movie industry, a vital national economic sector valued at over $40 billion, counts on the willingness of patrons to pay good money for the pleasures of sitting elbow to elbow in enclosed spaces, sharing communal laughs, gasps, shouts, sobs, coughs, chatter and corn kernels while watching large screens for two hours at a stretch. As the Sept. 3 domestic release of “Tenet” proved, few want to do that this year. Box-office receipts for the marquee writer-director Christopher Nolan’s latest cabinet of brilliant cinematic curiosities, a thriller with a characteristically squirrelly, palindromic plot structure teased by its title, have demonstrated an impressive regard for Covid-19 caution on the part of American consumers. The numbers proved the limits of fandom in this year of pandemic. Nolan’s admirers (I’m one) have loved his work since “Following” and “Memento,” up through “The Dark Knight,” “Inception” and “Dunkirk.” But they — we — love life more. We’ll wait.

Music

• Let Love Rule, Lenny Kravitz with David Ritz
• Nobody Ever Asked Me About the Girls: Women, Music, and Fame, Lisa Robinson
• Wild Thing: The Short, Spellbinding Life of Jimi Hendrix, Philip Norman

It’s comforting to us nobodies to be reminded that rock ’n’ roll stardom isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be. When reading books about the helter-skelter lives of our favorite artists and musicians, I tend to enjoy the ones that highlight how celebrity attracts a particular kind of person. Talented sometimes. Obsessively driven and a little masochistic usually always. I generally finish reading feeling grateful that I am not one of those people. But then again, I am also not rich.

Cooking

• Ottolenghi Flavor, Yotam Ottolenghi
• East: 120 Vegan and Vegetarian Recipes From Bangalore to Beijing, Meera Sodha
• Parwana: Recipes and Stories From an Afghan Kitchen, Durkhanai and Farida Ayubi
• In Bibi's Kitchen: The Recipes and Stories of Grandmothers From the Eight African Countries That Touch the Indian Ocean, Hawa Hassan with Julia Turshen
• The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food, Marcus Samuelsson with Osayi Endolyn
• Coconut & Sambal: Recipes From My Indonesian Kitchen, Lara Lee
• Aegean: Recipes From the Mountains to the Sea, Marianna Leivaditaki
• I Cook in Color: Bright Flavors From My Kitchen and Around the World, Asha Gomez
• The Nom Wah Cookbook: Recipes and Stories From 100 Years at New York City’s Iconic Dim Sum Restaurant, Wilson Tang
• A Good Bake: The Art and Science of Making Perfect Pastries, Cakes, Cookies, Pies and Breads at Home, Melissa Weller
• One Tin Bakes: Sweet and Simple Traybakes, Pies, Bars and Buns, Edd Kimber
• Snacking Cakes: Simple Treats for Anytime Cravings, Yossy Arefi

This year, a cookbook is one of the few presents that people actually need. (Though cash and a Roomba would be nice.) What have we been doing these past 10 months but trying to bring a little joy and order to our days through making meals? By December, with the inspiration tank dangerously low, an infusion of new ideas and flavors is truly a gift.

The way we cook and shop has changed. The hyper-project-y meals of months one through four have slumped toward an approach that favors both sanity and the reality that shopping is either a risky gantlet to be run as seldom as possible, or an online “convenience” over which we have no control: That order of specialty ingredients might arrive in 12 separate boxes on 12 separate afternoons. The days of blithely dashing out to find tamarind paste are gone.

Travel

• Accidentally Wes Anderson, Wally Koval
• Nala's World: One Man, His Rescue Cat and a Bike Ride Around the Globe, Dean Nicholson
• Blue Sky Kingdom: An Epic Family Journey to the Heart of the Himalaya, Bruce Kirkby
• Winter Pasture: One Woman’s Journey With China’s Kazakh Herders, Li Juan
• The Heartbeat of Iran: Real Voices of a Country and Its People, Tara Kangarlou

Remember traveling for fun? It was that thing many of us would do once in a while, in the before times. It often involved cramped airplanes and long immigration lines, and occasionally an upset stomach or a bout of debilitating jet lag. But it was worth it, for what it taught us about the rest of the world and ourselves. Sometimes, we traveled to unwind; other times, for the challenge. This year, even the most obsessed of travelers — myself included — have had to find new ways to do both of those things. We have looked a little closer to home, and when we have felt the urge to go farther, we have turned to living vicariously through others’ stories.

Sports

• Loving Sports When They Don't Love You Back: Dilemmas of the Modern Fan, Jessica Luther and Kavitha A. Davidson
• Three-Ring Circus: Kobe, Shaq, Phil and the Crazy Years of the Lakers Dynasty, Jeff Pearlman
• The Spencer Haywood Rule: Battles, Basketball, and the Making of an American Iconoclast, Marc J. Spears and Gary Washburn
• One Life, Megan Rapinoe, with Emma Brockes
• Losers: Dispatches From the Other Side of the Scoreboard, edited by Mary Pilon and Louisa Thomas
• Tom Seaver: A Terrific Life, Bill Madden

Like much of the rest of the world, sports at all levels were upended this year by the coronavirus pandemic, leaving fans without many beloved games for much of the spring and summer. This void gave way to two thematic sentiments that dominated sports in 2020: political activism and nostalgia.

The best sports books, especially those released during this year, remind us that the games we watch reflect the wider society we live in. Sports do not offer an escape, as many fans would prefer.

Historical Fiction

• The Blind Light, Stuart Evers
• The Turncoat, Siegfried Lenz
• Pigeons on the Grass, Wolfgang Koeppen
• All God's Children, Aaron Gwyn
• The Last Days of Ellis Island, Gaëlle Josse
• The Complete Writings of Art Smith, the Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, Michael Martone
• In Love With George Eliot, Kathy O'Shaughnessy
• Still Life, Zoë Wicomb

We may read historical fiction to imagine what life was like in the past, but our backward glances often cast shadows elsewhere, shaped by our present — even future — concerns. Of this season’s new novels, none demonstrates this better than Stuart Evers’s THE BLIND LIGHT (Norton, 544 pp., $27.95), a multigenerational portrait of two families disastrously linked by the fear that gripped post-World War II British society as tightly as those that haunt us today: the prospect of nuclear annihilation.

St. Paul’s Cathedral in London in the aftermath of Luftwaffe bombing raids.PA Images, via Getty Images

Drummond Moore and James Carter come from radically different backgrounds, but an unassuming factory worker and a pretentious Oxford dropout are both conscription fodder for a 1950s military intent on preparing for an atomic holocaust. Outwardly, nothing dire happens as they serve out their time on a civil defense training base in Cumbria, but memories of its carefully crafted replica of a bomb-blasted village, nicknamed Doom Town, will stay in their minds long after they’ve become husbands, fathers and, eventually, neighbors.

Photography

• Samuel Fosso: Autoportrait, Okwui Enwezor
• Memory, Bernadette Mayer
• Taxi: Journey Through My Windows, Joseph Rodriguez
• Gordon Parks: The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957, Sarah Meister
• The Station, Chris Killip
• Imogen Cunningham: A Retrospective, Paul Martineau
• The Book of Everything, Mary Ellen Mark
• The End of the Game, Peter Beard
• Peter Beard, Peter Beard

Samuel Fosso fled Nigeria in 1970, aged 8, as a consequence of the Biafran War, and landed in Bangui, capital of the Central African Republic, where several years later he began apprenticing for a studio photographer. Less than a year after that, at 13, he opened his own studio: passport pictures, school portraits, family parties. Fosso was a born artist, however, and he immediately began experimenting after hours, using himself as his subject. His “70’s Lifestyle” series, begun in 1975 as self-portraits to send to his grandmother, soon evolved into a protracted study of the science of posing. With textured backdrops and lighting that inevitably bring to mind the great Malian portraitists Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé, Fosso employed clothing, props, his alert features and dramatic mastery of body language to cast himself in a variety of roles, stances, personas: the spectrum of African youth of his time.

“The Liberated American Woman of the 1970s,” from “Samuel Fosso: Autoportrait.”Samuel Fosso

He went on to color film, elaborate costumes and historical reconstructions, from “Le Rêve de Mon Grand-Père” — a magical-realist evocation of his ancestral legacy — to “African Spirits,” in which he impersonates everyone from Angela Davis and Malcolm X to Haile Selassie and Léopold Sédar Senghor. His early ventures roughly coincided with Cindy Sherman’s, and while they surely did not know of each other then, there is a definite commonality of expression between them, a mix of photography, theater and mise-en-scène. SAMUEL FOSSO: Autoportrait (Walther Collection/Steidl/D.A.P., 188 pp., $85), edited by Okwui Enwezor, displays the sweep of his work, culminating in “SIXSIXSIX” (2015), in which he photographed his face, uncostumed and propless, for four weeks, documenting a grand tour of his emotions, nuanced and vivid.

Otherworldly

• Attack Surface, Cory Doctorow
• Burning Roses, S.L. Huang
• These Violent Delights, Chloe Gong
• The Scapegracers, Hannah Abigail Clarke
• Harrow the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir

The holidays are always a complicated season, when all of the difficult realities of actual families clash with an idealized fantasy equivalent, where the hardest problem to solve is cooking an improbably large bird in an improbably short time. But the usual stressors and wounds are compounded by the strangeness and dangers of this year, tense with the contradiction of expressing your love for your dear ones by keeping distant from them. So here are books about families — chosen, estranged, broken and healing — shot through with magic and science, dreams and technology.

BURNING ROSES (Tor.com, 156 pp., $21.99), by S. L. Huang, is a beautiful, deeply affecting novella that braids Western fairy-tale traditions with Chinese mythology in a way calculated to mash my every emotional button. I usually balk at admiring a book purely by itemizing its contents (“[Character type] in space! With [aggravating factor]!”), but the joyful revelations on page after page of “Burning Roses” demand it.