My Best Fiction Picks for 2011

As usual I read close to 90 books this year. One day I’ll make the hundred mark.

 So much good fiction appeared this year, I could not read all I purchased.  Still pending are: The Antagonist by Lynn Coady, Infrared by Nancy Huston, Miss New India by Bharati Mukherjee, Bride of New France by Suzanne Desrochers and The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst, one of my favourite writers.

Since I am spending the last month of the year recovering from surgery, I’ll have plenty of time to tackle the mountain by the bed side.

What follows are thirteen works of fiction I personally found satisfying and delightful. Tomorrow the clunkers, the books I felt should not be tossed lightly aside but instead, should be thrown forcefully across the floor.

Here in no particular order:

1.      Baking Cakes in Kigali  by Gaile Parkin.  This book is set in Rwanda and, through linked stories, touches on many of Africa’s woe’s: war, genocide, rape, genital mutilation, poverty, AIDS and yet it also a very feminist novel, a rarity these days.  The protagonist is a woman who has a cake-making business with numerous customers, several grandchildren to support and a cast of neighbours who live in the compound and who provide plenty of stories.

2   State of Wonder by Anne Patchett.  A fertility drug is being developed deep in the Amazon. So well written that it carries one along into the heart of darkness of a fantastical jungle.  It is a story of ethics, particularly medical ethics and the world view that anything is good if it will serve a greater good, or if you convince yourself it will serve a greater good. The title should be State of Confusion.

3.      Old Filth by Jane Gardam.  Read it in two days. Story of a life, uneventful life on the surface, but in reality, full of secrets.  Gardam took her basic idea from Kipling’s story of the raj child.

4.      Smokin Seventeen by Janet Evanovich – still funny after all these years.  One of the best comic writers takes the same cast— bail bond enforcer Stephanie Plum, her two hot lovers, pistol packin’ Gramma Mazur plus a selection of New Jersey wise guys—and tosses up a hilarious salad of a story.