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每到年末，《 *** 》都会推出“年度十佳好书”，在占据了世界主流话语权的英语世界里，它们是由最精巧的文笔、最绝妙的故事和最敏感细腻的心灵共同创造而成的英文佳作。
对于英语学习者来说，优质的外文书籍，一方面可以提高我们的英文阅读能力，同时也能拓宽我们的思维和眼界。
近日，《 *** 》的编辑们推出了2019年度的The 10 Best Books of 2019，其中虚构与非虚构类各5本。来看看把哪一本加入你的2020书单吧～
01
Disappearing Earth
《正在消失的地球》
By Julia Phillips
■ 两个失踪女孩的疑云
In the first chapter of this assured debut novel（处女作）, two young girls vanish, sending shock waves through a town perched on the edge of the remote, brooding Kamchatka Peninsula（俄罗斯堪察加半岛）. What follows is a novel of overlapping short stories about the various women who have been affected by their disappearance. Each richly textured tale pushes the narrative forward another month and exposes the ways in which the women of Kamchatka have been shattered — personally, culturally and emotionally — by the crime.
02
The Topeka School
《托皮卡学校》
By Ben Lerner
■ 一个高中辩论明星，一种全国性的信仰危机
Lerner’s exhilarating third novel, after “Leaving the Atocha Station”（作者处女作：《离开阿托查火车站》）and “10:04（第二部小说：《10点零4分》）,” rocks an emphatically American amplitude, ranging freely from parenthood to childhood, from toxic masculinity to the niceties of cunnilingus, from Freud’s Oedipus complex to Tupacs “All Eyez on Me.”
Adam Gordon returns as the protagonist, but this time as a high school debate star, and mostly in the third person. Equal portions of the book are given over to the voices of his psychologist parents, and to a former clas *** ate whose cognitive deficits are the inverse of Adam’s gifts. The earlier novels’ questions about art and authenticity persist; but Adam’s faithlessness is now stretched into a symptom of a national crisis of belief.
03
Exhalation
《呼吸》
By Ted Chiang
■ 美籍华裔科幻作家新作 九个精彩而富有哲思的故事
Many of the nine deeply beautiful stories in this collection explore the material consequences of time travel. Reading them feels like sitting at dinner with a friend who explains scientific theory to you without an ounce of condescension. Each thoughtful, elegantly crafted story poses a philosophical question; Chiang curates all nine into a conversation that comes full circle, after having traversed remarkable terrain.（其中《呼吸》、《商人和炼金术士之门》、《软件体的生命周期》已经有中文译本）
04
Lost Children Archive
《失踪儿童档案》
By Valeria Luiselli
■ 一场危机：无人监护的儿童、越境、拘留、死亡......
The Mexican author(瓦莱丽亚·路易塞利)s third novel — her first to be written in English — unfolds against a backdrop of crisis: of children crossing borders, facing death, being detained, being deported unaccompanied by their guardians.
The novel centers on a couple and their two children(all unnamed),who are taking a road trip from New York City to the Mexican border; the couple’s marriage is on the brink of collapse as they pursue independent ethnographic research projects and the woman tries to help a Mexican immigrant find her daughters, who’ve gone missing in their attempt to cross the border behind her. The brilliance of Luiselliss writing stirs rage and pity, but what might one do after reading such a novel? Acutely sensitive to these misgivings, Luiselli has delivered a madly allusive, self-reflexive, experimental book, one that is as much about storytellers and storytelling as it is about lost children.
05
Night Boat to Tangier
《开往丹吉尔的夜船》
By Kevin Barry
■ 两个爱尔兰老伙伴，在港口等待一个年轻女子
A desolate ferry terminal on the Spanish coast isnt a place where you’d expect to encounter sharp-edged lyrici *** or rueful philosophy, but thanks to the two Irish gangster antiheroes of Barry’s novel, there’s plenty of both on display, along with scabrously amusing tale-telling and much summoning of painful memories. Their lives have become so intertwined that the young woman whose arrival they await can qualify as family for either man. Will she show? How much do they care? Their banter is a shield against the dark, a witty new take on “Waiting for Godot.”
06
Say Nothing
《噤声》
By Patrick Radden Keefe
■ 1972年，一位38岁的母亲在她孩子面前被人拖走。北爱尔兰冲突历史下的家庭悲剧。
Masked intruders dragged Jean McConville, a 38-year-old widow and mother of 10, from her Belfast home in 1972. In this meticulously reported book — as finely paced as a novel — Keefe uses McConvilles murder as a pri *** to tell the history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Interviewing people on both sides of the conflict, he transforms the tragic damage and waste of the era into a searing, utterly gripping saga.
07
The Club
《俱乐部》
By Leo Damrosch
■ 传记类图书：汇聚了英国史上最杰出的经济学家、历史学家和艺术家的一场小型聚会
The English painter Joshua Reynolds（约书亚·雷诺兹）just wanted to cheer up his friend Samuel Johnson, who was feeling blue. Who knew that the Friday night gab sessions he proposed they convene at London’s Turk’s Head Tavern would end up attracting virtually all the leading lights of late-18th-century Britain? Damrosch brings the Club’s redoubtable personalities — the brilliant minds, the jousting wits, the tender camaraderie — to vivid life, delivering indelible portraits of Johnson and Reynolds, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, the actor David Garrick, the historian Edward Gibbon and, of course, Johnson’s loyal biographer James Boswell: “a constellation of talent that has rarely if ever been equaled.”
08
The Yellow House
《黄屋》
By Sarah Broom
■ 作者的家庭回忆录
In her extraordinary, engrossing debut, Broom pushes past the baseline expectations of memoir to create an entertaining and inventive amalgamation of literary forms. Part oral history, part urban history, part celebration of a bygone way of life, “The Yellow House” is a full indictment of the greed, discrimination, indifference and poor city planning that led her family’s home to be wiped off the map. Tracing the history of a single home in New Orleans East, from the 60s to Hurricane Katrina, this is an instantly essential text, examining the past, present and possible future of the city of New Orleans, and of America writ large.
09
No Visible Bruises
《看不见的伤痛》
By Rachel Louise Snyder
■ 以真实案例为背景，讲述家庭暴力下的伤痛与绝望。
Snyders thoroughly reported book covers what the World Health Organization has called "a global health problem of epidemic proportions.” In America alone, more than half of all murdered women are killed by a current or former partner; domestic violence cuts across lines of class, religion and race. Snyder debunks pervasive myths (restraining orders are the answer, abusers never change) and writes movingly about the lives (and deaths) of people on both sides of the equation. She doesnt give easy answers but presents a wealth of information that is its own form of hope.
10
Midnight in Chernobyl
《午夜切尔诺贝利》
By Adam Higginbotham
■ 切尔诺贝利灾难背后的真相
Higginbothams superb account of the April 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant is one of those rare books about science and technology that read like a tension-filled thriller. Replete with vivid detail and sharply etched personalities, this narrative of astounding incompetence moves from mistake to mistake, miscalculation to miscalculation, as it builds to the inevitable, history-changing disaster.
你想把哪一本加入你的书单？
