The five novels of the year according to the New York Times, from Angel Down to The Director: complete plots, main themes and everything that makes these books unmissable.
Every year the New York Times makes a ranking of the novels that have best been able to tell, with courage and sensitivity, the dramas, ambiguities and hopes of our time. Among the best of this year there are works that are very different from each other in terms of setting, style and theme, united by the ability to make us reflect, to excite us, and to shed light on dark pieces of the soul and history.
AngelDown by Daniel Kraus
In a brutal context like the First World War, a handful of soldiers enter the trenches to save a wounded comrade, but find themselves faced with something completely different: a creature that looks like a “fallen angel”, a wounded yet extraordinary being. The encounter with this being – fragile and supernatural at the same time – forces the soldiers to confront their own fears, ambitions and fragility. War thus becomes not just a fight for survival, but a journey into the soul, in its violence, desperation and, at times, hope. Through powerful and almost ritual writing, the novel drags the reader into an intense and disturbing experience, where historical horror and the metaphysical dimension are intertwined.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai
Sonia Shah and Sunny Bhatia meet when they are young – when their families try to arrange a marriage – but both refuse, busy with other stories and projects. Years later, now immigrants in the United States, their lives marked by uprooting, nostalgia for their origins and a growing sense of displacement intersect again. Their love story becomes a possible anchor: fragile, uncertain, but capable of offering hope and belonging in a world that has made them nomads. The novel thus becomes a saga of migration, divided identities, betrayed hopes and desires for rooting. An intense portrait of the contemporary diasporic condition.
The Sisters by Jonas Hassen Khemiri
Three sisters — born to a Swedish mother and Tunisian father — live a long span of different lives, moving between countries and cultures, searching for a place in the world. Their lives span decades, crossing aspirations, loves, failures, remorse, but also dreams of redemption. The novel is structured in non-linear temporal sequences, often fragmented, sometimes as short as moments, others as long as decades: an effect that reflects the very nature of memory, of the past that infiltrates the present, of the choices that continue to resonate. In the background, a family legacy made of secrets, pain and inexhaustible questions. The novel explores themes such as identity, belonging, cultural heritage, the invisible wounds that cross generations.
Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood
A woman – a former environmentalist, disillusioned by the climate crisis, oppressed by a sense of guilt for her impotence – decides to leave everything: work, city, marriage. He takes refuge in a rural convent, in a remote area of Australia, seeking a respite from chaos and remorse in the silence, simplicity and routine of the nuns. But the peace is fragile and the convent is soon shocked by a terrible infestation of mice from which the body of a nun who disappeared decades earlier emerges, thus causing shadows from the past to re-emerge. These events force the protagonist to deal with guilt, with memory, with the fragility of life and nature. And to wonder if, in a broken world, it can still make sense to seek redemption through silence and care.
The director by Daniel Kehlmann
The only book on the list already translated into Italian. The protagonist is GW Pabst, once a great master of German cinema. With the rise of Nazism he left France and took refuge in Hollywood, hoping to continue to create freely. But the American dream is shattered: he fails to fit into the studio system, his film flops, and he returns to Europe. His return, however, coincides with the Nazi occupation of Austria: blocked, Pabst is courted and later forced by the Ministry of Propaganda to make films for the Third Reich. To survive he finds himself imprisoned in a moral pact with a regime he detests, and is forced to negotiate himself, his art, his dignity. Kehlmann’s novel does not judge but shows the slowness and insidiousness of that compromise: how much it costs the artist, his conscience, and those he loves to choose his own survival by accepting to become an accomplice. Between dream and nightmare, between art and barbarism, Pabst’s story becomes a powerful metaphor of the fragility of freedom and the dangerous seduction of power.
