All Over Creation by Ruth L. Ozeki
Returning home to the Idaho potato farm she fled twenty-five years earlier, Japanese-American Yumi struggles with her father's terminal illness, her mother's Alzheimer's, her former best friend, and a former lover who once offended the town.

Bay of Souls by Robert Stone
Becoming involved with new faculty member Lara, who claims to be possessed, professor Michael Ahern journeys to Lara's native island of St. Trinity, where he is enmeshed in a smuggling scheme.

Brick Lane by Monica Ali
Carrying into her adult years a sense of fatalism instilled during her hardscrabble birth, Nazneen finds herself married off to a man twice her age and moved to London, where she begins to wonder if she has a say in her own destiny.

The Clarinet Polka by Keith Maillard
Returning to his Polish-American hometown, young Vietnam soldier Jimmy Koprowski feels stifled by the community's unpromising routines until his sister starts an all-girl polka band and sets in motion a series of events that helps him start to heal.

Deafening by Frances Itani
Left profoundly deaf from scarlet fever, Grania O'Neill grows up protected from the hearing world and learning sign language, but her life changes when she falls in love with Jim Lloyd, a hearing man, on the eve of the Great War.

Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer
In a debut collection by an award-winning short story writer, a scout troupe of African-American girls is confronted by a group of disabled white girls, a young man considers his allegiance to his father during the Million Man March in Washington, and an international group of work-seeking drifters find themselves starving in Japan.

Drop City by T. C. Boyle, T.
Set in 1970, Drop City, a California commune, decides to relocate to Alaska, where tensions rise between the commune and a group of homesteaders.

Fanny: A Fiction by Edmund White
A fictional account based on the life of Fanny Wright is presented from the perspective of social critical and biographer Frances Trollope, who remembers young Wright's utopian idealism, move to mid-nineteenth-century America, and witness to the nation's political turmoil.

The Force of the Past by Sandro Veronesi
In this award-winning Italian novel, an unusual stranger convinces Gianni Orzan that his vision of his deceased father as a distant, cruel Fascist is in fact untrue and that instead his father had been a double agent for the KGB.

Good Faith by Jane Smiley An extraordinary story about ordinary people caught up in the exotic 1980s version of the American Dream, as greed and financial game-playing explode on Main Street.

The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard
In the aftermath of World War Two, young men and women living in Europe and Asia must reconstruct their lives amid the ashes of war, including a young soldier who confronts the reality that material goods and success are not enough, and a woman living in Japan who tends to her dying brother.

Hell at the Breech by Tom Franklin
In 1897, in the Mitcham's Beat region of Alabama, a politician is murdered and his friends form a secret society to find those responsible for his killing, leaving in their wake a trail of mayhem known as the Mitcham Beat War.

King in the Tree by Steven Millhauser
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Martin Dressler explores the diverse faces and shapes of love in three novellas--"Revenge," a study of erotic love and betrayal, as well as two works, "An Adventure of Don Juan" and "The King in the Tree," which transform classic fables into original tales of romance.

Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Traces the unlikely friendship of a wealthy Afghan youth and a servant's son, in a tale that spans the final days of Afghanistan's monarchy through the atrocities of the present day.

Known World by Edward P. Jones
When a plantation proprietor and former slave--now possessing slaves of his own--dies, his household falls apart in the wake of a slave rebellion and corrupt underpaid patrollers who enable free black people to be sold into slavery.

Long for This World by Michael Byers
Specializing in a rare disease that causes children to age drastically, Dr. Henry Moss is confronted with an ethical dilemma when he meets a family whose two children are affected in dramatically different ways by the same disease.

Love by Toni Morrison
The epitome of a group of women's ideals about love, fatherhood, and friendship, wealthy hotel owner Bill Cosey finds his life compromised by his troubled past and his feelings about a spellbinding woman named Celestial.

The Mammoth Cheese by Sheri Holman
Celebrating the recent birth of eleven babies born to a local couple after fertility treatments, the citizens of Three Chimneys, Virginia, set out to re-create the making of an original Thomas Jefferson-era, 1,235-pound cheese.

The Master Butchers Singing Club by Louise Erdrich
Returning to his quiet German village home after World War I, trained killer Fidelis Waldvogel, accompanied by his new wife, starts a new life in America and finds his life irrevocably changed by a new relationship.

A Memory of War by Frederick Busch
His complacent life disrupted by a new patient's declaration that he is his half-brother, psychologist Alexander Lescziak, the son of Polish immigrant parents, is forced to confront painful truths about his life as he envisions his mother's relationship with a German prisoner of war.

My Life as a Fake by Peter Carey
Accompanying the arrogant poet, John Slater, to Malaysia, London editor Sarah Wode-Douglass finds herself obsessively drawn to a mysterious manuscript that bears a legacy of fraud and danger.

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
This novel of the future explores a world that has been devastated by ecological and scientific disasters.

Our Lady of the Forest by David Guterson
Sixteen-year-old runaway and unlikely spiritual candidate Ann Holmes, surviving by living in a tent and working as a mushroom picker, experiences a vision of the Virgin Mary in the foggy woods of a Washington November afternoon.

The Pleasure of My Company by Steve Martin
Daniel, a troubled man who lives alone, detached from the world, passes his time filling out contest applications and counting ceiling tiles, until his attachment to Clarissa and Teddy helps him rediscover the outside world.

The Time of Our Singing by Richard Powers
A richly textured generational tale of love, allegiance, loyalty, race, and music follows the marriage of David Strom, a German Jewish emigre scientist, and Delia Daley, an African-American singer, as they, along with their extraordinarily gifted children, struggle to overcome the racial injustices of the 1960s.

What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt
The long friendship between art historian Leo Hertzberg and artist Bill Wechsler leads to a growing involvement between their two families as they deal with the joys, sorrows, tragedies, and loss that transform their lives.

Where the Truth Lies by Rupert Holmes
Assigned to tell the story of popular 1960s comedy team Lanny Morris and Vince Collins, O'Connor, a journalist known for her celebrity interviews, investigates the end of their friendship, becoming increasingly involved with both men, one of whom could be a murderer.

A Whistling Woman by A.S. Byatt
Amid the effervescence and turbulence of the 1960s, Frederica finds a career in television in London, while events in Yorkshire threaten to turn her life and the lives of the people she loves upside down, in the triumphant conclusion of a quartet of novels that includes The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, and Babel Tower.

OTHER NOTABLE FICTION TITLES OF 2003

1929 by Frederick W. Turner
Celebrated jazz artist Bix Beiderbecke recounts his early jams at the Capone-controlled Blue Lantern Casino, grueling cross-country tours with Paul Whiteman's "Symphonic Jazz" orchestra, disastrous efforts to make a first all-color talkie musical, experiences during the stock market crash, and a dying attempt to audit his life's work.

Best Friends by Thomas Berger
Boyhood friends Sam Grandy and Roy Courtright discover, twenty years after growing up together, that they have grown into completely different people, threatening the inner core of their friendship.

The Book of Salt by Monique T.D. Truong
Considering whether he will accompany his employers, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, to America, a personal cook remembers his youth in French-colonized Vietnam, his years as a galley hand at sea, and his days cooking for the doyennes of the Lost Generation.

The Clearing by Tim Gautreaux
Returning from the Great War a changed man, Byron Aldridge drifts away from his privileged and charmed life to take a job as a constable in a remote Louisiana sawmill, while his younger brother, taking over management of the mill, struggles to understand him, in an atmospheric novel of famiy, justice, and obligation.

The Colour by Rose Tremain
An epic of life in New Zealand during the nineteenth century explores the relationship between two newlyweds as they encounter the harsh realities of their chosen home in the South Pacific.

Crabwalk by Günter Grass
The author of the Tin Drum takes on the worst maritime disaster in history, the sinking of a German cruise ship packed with refugees by a Soviet sub--a disaster that killed nine thousand people.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
After stumbling up his neighbor's dog impaled on a garden fork and being blamed for the killing, fifteen-year-old Christopher John Francis Boone, an autistic savant obsessed with Sherlock Holmes, decides to track down the real killer and turns to his detective hero to help him with the investigation. He's brought face to face with a family crisis, when his efforts uncover secret information about his mother.

Dogs of Babel by Carolyn Parkhurst
Discovering clues that indicate his beloved wife may not have died accidentally, Paul Iverson begins a perilous search for the truth while attempting to teach his dog, who witnessed the crime, to communicate.

Due Preparations for the Plague by Janette Hospital Turner
When a single father is badgered by a woman, who as a child had been on the same hijacked plane that caused his mother's death, life is transformed into a complex web of political intelligence, espionage, and terrorism, as his life spins out of control and survival becomes the number-one priority.

Easter Island by Jennifer Vanderbes
The centuries-old mysteries and haunting past of Easter Island become catalysts for the parallel quests of two young women, separated by sixty years of history--Elsa Pendleton, who travels to Easter Island with her anthropologist husband in 1913, and widowed American botanist Dr. Greer Faraday--as they confront discoveries about themselves and the people they love.

Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee
The life of aging Australian novelist Elizabeth Costello is revealed through a series of eight formal addresses that include an award-acceptance speech at a New England liberal arts college, a lecture on evil in Amsterdam, and a sexually charged reading by poet Robert Duncan.

Evidence of Things Unseen by Marianne Wiggins
Falling in love during the Second World War, a soldier and a glassblower's daughter eventually have a son, who in adulthood finds his own love affair impacted by the fallout of the atomic age.

Getting Mother's Body by Suzan-Lori Parks
Learning that a company plans to dig up the area where her mother is buried, supposedly with a cache of jewels, Billy Beede, poor and pregnant, heads for Arizona to rescue her mother's body and search for the jewels that could bring her a new life.

The Guards by Ken Bruen
Stuck in a rut after his dismissal from the Irish police force and still grieving over the death of his father, Jack Taylor finds renewal when an intriguing woman hires him based on his rumored talent for finding things.

The Liberated Bride by Abraham B. Yehoshua
As Yohanan Rivlin, a professor at Haifa University, embarks on research into turbulent recent Algerian history, with the help of one of his students, a young Arab bride from a Galilee village, he becomes obsessed with his son's failed marriage.

Monkey Hunting by Cristina Garcia
An evocative saga of a Chinese-Cuban family begins in 1857, when Chen Pan signs a contract that takes him from China to Cuba and enslavement on a sugarcane plantation and follows him as finds prosperity in Havana's Chinatown and establishes a dynasty, in a story that interweaves his life with those of two descendants, a granddaughter and great-grandson.

Mortals by Norman Rush
In the heart of Botswana, the live of three ex-patriate Americans--a contract CIA agent undercover in the guise of an English instructor at a private school, his disaffected wife, and an iconoclastic black holistic physician--entangle with that of a local populist leader as a violent insurrection erupts in the area.

Pursuit of Alice Thrift by Elinor Lipman
Workaholic wallflower Alice Thrift, a socially inept surgical intern at a Boston hospital, is pursued romantically by Ray Russo, a social-climbing, somewhat shady purveyor of carnival fudge, until her roommate, nurse Leo Frawley, and neighbor, Dr. Sylvie Schwartz, decide to take on the task of guiding Alice through the social complexities of life.

Saul and Patsy by Charles Baxter
A seemingly happy domestic scene is turned upside down by the obsessive attentions of a troubled sixteen-year-old boy.

Signal & Noise by John Griesemer
In a novel chronicling the laying of the trans-Atlantic cable, American engineer Chester Ludlow, his wife Franny, journalist Jack Trace, and musician Katerina Lindt and her husband, Joachim, become caught up in the excitement of the project.

Star of the Sea by Joseph O'Connor
In the middle of the Atlantic Ocean during the summer of 1847, a boatload of Irish refugees heading for the promise of America is stalked by a killer in their ranks who seems bent on some kind of revenge.

Ten Little Indians by Sherman Alexie
A collection of short fiction reflecting the experience of Native Americans caught in the midst of personal and cultural turmoil includes such works as "The Life and Times of Estelle Walks Above," "What You Pawn I will Redeem," and "Do You Know Where I Am?"

Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath by Kate Moses
A fictional account of the last months of Sylvia Plath's life and the painful creation of her Ariel poems finds her moving with her two children to London after divorcing Ted Hughes, who is saddened by her latest writings and who works to remind her about happier times.