Acts of Faith by Philip Caputo
A disparate group of men and women confronts their own individual moral crises, fears, and physical dangers as they work to alleviate the hardships and suffering caused by civil war and famine in contemporary Sudan.

Beasts of No Nation by Uzodinma Iweala
Recruited by a unit of guerrilla fighters after the brutal murder of his father by militants, a west African student falls under the spell of his dangerous commander and finds his new life increasingly contrasting with his former existence of family times, school friendships, and church services.

A Changed Man by Francine Prose
Holocaust survivor Meyer Maslow, the head of a human rights foundation, is baffled by the entreaties of Vincent Nolan, a young neo-Nazi who inadvertently transforms the lives of other people in his attempts to change his own life.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
Oskar Schell, the nine-year-old son of a man killed in the World Trade Center bombing who searches the city for a lock that fits a black key his father left behind.

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
Discovering a medieval book and a cache of letters, a motherless American girl becomes the latest in a series of historians, including her late father, who investigates the possible surviving legacy of Vlad the Impaler, a quest that takes her across Europe and into the pasts of her father and his mentor.

The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
Sixty years after a book's publication, its author remembers his lost love and missing son, while a teenage girl named for one of the book's characters seeks her namesake, as well as a cure for her widowed mother's loneliness.

The Last Days of Dogtown by Anita Diamant
Endeavoring to build a life for herself in a dying early nineteenth-century New England town, Judy Rhines struggles with feelings of profound loneliness and impacts the lives of those around her, including Black Ruth, a freed slave who dresses as a man and works as a stone mason; Mrs. Stanley, an imperious madam; and Oliver, who overcomes a painful childhood.

Making it Up by Penelope Lively
A tale based on the author's own life considers what might have happened had she made other choices or experienced different outcomes at pivotal moments, considering such fictional turns of events as her family's failure to escape from Egypt during World War II, an unplanned teen pregnancy, and a marriage to another person.

The March by E. L. Doctorow
Union General William Tecumseh Sherman's devastating march through Georgia and the Carolinas during the final years of the Civil War has a profound impact on the outcome of the war, in a richly textured, evocative historical novel that captures the full experience of the diverse characters caught up in the struggle.

Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel García Márquez
Having decided to celebrate his ninetieth birthday by spending the night with a young virgin, an old man falls deeply in love for the first time in his life when he spots the girl at a local brothel.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana by Umberto Eco
Having suffered a complete loss of memory regarding every aspect of his own identity, rare book dealer Yambo withdraws to a family home nested between Milan and Turin, where he sorts through boxes of old records and experiences memories in the form of a graphic novel.

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
Stumbling upon a bloody massacre, a cache of heroin, and more than $2 million in cash during a hunting trip near the Rio Grande, Llewelynn Moss removes the money, a decision that draws him and his young wife into the middle of a violent confrontation in which their only hope of survival is local sheriff Ed Tom Bell.

On Beauty by Zadie Smith
Struggling with a stale marriage and the misguided passions of his three adult children, long-suffering art professor Howard Belsey finds his family life thrown into turmoil by his son's engagement to the socially prominent daughter of a right-wing icon.

The Painted Drum by Louise Erdrich
Discovering a cache of valuable Native American artifacts while appraising an estate in New Hampshire, Faye Travers investigates the history of a ceremonial drum, which possesses spiritual powers and changes the lives of people who encounter it.

Pride of Carthage by David Anthony Durham
A saga set against the backdrop of the ancient Punic Wars describes Hannibal's struggle against the Roman Republic, his decision to attack Rome via a land route deemed impossible, and the young Roman military leader who defeated him.

Saturday by Ian McEwan
A successful, happily married neurosurgeon, Henry Perowne is drawn into a confrontation with Baxter, a small-time thug, following a minor motor vehicle accident on the way to his regular squash game, an encounter that has savage consequences when Baxter, believing that the doctor has humiliated him, visits the Perowne home that evening during a family reunion.

A Sudden Country by Karen Fisher
His life turned upside down by the deaths of his children from smallpox and desertion of his Nez Percé wife, Hudson's Bay Company trader James MacLaren joins a group of settlers headed west to Oregon in 1847 and encounters Lucy Mitchell, the wife of his employer, a woman who helps him confront his past, present, and future.

Sightseeing: Stories by Rattawut Lapcharoensap
A collection of stories set in modern-day Thailand depicts this Asian country on the crossroads between the ancient and the modern, focusing on issues of family relations, romance, generational conflicts, and cultural changes.

Veronica by Mary Gaitskill
The unexpected friendship between two very different women--Alison, a beautiful young woman struggling to recover from her ruined career as a fashion model, and Veronica, an older eccentric and proofreader--survives both Alison's reentry into the world of fashion and Veronica's battle with AIDS as it has a profound influence on both women's lives.

Wickett's Remedy by Myla Goldberg
Dreaming of a better life for herself, Lydia, an Irish-American shopgirl from South Boston, gets her chance when she marries medical student Henry Wickett, the scion of a Boston Brahmin family, but her life is turned upside down when Henry quits medical school to promote a patent medicine and the world is swept by the devastating Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918.

Zorro by Isabel Allende
Witnessing the injustices against Native Americans by European settlers from childhood, Diego de la Vega, the son of an aristocratic Spanish landowner and a Shoshone mother, returns to California from school in Spain to reclaim the hacienda on which he was raised to seek justice for the weak and helpless.

Other Notable Fiction Titles of 2005

Baker Towers by Jennifer Haigh
The decade following World War II becomes one of tragedy, excitement, and unexpected change for the five Novak children and the residents of their western Pennsylvania community of company houses, church festivals, and union squabbles.

Eleanor Rigby by Douglas Coupland
Liz Dunn has little to keep her going until a strange young man named Jeremy arrives in her life, upsetting her quiet routine and triggering events that take Liz around the world, into danger, and maybe, for the first time, in reach of happiness.

Europe Central by William T. Vollman
A series of interconnected stories seeks to contrast the moral decisions made by famous and everyday individuals with regard to the warring authoritarian cultures of Germany and the USSR in the twentieth century, from a pair of generals who collaborate with the enemy to two heroes who place themselves at risk for their countries.

Get a Life by Nadine Gordimer
Paul Bannerman, an ecologist living in South Africa, begins to re-examine his life after he is diagnosed with thyroid cancer and begins radiation treatments--an isolating experience that forces him to confront his relationships with family and friends.

The Good Wife by Stewart O'Nan
When her husband is incarcerated for his involvement in a tragic home invasion, Patty Dickerson must raise their newborn child in a community that is sometimes hostile to her, all the while struggling to maintain her dignity.

The Ha-Ha by Dave King
Rendered unable to speak, read, or write after a Vietnam War injury thirty years earlier, Howard Kapostash feels trapped by his disability and longs for the life he lost until his high-school sweetheart, recently forced into rehab, asks him to care for her nine-year-old son.

It's All Right Now by Charles Chadwick
Englishman Tom Ripple observes the course of his life throughout a thirty-year period that is marked by complicated relationships with family members, neighbors, girlfriends, colleagues, and friends.

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
An unlikely alliance forms between Kafka Tamura, a fifteen-year-old runaway, and the aging Nakata, a man who has never recovered from a wartime affliction, as they embark on a surreal odyssey through a strange, fantastical world.

Lost in the Forest by Sue Miller
For Eva, the divorced and happily remarried mother of three children, and her adolescent middle child, Daisy, the death of Eva's second husband John in a car accident turns their lives upside down, a tragedy that draws Daisy into a confusing, chaotic, and unstable world as she embarks on a harrowing sexual odyssey with a much older man.

The Lost Mother by Mary McGarry Morris
Enduring the Great Depression from within a tent during a Vermont summer after his wife's abandonment, itinerant butcher Henry struggles to support his two young children and considers an unusual proposition from a wealthy neighbor, who would hire the children as companions for her homebound son.

Midnight at the Dragon Café by Judy Fong Bates
Su-Jen Chou, a Chinese immigrant growing up in 1950s Ontario finds herself shouldering the weight of her mother's hopes and dreams as her isolated family attempts to forge a life for themselves in a small town.

Missing Mom by Joyce Carol Oates
In the aftermath of her mother's death, thirty-one-year-old, sexually liberated and economically independent Nikki Eaton comes into a startling realization of her identity as a daughter and experiences a tumultuous year of mourning that gives way to greater wisdom and love.

Never Let Me Go by Kauzo Ishiguro
A reunion with two childhood friends--Ruth and Tommy--draws Kath and her companions on a nostalgic odyssey into the supposedly idyllic years of their lives at Hailsham, an isolated private school in the serene English countryside, and a dramatic confrontation with the truth about their childhoods and about their lives in the present.

Pearl by Mary Gordon
Receiving a call from the State Department that her daughter Pearl has been protesting global violence by chaining herself to a flagpole at the American embassy in Dublin and refusing to eat, liberal New Yorker and single mother Maria Meyers heads to Ireland to save her daughter, while Pearl's surrogate father, Joseph Kasperman, flies in from Rome to help.

The Portrait by Iain Pears
Journeying to a remote French island to sit for a portrait that is painted by his tormented artist friend, an influential London art critic recalls the early years of their friendship, his own influence over aspiring artists, and the power struggle between subject and artist in the course of the sitting.

Saving Fish From Drowning by Amy Tan
During an ill-fated trip to Myanmar, eleven American tourists are abducted by a renegade tribe that believes that Rupert, a surly teenager with the group, is the reincarnation of their god Younger White Brother, who has returned to save them from their country's militaristic government.

The Sea by John Banville
Struggling to cope with grief, anger, and loss following the death of his wife, Max Morden retreats to the seaside town of his childhood summers, where his own life becomes inextricably entwined with the members of the vacationing Grace family.

Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham
Prophetic poet Walt Whitman presides over each interlinked episode in a visionary novel set in the city of New York, featuring the same group of characters--a young boy, an older man, and a young woman.

Sudden Rain by Maritta Wolff
Follows the lives of five disaffected middle-class Los Angeles families in the early 1970s, from a long-time married couple that finds their traditional roles unsatisfying, to an unhappily married woman who stumbles into a fatal accident.

A Thread of Grace by Mary Doria Russell
In September 1943, fourteen-year-old Claudette Blum and her father flee across the Alps into Italy with thousands of other Jewish refugees seeking safety, only to find an open battleground among the Nazis, the Allied forces, resistance fighters, Jews in hiding, and ordinary Italians struggling to survive the harsh realities of World War II.

Tooth and Claw by T. Coraghessan Boyle
A collection of fourteen stories previously published in such magazines as The New Yorker and Playboy includes "The Kind Assassin," in which a radio shock jock sets a world record; "Dogology," in which an obsessed woman loses sight of her identity; and the title story, in which a man wins a vicious African cat in a bet.