10 best books of 2004

Browse the Best Books of 2018

The books we've chosen as the year's 10 best -- five novels, a short-story collection, a memoir, two biographies and a historical study -- present a broad range of voices and subjects. What do they have in common? Each is a triumph of storytelling, and each explores the past, whether through research, recollection, invention or some combination of the three. This grave, lucid, luminously spiritual novel about fathers and sons reaches back to the abolitionist movement and into the 's. A novel about Henry James, his life and art -- beautifully written, deeply pondered, startlingly un-Jamesian.

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I couldn't make the highly scientific meeting that determined who of us would blog on which year, so I landed Lucky for me: it means I can rave on about David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas which came out this year and was robbed robbed, I tell you! More on Hollinghurst later; indulge me for a moment while I revisit Cloud Atlas. David Mitchell's dazzling third novel features six interlinked first-person narratives that move through different times and genres and yet, somehow, wrap up into a complete narrative that's far more than the sum of its distinctive parts. As Mitchell put it, "having sacrificed chronology, it's important to unify the disparate parts with a theme. Using a music analogy, Cloud Atlas works as different variations on a theme played on different instruments. It was the hot favourite for the Booker but lost out to a worthy winner - The Line of Beauty - in what was a pretty strong and uncontroversial year for the prize.