米Amazon.comの Best of 2009

米Amazon.comの Best of 2009 のうち 小説部門のトップ10をリストアップしました。

Let the Great World Spin: A Novel (ハードカバー)／ペーパーバック
Colum McCann (著)
オプラ・ウィンフリーの夏読書リストの1冊にもなった文芸作品。ニューヨーク市とそこに生きる人々の物語。

Wolf Hall (ペーパーバック)
Hilary Mantel (著)
2009年ブッカー賞受賞作。16世紀の英国を舞台にヘンリー8世の側近トマス・クロムウェルを描いた歴史小説。サクセスストーリーでもある模様。

Brooklyn: A Novel (ハードカバー)／ペーパーバック
Colm Toibin (著)
09年ブッカー賞候補作。
From the author of The Master, a moving novel about a young immigrant in 1950s Brooklyn torn between her Irish roots and the man who wins her heart.（Amazon.co.jpより）

This is Where I Leave You (ハードカバー)／ペーパーバック
Jonathan Tropper (著)
ワーナーブラザーズが権利を取得して、映画化を予定しているそうです。個人的に一番気になっている本です♪
Poor Judd Foxman returns home early to find his wife in bed with his boss – in the act. He now faces the twin threats of both divorce and unemployment. His misery is compounded further with the sudden death of his father. He is then asked to come and ’sit Shiva’ for his newly deceased parent with his angry, screwed up and somewhat estranged brothers and sisters in his childhood home. It is there he must confront who he really is and – more importantly – who he can become. Funny, moving, powerful and poignant. THIS IS WHERE I LEAVE YOU is the fabulous follow up to HOW TO TALK TO A WIDOWER and Jonathan Tropper at his best. （Amazon.co.jpより）

A Gate at the Stairs (ハードカバー)／ペーパーバック
Lorrie Moore (著)
Moore の15年ぶりの長編小説です。
It’s been 11 years since her last book, 15 since her last novel, but A Gate at the Stairs is vintage Moore: brittly witty and lurkingly dark, the portrait of a Midwest college town through the eyes of Tassie Keltjin, a student from the country whose mind has been lit up by learning but who spends nearly all this story out of class, as a nanny for a couple who have adopted a toddler. Tassie’s a bit of a toddler herself (and an ideal narrator because of it), testing the world as if through her teeth, and she finds the world stranger and more deeply wounded the more she learns of it. Her investigations make A Gate at the Stairs sad, hilarious, and thrillingly necessary.（Amazon.cmより）

Tinkers (ペーパーバック)
Paul Harding (著)
Harding’s outstanding debut unfurls the history and final thoughts of a dying grandfather surrounded by his family in his New England home. George Washington Crosby repairs clocks for a living and on his deathbed revisits his turbulent childhood as the oldest son of an epileptic smalltime traveling salesman. The descriptions of the father’s epilepsy and the cold halo of chemical electricity that encircled him immediately before he was struck by a full seizure are stunning, and the household’s sadness permeates the narrative as George returns to more melancholy scenes. The real star is Harding’s language, which dazzles whether he’s describing the workings of clocks, sensory images of nature, the many engaging side characters who populate the book, or even a short passage on how to build a bird nest. This is an especially gorgeous example of novelistic craftsmanship. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Spooner (ハードカバー)
Pete Dexter (著)
Warren Spooner was born after a prolonged delivery in a makeshift delivery room in a doctor’s office in Milledgeville, Georgia, on the first Saturday of December, 1956. His father died shortly afterward, long before Spooner had even a memory of his face, and was replaced eventually by a once-brilliant young naval officer, Calmer Ottosson, recently court-martialed out of service. This is the story of the lifelong tie between the two men, poles apart, of Spooner’s troubled childhood, troubled adolescence, violent and troubled adulthood and Calmer Ottosson’s inexhaustible patience, undertaking a life-long struggle to salvage his step-son, a man he will never understand.（Amazon.co.jpより）

Sag Harbor: A Novel (ハードカバー)／ペーパーバック
Colson Whitehead (著)
15歳の黒人少年Benji Coopeが、弟の暮らすSag Harbor（サグハーバー）で過ごした3ヶ月間の物語。

The Informers: Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean (ペーパーバック)
Juan Gabriel Vasquez (著), Anne McLean (翻訳)
When Gabriel Santoro publishes his first book, a biography of a Jewish family friend who fled Germany for Colombia shortly before World War Two, it never occurs to him that his father will write a devastating review in a national newspaper. Why does he attack him so viciously? Do the pages of his book unwittingly hide some dangerous secret? As Gabriel sets out to discover what lies behind his father’s anger, he finds himself undertaking an examination of the guilt and complicity at the heart of Colombian society, as one treacherous act perpetrated in those dark days returns with a vengeance half a century later. （Amazon.co.jpより）

Cutting for Stone: A novel (ハードカバー)／ペーパーバック
Abraham Verghese (著)
Marion and Shiva Stone, born in a mission hospital in Ethiopia in the 1950s, are twin sons of an illicit union between an Indian nun and British doctor. Bound by birth but with widely different temperaments they grow up together, in a country on the brink of revolution, until a betrayal splits them apart. But fate has not finished with them – they will be brought together once more, in the sterile surroundings of a hospital theatre. From the 1940s to the present, from a convent in India to a cargo ship bound for the Yemen, from a tiny operating theatre in Ethiopia to a hospital in the Bronx, this is both a richly visceral epic and a riveting family story.（Amazon.co.jpより）