Over the remote Pacific island of Chichi Jima, nine American flyers – Navy and Marine pilots sent to bomb Japanese communications towers there – were shot down. One of the nine was miraculously rescued by a U.S. Navy submarine. The others were captured by Japanese soldiers on Chichi Jima and held prisoner.

Then they disappeared.

When the war was over, the American government, along with the Japanese, covered up everything that had happened on Chichi Jima. The records of a top-secret tribunal were sealed, the lives of the eight Flyboys were erased, and the parents, brothers, sisters, and sweethearts they left behind were left to wonder.

Flyboys reveals for the first time ever the extraordinary story of those men. Bradley's quest for the truth took him from dusty attics in American small towns, to untapped government archives containing classified documents, to the heart of Japan, and finally to Chichi Jima itself. What he discovered was a mystery that dated back far before World War II – back 150 years, to America's westward expansion and Japan's first confrontation with the western world.

Bradley brings into vivid focus these brave young men who went to war for their country, and through their lives he also tells the larger story of two nations in a hellish war. With no easy moralizing, Bradley presents history in all its savage complexity, including the Japanese warrior mentality that fostered inhuman brutality and the U.S. military strategy that justified attacks on millions of civilians. And, after almost sixty years of mystery, Bradley finally reveals the fate of the eight flyers, all of whom would ultimately face a moment and a decision that few of us can even imagine.

The gun in question is pointed at twenty-one-year-old Ellis as she walks through a New York City park. In the end she is unrobbed and physically unharmed. But she is left psychologically reeling.

Determined to fit in at his New England prep school, the narrator has learned to mimic the bearing and manners of his adoptive tribe while concealing as much as possible about himself. However, his final year unravels everything he’s achieved, and steers his destiny in directions no one could have predicted.

The school’s mystique is rooted in Literature, and for many boys this becomes an obsession, editing the review and competing for the attention of visiting writers whose fame helps to perpetuate the tradition. Robert Frost, soon to appear at JFK’s inauguration, is far less controversial than the next visitor, Ayn Rand. But the final guest is one whose blessing a young writer would do almost anything to gain.

By the time he entered a drug and alcohol treatment facility, James Frey had taken his addictions to near-deadly extremes. He had so thoroughly ravaged his body that the facility’s doctors were shocked he was still alive. The ensuing torments of detoxification and withdrawal, and the never-ending urge to use chemicals, are captured with a vitality and directness that recalls the seminal eye-opening power of William Burroughs’s Junky.

But A Million Little Pieces refuses to fit any mold of drug literature. Inside the clinic, James is surrounded by patients as troubled as he is – including a judge, a mobster, a one-time world-champion boxer, and a fragile former prostitute with whom he is not allowed to speak, but their friendship and advice strikes James as stronger and truer than the clinic’s droning dogma of How to Recover. James refuses to consider himself a victim of anything but his own bad decisions, and insists on accepting sole accountability for the person he has been and the person he may become – which runs directly counter to his counselors' recipes for recovery.

James has to fight to find his own way to confront the consequences of the life he has lived so far, and to determine what future, if any, he holds. It is this fight, told with the charismatic energy and power of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, that is at the heart of A Million Little Pieces: the fight between one young man’s will and the ever-tempting chemical trip to oblivion, the fight to survive on his own terms, for reasons close to his own heart.

Though not as “fantastic” as his earlier fiction (though there are elements of fantasy) and not as gritty as his last novel (the award-winning Motherless Brooklyn), The Fortress of Solitude is nonetheless Lethem’s most fully-realized creation, achieving through both gloriously evocative prose and breathtaking verbal acrobatics.

The ever-evolving relationship of the two boys is not so much the subject of the book as the scaffolding from which Lethem paints a vivid portrait of a very unique place and time, which is also the story of the whole of late twentieth-century America.
A profoundly moving and completely engaging novel, The Fortress of Solitude will surely garner even more awards for one of our nation’s most important contemporary writers. (Selected by Michael Fortney and Gary Will)

In The Namesake, Lahiri enriches the themes that made her collection an international bestseller: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and, most poignantly, the tangled ties between generations. Here again Lahiri displays her deft touch for the perfect detail – the fleeting moment, the turn of phrase – that opens whole worlds of emotion. The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of their arranged marriage, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle together in Cambridge, Massachusetts. An engineer by training, Ashoke adapts far less warily than his wife, who resists all things American and pines for her family. When their son is born, the task of naming him betrays the vexed results of bringing old ways to the new world. Named for a Russian writer by his Indian parents in memory of a catastrophe years before, Gogol Ganguli knows only that he suffers the burden of his heritage as well as his odd, antic name.

Introduced to a vivid and exciting imaginary life by her now-dead father, who bestowed upon her the nickname "Flash Jackson," Haley Bombauer confronts the summer of her seventeenth year with glorious anticipation. She envisions herself roaming the hillsides and forests on her beloved horse, Brother, venturing farther and farther away from her sleepy hometown and her ultra-cautious mother, who since the death of her husband has remained rooted firmly in the past.

But when Haley falls through the rotted roof of the barn, she is destined to spend the dog days of summer in a thigh-high cast, stuck at home with her mother, enduring visits from her spooky, unintelligible grandmother, pondering the error of her impulsive ways, and dreaming longingly of adventure. The year that follows will, in fact, transform not only her life but also the lives of those closest to her. Haley's "imprisonment" affords her peculiar grandmother the chance to see finally what the girl is made of, and to pass along some of the mysterious and mystical arts that only she remembers. As Haley comes to understand just who her grandmother is, and what the old woman can teach her, she is transformed from a tomboy reluctant to accept her femininity to an extraordinary, powerful woman.

Steeped in imagery and lyricism, touched with the wisp of magical realism that has become William Kowalski's trademark, The Adventures Of Flash Jackson is a poignant and hilarious tale of self-discovery and the redemptive powers of love.

We’re just crazy about this beautifully written and magical book, and believe that it was one of the finest novels that we encountered in 2003. (Selected by Joe Drabyak, Melissa Smith, and Lauren Eyer)

Through sensual and interwoven stories, Moon Tide explores the secret workings of the heart – the violence of desire and memory, the redemptive power of longing – matched against society’s rules of class and the unpredictable tempers of the natural world.

At the center of the novel is Eve, who takes refuge in silence and art after the death of her mother. Eve can sense how the past nips at the heels of the living, and her ethereal beauty inspires a quiet passion in Jake, the son of a local stonemason. For Elizabeth, Eve’s wealthy, eccentric grandmother, one summer at Westport Point extends into a lifetime. She stays on in the town year-round, building a great library in her house for the cold New England winters, haunted by the Ireland of her youth and by one man’s doomed obsession with nature. And then there is Maggie, the exotic stranger with a peculiar clairvoyance. Maggie lives in the precarious space between the locals and the rich – a balance that is ultimately compromised by Wes, a ruthless rum-smuggler, whose desire for her triggers small cruelties and then a staggering act of violence.

With lyrical prose, wisdom, and insight, Dawn Clifton Tripp maps the shifting tensions in a small town on the verge of change. Like the growing weight of a storm, the lives in Westport Point build in emotional momentum even as the Great Hurricane approaches, and the landscape of the earth comes to reflect the geography of the mind. A novel of love and loss, survival and revelation, Moon Tide is an extraordinary debut. (Selected by Lauren Eyer)

Following a small group of contestants for a year on the contest circuit, journalist Amy Sutherland introduces us to well-known cook-off luminaries as well as some of the most bizarre cooks and recipes at local and national contests across the country – from the Great Garlic Cook-Off to the National Chicken and National Beef Cook-Off, from the World Champion Jambalaya Cooking Contest to the Pillsbury Bake-Off (the “Holy Grail” of competitive cooking). When the fanatics gather – be they “chiliheads” or barbecue fiends – and hunker down at the hot plate, it can be a recipe for delight or disaster as attitudes get spicy and tempers flare. Bursting with humor, Cook Off is an entertaining and in-depth look at a quirky, cutthroat, and (sometimes) delicious world.

It tells the story and speaks in the voice – at once innocent and too knowing for his age – of Antietam (Andy) Brown, named for the great-great-great grandfather who died on that Civil War battlefield. Andy at seventeen is himself the veteran of a violent boyhood, having been locked up in the Northern Virginia Juvenile Detention Center for killing a teenager who attempted to rape him.

Now, after seven years, he is out, free, at a crossroads, trying to make a fresh start, to fit into the life of Conestoga High School in the small upstate New York town to which he has been brought by his father – absent from his life since he was a month old. The man is certainly charismatic. He is also crude, apparently addicted to bodybuilding, beer, and
(his own words for his serial womanizing) “bareback riding.” He has no visible job, and no known past.

Associated by the town with his father’s coarseness, hectored by the boorish football coach and the coach’s pack of steroid-pumping teens, feeling himself losing ground, Andy is stunned to discover that the most popular girl in town is attracted to him. Terri, the homecoming queen, the school beauty, every boy’s dream, a born-again Christian, a really nice girl. Andy can’t believe it. He is immediately head over heels in love – first love – and determined to protect Terri from everything bad on earth. Worried that his father, even he himself, might contaminate her, and determined for her sake to discover what his father is, Andy begins to delve into the locked rooms and dangerous currents of the elder Tietam Brown’s past and present.

One reason for his popularity was his incredible run of successes, still unparalleled in the annals of the sport of kings. In an amazing three-year span, Native Dancer won twenty-one out of twenty-two races – and the one he lost, by a nose, was the 1953 Kentucky Derby, one of the most controversial races of all time. But the Dancer wasn't just a winning racehorse, he was a cultural icon. And the culture he embodied was the first generation of television viewers.

The little black box made him a star. With each race, millions of Americans rushed to their new televisions to watch the only horse whose image clearly stood out on the black-and-white ten-inch screens-the light grey colt nicknamed the Grey Ghost. Running from behind, the Grey Ghost would wait until the last crucial seconds, and then, with an uncanny burst of power and speed, weave through the pack to triumphantly take the lead. Celebrities, socialites, and business tycoons flocked to the track to see him. Crowds gathered at train stops when he traveled throughout the country. In 1954 Time magazine chose the Dancer to grace its cover. More popular than any baseball player, the colt had won the hearts of a nation.

Filled with stride-by-stride racing action, Native Dancer tells not only the Dancer's story but those of the people in his life. Among others, we meet the Grey Ghost's millionaire owner, Alfred G. Vanderbilt, who spent his entire career hoping for a Derby winner; his shrewd and devoted trainer, Bill Winfrey; and his jockey, Eric Guerin, a Cajun who was haunted by the Derby for the rest of his life.