Year-End Lists

Publishers Weekly: Best Books of 2011 [fiction, nonfiction]

[see also 2024 • 2023 • 2022 • 2021 • 2020 • 2019 • 2018 • 2017 • 2016 • 2015 • 2014 • 2013 • 2012]

Fiction

1. The Marriage Plot
   Jeffrey Eugenides
2. The Devil All the Time
   Donald Ray Pollock
3. State of Wonder
   Ann Patchett
4. There but for the
   Ali Smith
5. The Wandering Falcon
   Jamil Ahmad
6. The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar
   Alina Bronsky (translated by Tim Mohr)
7. The Sisters Brothers
   Patrick deWitt
8. Say Her Name
   Francisco Goldman
9. Volt
   Alan Heathcock
10. The Stranger’s Child
    Alan Hollinghurst
11. Train Dreams
    Denis Johnson
12. Changó’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes
    William Kennedy
13. The Night Circus
    Erin Morgenstern
14. The Call
    Yannick Murphy
15. The Tiger’s Wife
    Téa Obreht
16. Cain
    José Saramago
17. Luminarium
    Alex Shakar
18. Someday This Will Be Funny
    Lynne Tillman
19. I Married You for Happiness
    Lily Tuck
20. Leche
    R. Zamora Linmark

Nonfiction

1. Bossypants
   Tina Fey
2. Catherine the Great

   Portrait of a Woman
   Robert K. Massie
3. Hemingway’s Boat
   Paul Hendrikson
4. One Day I Will Write About This Place
   Binyavanga Wainaina
5. Arguably

   Essays
   Christopher Hitchens
6. The Convert

   A Parable of Islam and America
   Deborah Baker
7. The Anatomy of a Moment
   Javier Cercas
8. The Beautiful and the Damned

   A Portrait of the New India
   Siddhartha Deb
9. Blue Nights
   Joan Didion
10. Townie

    A Memoir
    Andre Dubus III
11. The Swerve

    How the World Became Modern
    Stephen Greenblatt
12. Life Itself

    A Memoir
    Roger Ebert
13. A World on Fire

    Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War
    Amanda Foreman
14. Tiger, Tiger
    Margaux Fragoso
15. Love and Capital

    Karl Marx and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution
    Mary Gabriel
16. The Information

    A History, a Theory, a Flood
    James Gleick
17. Blood, Bones, and Butter
    Gabrielle Hamilton
18. A Book of Secrets

    Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers
    Michael Holroyd
19. Rome

    A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History
    Robert Hughes
20. In the Garden of Beasts

    Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin
    Erik Larson
21. Boomerang

    Travels in the New Third World
    Michael Lewis
22. Malcolm X

    A Life of Reinvention
    Manning Marable
23. Believing is Seeing

    Observations on the Mysteries of Photography
    Errol Morris
24. Rin Tin Tin

    The Life and the Legend
    Susan Orlean
25. The Long Goodbye

    A Memoir
    Meghan O’Rourke
26. The Psychopath Test
    Jon Ronson
27. The Price of Civilization

    Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity
    Jeffrey D. Sachs
28. Charles Dickens

    A Life
    Claire Tomalin
29. The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt
    Toby Wilkinson