Gillian Rose’s memoir of love and death, Love’s Work

Harry Mulisch’s novel of World War II and its aftermath in the Netherlands, The Assault

Mike Royko’s biography of Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley, Boss

A.R. Ammons’s long poem, Sphere: The Form of a Motion

Ellen Ullman’s memoir of software development, Close to the Machine

Colin MacInnes’s novel of teen culture in 1950s London, Absolute Beginners

John Langston Gwaltney's oral history of African Americans, Drylongso

Sanora Babb’s novel of small-town Kansas, The Lost Traveler

Diana Athill’s memoir of early love and artistic discovery, Instead of a Letter

Kim Thúy’s novel of a Vietnamese refugee in Canada, Ru

Rockwell Kent’s memoir of a sailing adventure to Greenland, N by E

Gwendolyn Brooks’s novel of a life in Chicago, Maud Martha

Edmund Gosse's memoir of his Victorian fundamentalist upbringing, Father and Son

Debra Magpie Earling's novel of the Flathead Indian Reservation in the 1940s, Perma Red

Christiane Ritter's memoir of a year spent on an Arctic island, A Woman in the Polar Night

George V. Higgins's crime novel of 1970s Boston, The Friends of Eddie Coyle

Leah Hager Cohen's book of reporting and memoir about a school for the deaf in New York City, Train Go Sorry

Keith Roberts’s alternative history of post-Elizabeth England, Pavane

Joe Hutto’s memoir of raising a brood of wild turkeys in the Florida panhandle, Illumination in the Flatwoods

Edith Wilson’s novel of a woman making a new life for herself in the British Columbia interior, Swamp Angel

Frederic Morton’s history of a deliriously pivotal year in the politics and culture of the late Habsburg Empire, A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888/1889

Sybille Bedford’s autobiographical novel of a transient youth spent among irresponsible adults, Jigsaw

Mary Oppen’s memoir of a shared, independent life of art, adventure, and activism, Meaning a Life