NEW YORK TIMES

The 10 Best Books of 2004

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.

FICTION

Gilead
By MARILYNNE ROBINSON
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.
This grave, lucid, luminously spiritual novel about fathers and sons reaches back to the abolitionist movement and into the 1950's.

The Master
By COLM TOIBIN
Scribner, $25.
A novel about Henry James, his life and art -- beautifully written, deeply pondered, startlingly un-Jamesian.

The Plot Against America
By PHILIP ROTH
Houghton Mifflin Company, $26.
An ingenious ''anti-historical'' novel set during World War II. Charles Lindbergh is elected president on an isolationist platform, and a Jewish family in Newark suffers the consequences.

Runaway
By ALICE MUNRO
Alfred A. Knopf, $25.
Her 11th collection of short stories about people, often women living in rural Ontario, whose vivid, unremarkable lives are rendered with almost Tolstoyan resonance.

Snow
By ORHAN PAMUK
Alfred A. Knopf, $26.
The forces of secular and Islamic Turkey collide in this prescient, complexly orchestrated novel, begun before 9/11 and completed shortly thereafter.

War Trash
By HA JIN
Pantheon, $25.
A powerfully apposite moral fable whose suffering hero passes from delusion to clarity as a Chinese P.O.W. in Korea.

NONFICTION

Alexander Hamilton
By RON CHERNOW
The Penguin Press, $35.
An exemplary biography -- broad in scope, finely detailed -- of the founder who gave America capitalism and nationalism.

Chronicles: Volume One
By BOB DYLAN
Simon & Schuster, $24.
A memoir -- idiosyncratic and revelatory -- by the peerless singer-songwriter who journeyed from the heartland to conquer the Greenwich Village music scene of the 1960's.

Washington's Crossing
By DAVID HACKETT FISCHER
Oxford University Press, $35.
An impressively researched narrative about the Revolutionary War that highlights the Battle of Trenton.

Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
By STEPHEN GREENBLATT
W. W. Norton & Company, $26.95.
Scholarship, speculation and close reading combine in a lively study that gives shape to the life and context to the work.


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