AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Who doesn't love a good book this time of year? It gets real dark real early, so you may as well stay inside curled up with a great story. But what story to dive into? Books we love, NPR's list of the best reads from the year, has hundreds of recommendations. Today, we bring you some fiction suggestions from four of our colleagues.
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ASMA KHALID, BYLINE: This is Asma Khalid. I'm a White House correspondent for NPR, and I also co-host the NPR Politics Podcast. The book I Want to shine a light on is called "The Covenant Of Water" by Abraham Verghese. He's a doctor who also happens to be a novelist. And the story in this book is, on the surface, a family saga that spans three generations who are dealing with this strange condition of drownings. But ultimately, the book is really a lot deeper.
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KHALID: It's a book about a bygone era in India with lessons of love, pain and human understanding. It's a book that I could not put down because the storytelling and the writing was so beautiful, and the characters were so complicated. And ultimately, the book gives you a way to find hope in the face of repeated tragedy. It was one of the best books I have read about South Asia in years.
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NEDA ULABY, BYLINE: I am Neda Ulaby, an arts correspondent here on NPR's Culture Desk.
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ULABY: I'm recommending a novel called "Western Lane." It was a finalist for the Booker Prize. It's about a young girl in a London suburb. She's 11, the daughter of Indian immigrants, whose family has become emotionally frozen and fragile after a devastating tragedy. The girl, Gopi, starts playing squash just by chance, and it turns out she's a child prodigy on the level of Tiger Woods or the Williams sisters.
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ULABY: The author, Chetna Maroo, is herself a squash player, and she's an enthralling and graceful writer. The Booker judges singled out "Western Lane" especially for its language, praising its, quote, "crystalline prose that also feels warm and tender," which can be a difficult balance to strike.
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LINAH MOHAMMAD, BYLINE: My name is Linah Mohammad, and I'm a producer for All Things Considered. I'm recommending C. Pam Zhang's novel "Land Of Milk And Honey."
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MOHAMMAD: It's set in a future where climate change becomes so bad that a mysterious smog just engulfs the Earth. Crops die. Biodiversity vanishes. In the middle of all of this, a super-rich guy buys a mountaintop on the border between Italy and France, and he hires a chef.
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MOHAMMAD: She's cooking up these lavish meals using incredible and sometimes disgusting ingredients. But it's not just a story about food. It's this exploration of human nature, the allure of pleasure. It left me questioning the balance between survival and indulgence and just how much we're willing to pay for pleasure in a world that's dying.
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CORY TURNER, BYLINE: My name is Cory Turner, and I'm a correspondent covering education. The book I love this year is called "The Making Of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece" by Tom Hanks.
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TURNER: It is the fictional story of the making of a kind of movie. I don't think Hanks has ever made, a comic-book superhero blockbuster. The book is a love letter to the movies and the people who make them. The heroes of this story toil largely behind the camera - the producers and assistants, director and driver, hairstylists and hard-working, clairvoyant grabbers of coffee and tacos and everything else the makers of movies want or need to keep from starving or giving up or losing their minds. There's a humanity to this book that has always been Hanks' greatest gift as an actor. Remember that scene in "The Money Pit"...
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TOM HANKS: (As Walter Fielding) Help.
TURNER: ...When a baby-faced Hanks is trapped in the carpet of his collapsing life?
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JOE PONAZECKI: (As Montgomery Shrapp) Are you in there, Fielding?
HANKS: (As Walter Fielding) Yeah. I'm here. My chest is constricted. I can't shout.
TURNER: This book is kind of like that - hilarious and tragic, ridiculous and heartbreakingly sincere all at once.
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RASCOE: That was Cory Turner, who suggested "The Making Of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece," Linah Mohammad recommending "Land Of Milk And Honey," Neda Ulaby with "Western Lane" and Asma Khalid, who recommended "The Covenant Of Water." For more ideas on what to read, you can find the full list of books we love at npr.org/bestbooks.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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