8. Every Day Is For The Thief - Teju Cole
Like a few other entries on this list, Every Day Is for the Thief marks the sophomore effort from a novelist that made a pretty big splash with their first book. Teju Cole's 2012 debut Open City was set along the streets of Manhattan with Julius, a young Nigerian doctor reflecting on his past and on his future. It immediately won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and so it goes without saying that the stakes were raised for Cole's second novel. Again, a young Nigerian living in New York City is our protagonist. When this unnamed narrator visits his hometown of Lagos, he finds the city he once knew to be a strange and unfamiliar place.He reconnects with old friends, old lovers, and along the way attempts to reconcile the changes he sees in his city and in himself. If Every Day Is for the Thief is as digressive, wandering, and ruminative as Teju Cole's first book, you're in for a treat. Don't miss this one.
7. Updike - Adam Begley
The life stories of writers are often as exciting as the stories they themselves invented, in some cases even more so. John Updike spent his life writing, from a vast body of literary criticism and review to a highly-respected canon of novels and short stories. Rabbit Angstrom remains one of his greatest creations, spindly protagonist of a tetralogy of works that span almost half a century, but his other books like Couples and Gertrude & Claudius all display his mastery as well. Since Updike's death, Nicholson Baker's biography U & I has served as an excellent, touching glimpse into the life of the writer, a true story that encompassed so many elements of a long and complicated existence. But Adam Begley will present a new biography this year, entitle simply Updike, and hopes are high that Begley will traverse new and untold portions of Updike's career and family life. Any great author deserves multiple looks into their own story, and this biography should be especially interesting to aspiring young writers.