We're just about through the full set of Best Books of 2008 now. There might be a few dribbling in a bit later: I seem to recall that Locus releases its list of best sf and fantasy in Fenruary or March each year. So this list from the "International Herald Tribune" will be the last for a while, for which you'll probably be eternally grateful. The list includes the following:
FICTION
THE BOAT. By Nam Le. (Knopf, $22.95.) In the opening story of Le's first collection, a blocked writer succumbs to the easy temptations of "ethnic lit."
BREATH. By Tim Winton. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.) Surfing offers this darkly exhilarating novel's protagonist an escape from a drab Australian town.
DIARY OF A BAD YEAR. By J. M. Coetzee. (Viking, $24.95.) Coetzee follows the late career of one Señor C, who, like Coetzee himself, is a South African writer transplanted to Australia and the author of a novel titled "Waiting for the Barbarians."
HIS ILLEGAL SELF. By Peter Carey. (Knopf, $25.) In this enthralling novel, a boy goes underground with a defiant hippie indulging her maternal urge.
OPAL SUNSET: Selected Poems, 1958-2008. By Clive James. (Norton, $25.95.) James, a staunch formalist, is firmly situated in the sociable, plain-spoken tradition that runs from Auden through Larkin.
NON-FICTION
SHAKESPEARE'S WIFE. By Germaine Greer. (Harper/HarperCollins, $26.95.) With a polemicist's vision and a scholar's patience, Greer sets out to rescue Ann Hathaway from layers of biographical fantasy.
