In books as in life, 2019 was a year of monstrous revelations—trusted figures abusing their power, cities uncovering their cruelest corners, family structures imploding when long-held secrets came to light. There were also small, illuminating moments of joy and wonder, of clarity and connection. Our picks for the year are far from exhaustive, but they span multiple genres and forms, and they grabbed our attention with their vibrant ingenuity.

The Old Drift, Namwali Serpell

Staggering in its complexity, The Old Drift resists easy categorization. It is, in some measure, all of the following: historical epic, surrealist adventure, interpersonal (and interspecies) study, dystopian warning, anthropological commentary. It is also, most impressively, a story that grips the reader from its first pages. The debut novel from the Zambian author Namwali Serpell, The Old Drift follows three families across several generations, zigzagging through time as it tracks their lives (and how their outcomes differ across demographic lines). The novel’s characters ache and pine; they rail against an acute awareness of their own bodies. Serpell is a tremendously gifted writer who can retain narrative cohesion even as she weds stories of love and terror to casual observations about the state of the world. A favorite: “Progress is just the word we use to disguise power doing its thing.”  — Hannah Giorgis

Music: A Subversive History, Ted Gioia

How’s this for spicy music criticism? “Disciples of the new school … dismember melodies with hockets and sing lugubrious discants. … They know not what upon they defining sound of Catholic musicSuch papal pitchforking is just one of the many amusing examples of elite distrust marshaled in Ted Gioia’s survey of an art form in perpetual rebellion. Across millennia, sonically adventurous courtesans, slaves, monks, gang members, and other marginalized folks offended polite society before conquering it. The book goes beyond asserting that every form of music was the punk of its day, though. Feistily and authoritatively, Gioia draws out cross-cultural axioms to rewire the reader’s ear. Music’s ability to heal gets dissected in scientific, sociological, and even supernatural terms, but so does its link with violence—a link that might explain why new sounds have been so often met with fear.  — Spencer Kornhaber