Exams are finished, winter break is here, and it’s a good time to enjoy the best books of 2015.  These books from The New York Times list are available at UT Libraries.

Click the book title to find the book at UT, and request any of these books for pickup at Pendergrass Library.

Top Books at Pendergrass Library

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald.  “Ms. Macdonald’s beautiful and nearly feral book, about her attempts to train a goshawk, reminds us that excellent nature writing lays bare the intimacies of the human world as well as of the wild one.”

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins.  “This thriller arrived on Jan. 5. And like Gone Girl, which it resembles in sneakiness, it just won’t go away.”

Top Books at Hodges Library

The Story of the Lost Child by Elana Ferrante.  “This concluding volume to the author’s dazzling Neapolitan quartet spans six decades in the lives of its two unforgettable heroines: Elena, the conscientious good girl, and her best friend, the tempestuous Lila.”

The Whites by Richard Price writing as Harry Brandt.  “This novel’s title is a not-so-oblique reference to the Ahab-like obsessions that drive a group of New York cops and former cops, who remain haunted by cases they handled in which shameless criminals — their white whales — ‘walked away untouched by justice.'”

Leaving Orbit: Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight by Margaret Lazarus Dean.  “In this wonderfully evocative book, the author sets out to chronicle ‘the beauty and the strangeness in the last days of American spaceflight,’ and while she overstates the end-times nature of NASA’s future, she writes with the passion of a lifelong lover of space exploration.”

The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud.  “This inventive debut novel is an artful reimagining of Albert Camus’s The Stranger — told from the perspective of the brother of the nameless Arab murdered by Meursault in that existential classic.”

The Harder They Come by T. Coraghessan Boyle.  “Arguably the most resonant novel in Mr. Boyle’s long career, this story is at once a gripping tale of a father’s flailing efforts to come to terms with a violent child wanted by the law, and a dynamic meditation on the American frontier ethos and propensity for violence.”

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates.  “Inspired by James Baldwin’s 1963 classic, The Fire Next Time, and addressed to the author’s 14-year-old son, this powerful and timely book is a searing meditation on what it means to be black in America today.”

The Sellout by Paul Beatty.  “This jubilant satirical novel (it’s about an artisanal watermelon and weed dealer in Los Angeles) is as incisive about race and other issues as the best monologues and interviews of Chris Rock, Richard Pryor, and Dave Chappelle.”

James Merrill: Life and Art by Langdon Hammer.  “This nearly flawless literary biography tells the story of James Merrill, the son of a co-founder of Merrill Lynch, who became one of the 20th century’s most important poets.”

Negroland: A Memoir by Margo Jefferson.  “A sinewy and graceful memoir, from a former book critic for The New York Times, about her childhood in an upper-middle-class black family in Chicago.”

Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs by Sally Mann.  “Sally Mann, the photographer, has written a weird, intense and uncommonly beautiful memoir. The author has a gift for fine and offbeat declaration.”

The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories by Joy Williams.  “A 50-course, full-tilt tasting menu of misanthropy and guile. This career-spanning collection of Ms. Williams’s stories solidifies her position as a thorny American writer of the first rank.”

Mislaid by Nell Zink.  “Ms. Zink’s second novel is a tangled satire about a well-born Southern woman who decides to pass as African-American.”

Frog by Mo Yan.  “This Nobel laureate writes a broad, humanizing tale exploring the effects of China’s one-child policy, just as that policy fades into obsolescence.”

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson.  “Mr. Ronson … takes on one of the most egregious perils of life in the age of social media — the whopping magnification of some gaffe or misstep or downright lie — to the point that it achieves life-wrecking power.”

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara.  “Love it or not, this was one of the year’s big books, a dense and hefty drama following a close-knit group of male friends through triumph and adversity.”

The Train to Crystal City by Jan Jarboe Russell.  “The mind-boggling story of America’s only family internment camp during World War II. Ms. Russell mined the memories of Japanese and German children whose families were spirited off to a camp in snake-and-scorpion-rich South Texas to wait out the war.”

The Wright Brothers by David McCullough.  “Concise, exciting and fact-packed, this look at these pioneers of flight is the veteran historian’s best book in quite a while.”

Top Books at Devine Music Library

M Train by Patti Smith.  “This achingly beautiful memoir is a ballad about love and loss, an elegy for the author’s husband, Fred (Sonic) Smith; her brother, Todd; and her friend Robert Mapplethorpe.”

Dylan Goes Electric! by Elijah Wald.  “Mr. Wald offers an account of Dylanageddon — the night in 1965 when Bob Dylan savaged the acoustic sanctuary of the Newport Folk Festival by making loud, electrified noise.”

_{Reviews are excerpted from The New York Times, Top Books of 2015: http://nyti.ms/1SQPc16}