Maureen Corrigan

Stop bragging.

My picks for this year's best books tilt a bit to nonfiction, but the novels that made the cut redress the imbalance by their sweep and intensity.

Karen Russell's long-awaited second novel, The Antidote, is my pick for Novel of the Year.

An epic story of immigration, land grabs, and aspiration.

The antidote is set in Nebraska and framed by two actual weather catastrophes.

The Black Sunday dust storm on April 14, 1935, in which people were suffocated by a moving black wall of dust.

And a month later, the Republican River flood.

The central character here is a so-called prairie witch who heals her customers by holding whatever they can't stand to know.

Russell herself is America's own prairie witch of a writer, exhuming memories out of our national unconscious and inviting us through her spellbinding writing to see our history in full.

Patrick Ryan's Buckeye is a more straightforward historical novel, set, as its title indicates, in Ohio.

Stretching from pre-World War II to the close of the 20th century, the story focuses on two married couples.

When we first meet her, Margaret Salt, a red-headed looker, walks into the hardware store where Cal Jenkins works and demands that he turn on the radio.

There's commotion in the streets, and because Margaret's husband is in the Navy, she wants to know what's happening.

It turns out Germany has surrendered.

Overwhelmed, Margaret kisses Cal, and married man Cal likes it.

Throughout the novel, Ryan's narrator underscores how chance moments shape our lives.

Like Karen Russell, Kiran Desai has kept readers waiting for her second novel, but the loneliness of Sonia and Sonny makes the wait worthwhile.

At the outset, Sonia, a college student in Vermont, is homesick for her native India.

Her depression makes her vulnerable to a visiting painter, an art monster.

Meanwhile, Sunny has left India to work in New York, but distance can't shield him from his fearsome mother.