Holiday books: Our critics choose their 10 favorite books

Maybe you're shopping for the holidays, maybe you're just cobbling together your own reading list for the coming winter. Either way, here are recommendations for you, one suggestion each from 10 of the Star Tribune's most trusted book critics. The best books of the year? Maybe. Books that you should read? Definitely. And books that will make fabulous gifts? Absolutely.

Jenny Offill's "Dept. of Speculation" (A.A. Knopf, $23) probably isn't the first novel you've read about a stymied writer and infidelity, but it might feel as if it is. Its narrator is a conscientious mother, wife and breadwinner who's surrendered her plans of being an "art monster" — single-mindedly devoted to her creative work. When a marital crisis breaks out, she's devastated, and irritated by how predictable (yet unpredicted) it all is. Short, fragmentary and sometimes seemingly desultory, "Dept." takes cues from experimentalists such as Renata Adler and David Markson, and it musters its emotional power through melancholy, wit and an ingenious sort of narrative shorthand. It also has the momentum of a good detective novel; you might be torn between wanting to read it in one sitting and wanting to make it last a month.

DYLAN HICKS

In 1989, Richard McGuire published "Here," a six-page comic that used panels within panels to wryly explore the passage of time on a particular speck of land, from a dinosaur creeping 100 million years ago to a living-room party just the other day. "Here" quickly became a cult classic on the order of "Battleship Potemkin" or Raymond Carver's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" — evidence that simple techniques could produce deep art. For the long-awaited book-length "Here" (Pantheon, $35, illustrated), McGuire adds lavish color and some plot, but he preserves the captivating, uncanny sense of love, anger and tragedy flying across the centuries while staying in one place.

MARK ATHITAKIS

"Updike" by Adam Begley (Harper, $29.99) does what all good literary biographies should — shows how life influences art. Through meticulous research into Updike the man and critical readings of Updike the writer, Begley constructs a compelling and intimate portrait of a true American great. We come away with a better understanding of this prolific man of letters but also with the urge to rediscover him. Updike's star fell somewhat in the years before his death, but this stunning work could be the first sizable step toward rehabilitation.

MALCOLM FORBES

LAURIE HERTZEL

"Women in Clothes" (Blue Rider Press, $30) is the book I want to give all my women friends for the holidays. Co-authored by Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavitis, Leanne Shapton and "639 others," it is an unparalleled compendium that uses photographs, illustrations, interviews and essays to explore women's multilayered relationship with clothing. This collection goes beyond the inane "Women love shoes!" line and "Do's and Don'ts" of mainstream publications and elevates the discussion of fashion in all its forms to a higher plane. This is a book I'll return to again and again.

MEGANNE FABREGA

"Lila," by Marilynne Robinson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26). In this story of a rough, uneducated woman's romance with an older, erudite, religious man — the third in the author's series about a tiny, history-laden and spiritually burdened Midwestern town — Robinson finds the perfectly precise and evocative language for framing experience that doesn't know how to express itself. However deep the book goes, the surface sings.

ELLEN AKINS

Carol Memmott

In a year of magical reading, one book stands head and shoulders above the rest: "Long Man" by Amy Greene (A.A. Knopf, $25.95). It's hard to do justice to a book that is as compulsively readable as it is intellectually profound, but if such a book exists, it is this one. When a 3-year-old girl goes missing on the eve of a major dam project, her mother must traverse the landscape she loves and a past that is as tangled as the briars in the Tennessee hills. Swift, gorgeous and wickedly smart, "Long Man" is nearly perfect, and Greene is a major American novelist in waiting.

PETER GEYE

Robert Harris is the best historical novelist writing now, with political intrigue his specialty. "An Officer and a Spy" (A.A. Knopf, $27.95) takes on the notorious Dreyfus Affair, tracing the plot to scapegoat a Jewish army officer — which led to a life sentence on Devil's Island — and the subsequent campaign to exonerate him. The story emerges through the eyes of the actual whistleblower, and we are plunged into a paranoid France and cynical, vindictive Army, both pervaded by anti-Semitism. This superb novel is as suspense-filled as a crime thriller, rich in character as any drama and astute as the most penetrating history.

KATHERINE A. POWERS