Atlantic literary editor Benjamin Schwarz picks the twenty five best books of 2009. The top five books are listed below. View the twenty runners up on Atlantic.com…
ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A Life 
By Michael Burlingame
Johns Hopkins
Measured, psychologically astute, authoritative when it can be, Michael Burlingame’s exhaustive narrative (2,024 pages!) is unafraid of ambiguity and indeterminacy. This is the life of Lincoln for our times.
[Read Christopher Hitchens's full review from the July/August Atlantic]
THE CHILDREN’S BOOK: A Novel
By A. S. Byatt
Knopf
Byatt has wrought a richly detailed, decade-spanning, at once Olympian and pointillist masterpiece. To read this gorgeous bolt of fiction is to fully enter a world.
[Read the full review from the October Atlantic]
THE THIRD REICH TRILOGY (Concluding With The Third Reich at War)
By Richard J. Evans
Penguin
Evans’s cool, crisply argued three-volume chronicle will be for a generation the definitive general history of Nazi Germany in English.
IT’S BEGINNING TO HURT: Stories
By James Lasdun
FSG
This collection of short stories illuminates the everyday agonies of the mind, its anxieties, obsessions, doubts, and yearnings. Lasdun pins each observation to the page with grace and exactitude.
[Read the full review from the September Atlantic]
MRS. WOOLF AND THE SERVANTS: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury
By Alison Light
Bloomsbury
In her elegant, sparkling book, Light marries social and literary criticism as she probes the deeply intimate, often sordid, always fraught relationship between women servants and their female employers.
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