The best books of 2003 include four novels, an autobiography, two biographies, a history and a volume of reportage. They were chosen by the editors from a roster of 10 works of fiction and 11 of nonfiction nominated by individual editors throughout the year. Three of the novels are by American men and one by a British woman. Three nonfiction authors are women and two are men; three are Americans, one a Briton and one a Latin American.

Two of the novels are the first written by their authors, and the reporter's book is also her first. In no previous best-books list were a third of the choices first books. Actually, among the original nominations, six of the volumes of fiction were first books, along with two of the volumes of nonfiction -- an unusually high, if not unprecedented, percentage of the nominees in one year. Two of the writers on this year's list, both of them novelists, have appeared in previous best-books lists, one 16 years ago and one 33 years back.

Thematically all the novels are about the homeless -- immigrants who find the place they've journeyed to is not theirs and the one they left cannot be recovered; children of city streets taken from them by gentrifiers, leaving them with slippery memories of where they belong; flower children who abandoned middle-class America in search of nirvana and found Alaska; and a county of black people in pre-Civil War Virginia who have been whipped from home in so many senses one cannot bear to count them.

Labeling the nonfiction books is inadequate. Both biographies sketch the history of politically perilous times; the autobiography evokes in personal terms the history of a nation's collapse; the reporter's book is so colorfully animated it takes some effort to remember it is not a novel; and the history uncovers the truth behind a legend by resurrecting biographies of a dozen forgotten men.

The best books were selected from among those reviewed here since the 2002 Holiday Books issue, and the summaries here draw on those reviews. Best books are not included in the Notable Books of the Year listing, which begins on Page 64.

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THE BOUNTY: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty. By Caroline Alexander. (Viking.) Relax! The movies didn't lie to you -- not entirely. Fletcher Christian really led a mutiny on the Bounty in 1789; and Captain Bligh and 18 crewmen did sail 3,600 miles of the South Pacific for seven weeks in a 23-foot open boat to reach safety after the mutineers tossed them overboard. Caroline Alexander's threatening subtitle simply means she sets out to prove that we have never understood these two men and hadn't a clue about how Bligh, a caring officer, became the heavy in the legend or why Christian, who was detested even by his fellow mutineers, became a sympathetic character to later generations. Her dramatic presentation of the court- martial of several mutineers leads to a subtle investigation of how the interests, and the political influence, of several families of minor gentry who wanted to save the neck of one mutineer bent the law and the rules of the British Admiralty. We hear them questioning one another and government officials, suggesting interpretations of disputed testimony and spinning the story one way and another while Bligh, confident of his probity and his lifetime record of naval service, could not recognize that history, and his rightful reputation, were being stolen from him.

BRICK LANE. By Monica Ali. (Scribner.) Leaving home is a journey without end in this novel about Bangladeshi immigrants in London's East End. The story turns on itself like a winding spring. An 18-year-old woman from Dhaka in an arranged marriage with a man of 40 is practically immured in their flat, with only one neighborhood friend, bearing children and listening to her husband's dreams of being a success and then returning home. But her sister's letters from there tell her, in hints and silences, that the Dhaka of memory is gone. Her husband's loss of work, and then of his savings to a moneylender, forces her into garment making, and she falls in love with the man who delivers and collects her piecework. In the deep background, scarcely mentioned, Islamic culture is challenged by Western values and personal choice battles fate. It is the emotional force of the woman's brief affair that releases the spring, and the deep tensions of the story erupt in front of us. When the husband returns to Dhaka, resigned to failure, she stays on with her daughters, learns English from them, and by the end seems to be sailing out into the universe on her own. The expansive generosity of the last pages is a remarkable achievement, especially in a first novel.

DROP CITY. By T. Coraghessan Boyle. (Viking.) Is T. C. Boyle mellowing? Well, the debris left scattered up the entire West Coast of North America in this novel is as frightening and spectacular as any he's ever dropped on his readers -- wasted people, bears, goats, wolverines, dogs, a horse, bulldozed houses and wrecked rolling and flying machines. ''Drop City'' is a 1970's California commune of hippies who migrate to Alaska believing that the lawless tundra will let them live high as kites forever. Of course, it takes only a few months of early winter to make flower power fade to black. But Boyle's compassion for the oddballs, and even a few losers, is striking; he has not often achieved such emotional complexity. At the heart of this novel are two love stories: one involving two middle-class newcomers to the commune and the other a solitary Alaskan trapper and a woman from Anchorage who seeks him out as the only safe haven in a world melting down. The cranky, passionate attachments of these couples spread warmth through the book; Boyle's joy in sharing the music of the age gives it a nostalgic tone; and his delight in evoking the effects of a rainbow of narcotics endows it with authority -- he's obviously no amateur. (The music and dope seem to have inspired him to coin a witty word, one spoiled by a typographical error in the book. We find spacey hippies ''dancing like moonwalkers to the drugged-down testiduneous beat,'' when surely what he wrote was ''testudineous.'' You won't find either word in your dictionary, but look up ''testudo'' or ''testudinata'' and you will catch his intention.)

THE FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE. By Jonathan Lethem. (Doubleday.) Everyone seeks his own Garden of Eden, but who would think to find it in a single block of Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, in the 1970's, when New York City was going down the tubes? In Jonathan Lethem's new novel it is there for Dylan, a white geeky boy, and his friend Mingus, a hip black neighbor. These boys' knowledge of life comes in piles of hoarded comics; graffiti, which they streak together as if by a single hand across the borough; unending black and white confrontations of will on the street; and black music, from jazz and blues to hip-hop. If Dylan, who seems to be Lethem's alter ego, looks like the threatened outsider among the black kids on their street, what he gets from them makes him a prophet of cool among whites he later meets in college, but since he ends up a pedantic music critic, the cool must have worn off. It was Mingus who was the outsider all along; from Day 1 he had a lashing knowledge of the great world and he emerges out of a long silence at the novel's center as the tragic figure of the book. If at times this sometimes disheveled novel strikes one as a meander through memory, magic and regret, his fate gives it a bitter bite.

KHRUSHCHEV: The Man and His Era. By William Taubman. (Norton.) Nikita Khrushchev left a deep imprint on the first 47 years of the Communist era, almost two-thirds of its whole history. He was involved in Stalin's collectivization program that destroyed millions of peasants and the bloody purges of the late 30's. He supervised the arrests and executions of thousands in Ukraine in 1939. After World War II he was one of the three Soviet leaders closest to Stalin, and after the dictator died in 1953, Khrushchev outmaneuvered the others and took control in 1956. That year he made the famous ''secret speech'' to the Communist Party Congress, denouncing the crimes of Stalin in vivid detail and setting loose forces that would eventually bring down the Soviet Union. Before he was toppled from power in 1964, he also nearly caused a nuclear war over Russian missiles in Cuba, but he also arranged the first détente with America shortly afterward. William Taubman presents this sweeping history, and Khrushchev's explosive, vulgar, warm character, unobtrusively but not without measured judgments. And he never tries to explain the inexplicable -- how a man so deeply complicit in political crimes that were almost immeasurable could then have done so much good so courageously when the chance came.

THE KNOWN WORLD. By Edward P. Jones. (Amistad/HarperCollins.) What makes this novel so startling is that the situation Edward P. Jones imagines was reality in parts of this country in the 1850's: there were black slave owners, more than a few, and a few were pretty well heeled. Jones's story, centered on one such man in Virginia, exposes the heart of slavery; there are few real villains in this book, because slavery poisons the entire society, white and black, and for the same reason there can be no real heroes. Until now Jones has been a writer of short stories, and this first novel often reads like an assemblage of stories within stories. But he has a sharp ear for speech and a gift for spotting individualizing gestures; ''The Known World'' is crowded with individuals who refuse to get lost in the vast picture of humiliation and disgrace it presents. Jones knows how to create dramatic confrontations that appall us and will not let us escape, as in the treachery of a traveling white con artist who returns a freed black man to shackles by a despicable trick and thus sets the novel on a course to its tragic end. The book has an epic feel, and the seductive force of folk tales.

LIVING TO TELL THE TALE. By Gabriel García Márquez. Translated by Edith Grossman. (Knopf.) At 76, Gabriel García Márquez has the comforting confidence of a man unafraid to tease his admirers. This memoir, the first of three planned volumes, takes him to his early 20's, before he leaves his country as it sinks into violence. As the fantastic landscape of the Caribbean region of Colombia, where he grew up, passes in front of us, occupied by eccentric and, in some cases, bizarre members of his family, we realize that a good part of the ''magic realism'' in his novels was not so magic after all. A ghost who walks in on a family at dinner, a man who breeds a platoon of devoted bastards right across the country, a family that takes an exhumed corpse with its belongings when it moves -- such experiences make for great fiction. His parents and grandparents are masterpieces of memory infused with insight and sad humor. The middle of the book may be opaque to North Americans, who will not know the importance of many of his associates, but the first 100 pages and the last 50 make it all pay off. And there is a powerful moment so quietly stated that its meaning takes time to register: García Márquez was in Bogotá in 1948 when the murder of a popular liberal political leader just down the street from him ignited the civil war that continues today to tear Colombia apart.

RANDOM FAMILY: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx. By Adrian Nicole LeBlanc. (Scribner.) The detail in this extraordinary feat of reportage can be intimidating at times -- the etiquette of prison visits, techniques of cutting dope, rituals of dance clubs, people's clothes, voices, smells and hairdos. The sensuous detail makes reading about the lives of members of a loosely defined Bronx family through 10 years like watching Seurat add specks and daubs until crowds of Parisians rise living from his canvas and walk along the Seine. The people Adrian Nicole LeBlanc gives us are not so fashionable. She focuses on two Puerto Rican girls: one who has a baby by one man and twins by his brother before she's 19 and then ties up with a heroin kingpin and lives lavishly for a few years before going to prison; and another, who has two babies by the first girl's half brother and three more by three other men but who remains so vital and good-humored she lifts a reader's spirit at every encounter. These women, and the scores of relatives, friends and rivals who orbit them, go nowhere; they return repeatedly to the same ruts. The author seldom judges anything they do; they speak for themselves. And yet they are fascinating. It can be tough to read 400 pages about blight and struggle. But these people are such memorable personalities that you can easily read a short section and after you have put it down for some days you will not have lost track of who they are or what they are up to. This book took 10 years to report and it may well stand 10 years of reading.

SAMUEL PEPYS: The Unequalled Self. By Claire Tomalin. (Knopf, cloth; Vintage, paper.) Claire Tomalin rescues Pepys from his own diary, and a much larger figure he is outside it. For 10 years starting in 1660, when he was 26, Pepys wrote in his diary everything he experienced every day -- his countless romantic encounters, fights with his wife, talks with the king, dreams, the plague, the fire of London, work, nights in the theater and at concerts -- in shorthand, or in a pidgin of Latin, French and Spanish. It is the most voluminous account we have of life in the 17th century. Until the 19th century it was hardly known, and from then on was celebrated mostly for its sexual episodes; almost no one now reads the entire six volumes of the diary. But Pepys lived 70 years and became one of the greatest civil servants in British history; his organization of the work of the admiralty is often taken as having given Britain the ability to rule the world's oceans. And his times were as dramatic and dangerous in politics as any in British history. Tomalin resurrects the times vividly and puts him in the center of them. If some of her claims for his eminence as a writer or for his place in human psychology are a bit extravagant, well, Pepys is so captivating and her picture of his Britain so brightly drawn that you can ignore her theses and still hugely enjoy her book.

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