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Credit Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

REDEPLOYMENT by Phil Klay (the Penguin Press). The gritty, unsparing stories in this debut collection give us a visceral feel for what it was like to be a soldier on the ground in Iraq and what it was like to return home to a country that was mostly oblivious to the fact that America was even at war. A veteran of the Marine Corps, who served in Iraq during the surge, Mr. Klay writes with enormous precision and depth of feeling, the exactitude of his prose containing, and at the same time underscoring, war’s violence and chaos. His 12 stories are told in the first person, but from a variety of points of view (a young artilleryman, a member of Mortuary Affairs, a veteran attending law school). Together, these tales create a choral portrait of the war, and they testify to Mr. Klay’s range as a writer and his understanding of its human costs.

LITTLE FAILURE: A Memoir by Gary Shteyngart (Random House). Mr. Shteyngart’s affecting, often hilarious memoir recounts the story of how he and his parents left the monochromatic world of the U.S.S.R., and in 1979 began new lives in the gloriously technicolor U.S. of A. He poignantly conveys his parents’ frugal, cautious existence in America — “they live with the idea that disaster is close at hand” — while using antic comedy to depict his own stumbling efforts to bridge the cultural divide: His name was changed to Gary from Igor because “Igor is Frankenstein’s assistant, and I have enough problems already” fitting in. This book is raw, moving, uproarious and melancholy all at the same time.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF SEVEN KILLINGS by Marlon James (Riverhead Books). This novel is epic in every sense of that word: mythic, sweeping, over the top, staggeringly complex. Mr. James uses the 1976 assassination attempt on Bob Marley as a portal into Jamaican politics and culture, and his novel becomes an elliptical inquiry into race and class, and the volatile relationship between the United States and the Caribbean. Although the novel’s sprawling cast and stream-of-consciousness patois can initially make the book seem overwhelming, Mr. James writes with such a love of language — language that’s musical, electric and fantastically profane — that he quickly immerses the reader in his characters’ lives, creating a story that is as compelling as it is complicated.

CAN’T WE TALK ABOUT SOMETHING MORE PLEASANT? A Memoir by Roz Chast (Bloomsbury Publishing). As fans of her New Yorker cartoons well know, Ms. Chast’s work has long been informed by her experiences as a daughter, wife and mother. In her new book, she directly tackles the subject of her parents — her gentle, worrywart father and impossibly stubborn mother, who lived for 48 years in the same Brooklyn apartment filled with geologic layers of unopened mail, old Life magazines and antique appliances. Her account of growing up with them as an only child, and her efforts decades later to help them navigate the shoals of old age and ill health, is sad and funny and absurd, and it reminds us of the infinite elasticity of the illustrated book — in this case, the perfect vessel for a personal story about filial love and duty.

DUTY: Memoirs of a Secretary at War by Robert M. Gates (Alfred A. Knopf). In his forthright and highly impassioned memoir, Mr. Gates gives readers a compelling account of his four and a half years as secretary of defense under Presidents Bush and Obama. Though inside-the-Beltway readers have already perused this volume for revelations about turf wars and policy disagreements in those administrations, lay readers will learn a great deal here about the workings of Washington and the challenges facing the United States at home and abroad. Mr. Gates’s assessments of a wide array of national security matters are informed by a keen sense of history and his longtime Washington experience, and he talks candidly here about the Iraq war he inherited when he took over as defense secretary in late 2006, recalling that he was “stunned by what I saw as amazing bungling after the initial military success.”

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THE SIXTH EXTINCTION: An Unnatural Selection by Elizabeth Kolbert (Henry Holt and Company). In a book that reads like the very model of explanatory journalism, Ms. Kolbert reports from far-flung parts of the world and interviews scientists and researchers to give readers an up-close-and-animal understanding of the globe’s many endangered species and their shrinking habitats. Her descriptions of vanishing creatures — like a Sumatran rhino named Suci and a Hawaiian crow named Kinohi — are vivid and touching, but the real power of her book resides in the hard science and historical context she delivers here, documenting the mounting losses incurred by mankind’s transformation of the planet.

THE DOG: Stories by Jack Livings (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). The stories in Mr. Livings’s masterly debut collection (not to be confused with this year’s Joseph O’Neill novel of the same name) are set in China, and show us how parts of that country are rushing to embrace the 21st century, even as many of its people still feel the magnetic hold exerted by history and tradition. Mr. Livings, who taught English in China and studied there as an undergraduate, writes with such sympathy and insight that he seems less like an outsider than like a sort of Chekhovian observer, attuned to the ironies of his characters’ stories, their entrapment by family expectations and government rules and their struggles to clear a small measure of personal freedom in their daily lives.

LILA by Marilynne Robinson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Ms. Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “Gilead” (2004), recounted the story of John Ames and his much younger wife, Lila — and in this affecting, ballad-like prequel to that book, she focuses on Lila’s earlier life. Writing in lovely, angular prose, she chronicles the abandonment and hardship Lila knew growing up, her life on the road with a group of itinerant workers and the fears of abandonment that threaten to undermine her relationship with John. This is the story of two lost souls who, after years of stoic solitariness, unexpectedly find love — not the sudden, transformative passion of romantic movies but hard-won trust and tenderness that grow slowly over time.

NOT THAT KIND OF GIRL: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s ‘Learned’ by Lena Dunham (Random House). This smart, funny book by the creator of the hit HBO series “Girls” is a kind of memoir disguised as an advice book, or a how-to book in the guise of a series of personal essays. The sharp observations and distinctive voice Ms. Dunham honed in “Girls” and her 2010 movie, “Tiny Furniture,” are translated here to the page. She writes about the most personal details of her life, from longstanding insecurities to terrible relationships to long-distance therapy sessions (conducted “from beaches, speeding vehicles in Western states, crouched behind a Dumpster”). At the same time, there is also an older person’s sort of wisdom here: a writer’s stereoscopic perspective on her hardly distant youth, and an understanding of the transactions between life and art.

ALL OUR NAMES by Dinaw Mengestu (Alfred A. Knopf). Set in the early 1970s, this novel recounts the story of a young man who calls himself Isaac. We gradually learn that he has taken his best friend’s name and has fled the revolutionary violence of Uganda to go to the United States. There, in a small town, he begins an intense affair with a social worker named Helen, who is supposed to be “his chaperone into Middle America” — an affair threatened by the hostility of their neighbors, and their worries about each other and the liabilities of their love. Isaac’s story is not just a story about exile and loss, but about how individuals define themselves by their dreams, their choices, the place or places they call home.

Janet Maslin’s 10 Favorite Books of 2014

Dwight Garner’s 10 Favorite Books of 2014

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