Believe it or not, I and the other editors of the Business Law Prof Blog don't spend all of our time reading and thinking about business law. I assume none of you do, either, so I thought you might be interested in a list of the best non-law books I have run across this year.

I originally planned to put them all in a single post, but I read a number of very good books in 2014, so I decided to divide the list into two posts. Today, fiction. Next week, non-fiction.

I’m limiting both lists to books published relatively recently, so you don’t have to wade through a list of old science fiction or Thomas Hardy novels, no matter how excellent I thought they were when I reread them this year.

Except for the first book, they’re in no real order.

1. Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See. If you read only one book on this list, this should be it. This is the best new novel I have read in some time. It centers on a bright young German boy and a blind French girl in the period prior to and during World War II. It’s hard to explain the story in a few words, but I think it’s an absolutely brilliant book.

2. Chang-Rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea. The main character searches for the father of her unborn child in a dystopian future. The book has no real conclusion, and I usually don’t like that, but I’m willing to excuse that, given the excellent writing.

3. Rachel Joyce, Perfect. This brilliant novel has two alternating stories: one about a young boy who becomes obsessed when a friend tells him that two extra seconds will be added to clocks; the other about a disturbed 50-year-old supermarket worker. Keep reading: she eventually ties the two story lines together.

4. Andy Weir, The Martian. An astronaut is stranded on Mars without adequate supplies after his colleagues leave, thinking he’s dead. A solid piece of science fiction.

5. Karen Russell, Sleep Donation. A novella about a sickness that keeps people from sleeping. They use a machine to borrow sleep from sleep donors.

6. Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour. I’m not a huge Joshua Ferris fan, but I liked this one. A dentist discovers that someone is posting online in his name about a lost Middle Eastern group and a religion whose primary belief is a doubt that God exists.

7. Jo Walton, My Real Children. I really enjoy Jo Walton’s science fiction, and this book was not an exception. It’s about a woman with Alzheimer’s who remembers two very distinct lives—diverging when she said either “yes” or “no” to a marriage proposal.

8. Matthew Thomas, We are Not Ourselves. A bittersweet first novel about a woman and her families—the family she grew up with and, later, her husband and son. A story of regret and uncertainty, it's sad and depressing, but extremely good.

9. Bill Roorbach, The Remedy for Love. A fascinating love(?) story involving a small-town lawyer stuck in a tiny, isolated cabin with a disturbed woman during a once-a-century blizzard. A charming story, expertly told.