Best of 2013 The top 10 booksBest of 2013 The top 10 books.docVIP

10. Mary Coin by Marisa Silver Do you mind if I take your picture? In 1936 photographer Dorothea Lange focused her lens on the exhausted face of a migrant woman, a mother of seven displaced by the Dust Bowl and caught in the downward spiral of the Great Depression. In this iconic image, caught in a quicksilver moment, using a new technology, two women - photographer and subject - were linked forever. Thats the set-up for Silvers elegantly written third novel. She braids together the stories of US government photographer Vera Dare (a proxy for Lange), her subject Mary Coin - the Oklahoma-born mother she spotted working in a California pickers camp - and Berkeley cultural historian Walker Dodge, who finds unexpected connections to them both. Silver unleashes a kaleidoscope of images, then slows down long enough for us to absorb the emotional resonance of each. Most surprising is Mary Coins late-life recognition of what the portrait - frozen into an indelible past like an insult you can never take back - means to the world outside her own. (Blue Rider Press) 9. The Woman Who Lost Her Soul by Bob Shacochis The Woman Who Lost Her Soul starts as a simple thriller with a simple guiding intrigue: Who killed Jackie Scott? But Shacochis has his sights set high. He ranges from Nazi-occupied Croatia, where a young boy watches his father beheaded, to Cold War Istanbul in 1986, when that boy, now a US diplomat, trains his own daughter in tradecraft. She shows up in Haiti after the disastrous 1996 US invasion, calling herself Jackie Scott, seeking a Vodou priest to help recover her soul. When Americans pray, they pray first that history will step aside and leave them alone, Shacochis writes. But history walks on all of us, lashed by time, and sometimes we feel its boot on our backs and sometimes we are oblivious to its passing. This spectacular novel is a globe-spanning half-century prequel to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. It measures up to the darkest work