A year's worth of staff favorites.

The Silver Swan, by Benjamin Black (Picador, $14 paperback) Noir doesn't get any darker than Benjamin's Black's Garrett Quirke mysteries, set in 1950s Dublin and featuring the brilliant, alcoholic, melancholic, and deeply troubled forensic pathologist Quirke. I just discovered the series this year. The other night, I picked up The Silver Swan, published in 2008. Quirke's hitting the whiskey again, and a woman has turned up dead. Suicide, or not? This isn't funny stuff. It is compelling, very Irish, and very, very dark. Black himself is actually a creation, the nom de plume of acclaimed Irish writer John Banville. The Quirke books are fantastically written, and so hard to put down.

- Rita Giordano, staff writer

The Submission by Amy Waldman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26) Waldman has written a tight, smart novel about an Arab-American architect winning a blind submission to design the 9/11 memorial. Chaos ensues, with a convincing cast of characters etched with Tom Wolfe precision.

- K.H.

The Tragedy of Arthur, by Arthur Phillips (Random House, $26) Late in The Tragedy of Arthur, the King Arthur character laments: "I am no author of my history." But who is the author of his history? That's the big question in this ambitious, funny skewering of memoirs, literary experts, Shakespeare theories, hunts for provenance, and human foibles throughout the ages. As Phillips constructs this fiendishly complex puzzle, he keeps the focus on the real puzzle: What motivates people, especially when family, money, and reputation are involved?

- R.D.

Vietnamerica: A Family's Journey, by GB Tran (Villard, $30) This moving, harrowing, lovely graphic novel tells the story of the Tran family's flight to America after the fall of Saigon, and of their struggle to forge a new life in a strange place. Tran, born not in Vietnam but in South Carolina, tracks his family from past to present, slowly coming to understand what his parents and grandparents did to survive a series of Vietnam wars - and the price they paid for that. Library Journal called the book "the Maus for the Vietnam War," a deserved honor.

- J.G.