1. The Forever War by Dexter Filkins

The gaping wounds of Iraq and Afghanistan have produced a torrent of words, but no single volume so far has the precision and power of The Forever War. Filkins has been covering the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan since 1998, and since then he has filled 561 notebooks with observations and interviews. Even under the direst of conditions Filkins is alive to novelistic detail: the popping sound of a 105 mm cannon, like "a machine that served tennis balls"; a barber shaving the beards of Talibs so they can switch sides; a man whom Saddam forced to pay for the bullets that were used to execute his brother, and who received a receipt for his payment. Filkins' set pieces have the absolute clarity of lightning flashes that burn away the fog of war.

2. The Thief at the End of the World by Joe Jackson

Henry Wickham was born in England in 1846, and he was one of fortune's fools if there ever was one. Dreamy, ungifted and of modest means, Wickham set off for the Amazon at the age of 20 to collect exotic feathers for his mother's hat business. When that venture failed he spent the next 10 years failing to set up a rubber plantation while various relatives who came over to help him dropped dead around him. From this stupendous disaster he wrung one towering, historic, ethically questionable victory. Defying malaria, anacondas, electric eels, freshwater stingrays, Confederate colonists, customs inspectors and Yanomamo tribesmen, he smuggled 70,000 priceless rubber-tree seeds out of Brazil and back to Kew Gardens, in a single stroke handing England supremacy in one of the key resources of the 20th century. Wickham's life is a stone-cold historical thriller, a black comedy and one of the great secret fables of the modern age.

3. The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder

You've met Buffett the investor, the coolheaded gunslinger with an X-ray eye for buying good firms cheap. Now meet Buffett the person: an emotionally needy husband and absentee father who avoids anyone he fears might criticize him. Even people who don't care a whit about business will be intrigued by this portrait of a boy who endured a verbally abusive mother and grew into a man desperately dependent on a series of women to shore up his fragile psyche, even as he became the richest person on the planet. Schroeder, a former insurance-industry analyst, spent years interviewing Buffett, and the result is a side of the Oracle of Omaha that has rarely been seen.

4. The World Is What It Is by Patrick French

Judging by The Snowball and this portrait of Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul, 2008 might go down as the Year of the Authorized Biography. French is blessed with a rich subject: any book on Naipaul is also a book about Trinidad, England, the Indian diaspora, family, marriage, friendship, race, class and contemporary literature. (Also — somewhat surprisingly given Naipaul's finicky, ascetic image — sex!) But it takes a steady hand to pull all these strands plus a formidable range of source material into a cohesive narrative, and French has it. Naipaul's contributions, meanwhile, are invaluable and characteristically cunning; while some of his revelations — especially regarding his outsize callousness toward the women in his life — will make you cringe, you can't help but admire his candor. It's a seamless union of author scrutiny and subject self-scrutiny — the perfect treatment for Naipaul, who has spent much of his writing life teasing out his own autobiographical enigmas.

5. The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher by Kate Summerscale

Very early on the morning of June 30, 1860, a murder took place at an English country house called Road Hill. The owner's son Saville Kent, 3, was gently lifted from his bed. His assailant suffocated him, stabbed him in the chest, cut his throat and finally dropped him head-down through a hole in the servants' outhouse. The Road Hill House murder became a national obsession; it seemed to reveal some sick secret truth lurking in the hushed, upholstered heart of the Victorian household. The task of solving the crime fell to one Jonathan Whicher, one of the original eight London policemen selected to join the new, élite unit of detectives headquartered at Scotland Yard. This is a dark, vicious true-crime story, but it's also the story of the birth of forensic science.

6. Hurry Down Sunshine by Michael Greenberg

Sally had always been odd. She dressed eccentrically. She stayed up till all hours reading Shakespeare and scribbling in notebooks. But on July 5, 1996, her fizzing mental chemistry boiled over and she experienced a psychotic break at the precocious age of 15. In this extraordinary memoir Greenberg — a freelance writer with no health insurance — tracks his daughter's journey through the mental health system, and through the measureless corridors of madness and medication, back to a semblance of normality. He also tells his own story, that of a man desperately clinging to his own mental balance while he helplessly watches his little girl lose hers.

7. Factory Girls by Leslie T. Chang

There are 130 million migrant workers in China. Many of them are young women who work illegally long hours for illegally low pay in colossal factories that are self-contained worlds unto themselves, with their own dorms and cafeterias and movie theaters and hospitals. Chang, a journalist, followed the lives of several of these factory girls, many of whom fled even grimmer situations in rural villages. The only traces we in the West see of this shadowy world are the cheap export goods the girls create, but it's a vast and complex society with its own iron laws, and it holds vital clues to the future of China and of the larger global economy it services.

8. John Lennon by Philip Norman

Over the years Lennon fans have been whiplashed by biographies that alternately demonize and canonize the Beatles' front man. Norman does both, and in doing so gets closer than anyone else to capturing the man. No novelist would have dared to invent the improbable story of a motherless little boy from a dreary British backwater who grew up to become the Pied Piper of global pop culture. Boozing, bedding and brawling, preaching universal love while nursing a bottomless inner well of loneliness, Lennon scaled the heights of fame almost in spite of himself. He only experienced the peace he sang about in his last years, before an act of insane violence silenced him forever.

9. The Magician's Book by Laura Miller

The Chronicles of Narnia is a beloved classic of fantasy literature. It's also a mass of contradictions: it's both an argument for Christian spirituality and a psychosexual allegory, a hymn of childhood innocence and a dark morass of racial prejudice and male condescension. Miller plunges into this perilous literary thicket in search of a way of understanding the books that preserves their undeniable pleasures without compromising their complexity. Weaving together her own life as a reader and Clive Staples Lewis's life as, among other things, a reader, a writer, a Christian, a veteran of World War I, a friend to J.R.R. Tolkien and the partner of a woman 20 years his senior, Miller illuminates not only the Chronicles of Narnia, but the nature of reading itself.

10. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

By now Gladwell's modus operandi is well known: he finds a little gem of conventional wisdom and uses statistics and anecdotes from diverse fields to prove that this precious stone is in fact paste. In this case the myth he busts has to do with success. Using the stories of various ultra-successful individuals (Bill Gates, Robert Oppenheimer), and a few spectacular failures (notably Christopher Langan, a man with an IQ higher than Einstein's who wound up working on a horse farm), Gladwell argues that success isn't so much about individual genius or talent as it is about context: the family, culture and historical moment of the successful indidivdual. It's a gripping dismantling — or at least a thorough nuancing — of the American myth of the self-made man.