Each year the editors of the Believer generate a short list of the novels they thought were the strongest and, in their opinion, the most undervalued of the year. The 2007 list, published this month, appears below, along with several writers’ citations.

If the measure of a writer’s success is the ire he provokes, then V. S. Naipaul is a spectacular success in Trinidad. In this island nation of just over a million people, there is a widespread perception that he has jilted his homeland through unflattering portraits in his books and a string of cutting remarks [...]

She felt as though she was spiraling to hell as she ran breathlessly down the hill. She was not a runner, she had not done this often, but there was a man chasing her and she had seen out of the corner of her eye, the danger he carried in his right hand, its barrel [...]