Every year, for all the books that get their due attention, good or bad, a handful simply slip through the cracks. Some--luckily for their authors--manage to slide into oblivion when, in a just world, they would be laughed right into the landfill, let alone the discount bin. And then there are the ones I think should have dominated bestseller lists and won every prize in sight. Here are four that should have met a better fate:The rhythms of recovery
Far, far from the world's sound and fury, lies the still centre of There is a Season: A Memoir in a Garden. This astonishing memoir, beautiful in its prose and terrifying in its honesty, is poet Patrick Lane's account of a year in his life and garden. It opens in January of 2000, with Lane barely two months out of the rehab centre he entered after 45 years of heavy drinking. Memories of his childhood's "dark infinities" flood Lane, now 65, as he slowly tends his land. Images of a harsh life in the B.C. Interior in the 1940s include the dead baby Lane found in the woods, a friend's father who prostituted his Down's Syndrome daughter for 25 cents a customer, the rape of a native woman--and, stunningly, "moments of such joy that to remember them makes me reel through the thin air of the past." Possibly the best-written book published in 2004, There is a Season is a masterpiece.

Bloody baroque
Paul Anderson's 1,354-page tour-de-force, Hunger's Brides, is a difficult text, even to describe. Ranging seamlessly between the 17th century and now, it details the parallel lives of two child prodigies, Sor(Sister)Juana Inés de la Cruz, the greatest Spanish-language poet of her era, and the unstable Beulah Limosneros, a Calgary scholar obsessed with the Mexican Juana, who entered a convent at 19 and later took a vow of silence.

And that's just the starting point for a novel that draws on Inquisitorial records, Spanish accounts of Aztec blood sacrifices, and theological disputes, to ask why genius would silence itself. Anderson undermines the basic assumptions of historical fiction by constantly pointing out the threads linking the Baroque age to the 20th century--"the Postmodern is just the Baroque, with its blood sucked out"--like the remarkably similar heresy trials held in Soviet Russia and Colonial Mexico. Months after reading it, the novel's ideas and startling historical vision will continue to roil in your mind.

Family and memory
Wayson Choy did get a Giller nomination for All That Matters, so I can hardly claim he was ignored. But he should have won it. His writing has a quiet integrity and an exquisite grace that can electrify readers--when they can get it, that is. The new novel is a return to familiar territory. This time the fictional child looking back is the Chen family's First Son, Kiam-Kim. As in his previous books, Choy's handling of childhood memory is dazzling. However perfect their recall of certain moments, his kids never invest them with an adult portentousness; full awareness of their significance remains elusive even after they grow up.

Kiam-Kim is torn between Chinese family tradition and the New World. First Son thinks too much, or so his relatives say, in a culture that believes toeing the line is the key to survival. When the children gather before their grandmother, the incandescent Poh-Poh, to listen to the tales of Old China that bind the family to its roots, the tension within Kiam-Kim becomes overwhelming. So too does the subtle resonance of Choy's writing. All That Matters is a beautiful novel.

Magical reading
Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is a glorious sprawl of a novel, as much a tribute to two centuries of English prose as it is a tale of two magicians who fight, first against Napoleon, then against each other. There is magic, of course--a tedious, costly and strangely believable business. Visitors from the otherworldly realm of Faerie and cathedral statues that suddenly speak, denouncing murders that occurred before them centuries ago, come to seem as much a natural part of the times as Royal Navy frigates or candlelit salons. Far more dazzling are Clarke's recurrent nods to almost every giant of 19th-century writing.

While there are numerous needle-sharp sentences worthy of Austen--"Even his dearest friends would have admitted that he possessed not a single good quality"--there is far more Dickens, and even a trace of P. G. Wodehouse. Some critics, somehow managing to be both correct and to completely miss the point, complain that very little happens in Strange's 782 pages. Exactly. Entrancing footnotes that meander through the history of English magic, charming subplots that go nowhere at all, and painstakingly drawn portraits of unimportant characters are the very essence of Clarke's beguiling hymn to the pure pleasure of reading.