If you’re buying a gift for a booklover, check out the The Kansas City Star’s Top 100 book list of 2011. Here are the Star’s top ten recommendations from the list. You can find the complete list — which includes fiction, non-fiction, poetry, biography and more — on KansasCity.com.

Fiction

1. “The Marriage Plot”

Jeffrey Eugenides (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). At Brown University in the early 1980s, two very different young men vie for the attention of a female student whose personal life mirrors the plotlines found in the 19th century novels she adores.

2. “The Night Circus”

“The Night Circus” By Erin Morgenstern (Doubleday). Two young magicians outwit their masters in a captivating, whimsical and much-publicized first novel. Part literary fiction, part fantasy, it turns lush atmosphere into art, despite a shaky, frothy, stock romantic subplot.

3. “The Outlaw Album”

By Daniel Woodrell (Little, Brown).

After reading the first sentence of “The Echo of Neighborly Bones,” the first story included in this collection — “Once Boshell finally killed his neighbor he couldn’t seem to quit killing him” — there’s no choice but to keep reading.

4. “The Tiger’s Wife”

By Tea Obreht (Random House). The literary world’s excitement that Obreht is a mere 26 years old and that this is her first novel somewhat eclipsed the power of the story itself — a rich saga of war and medicine in southeastern Europe with a touch of Isaac Bashevis Singer-tinged mysticism.

5. “You Think That’s Bad”

By Jim Shepard (Knopf). Dangerous obsessions, doomed love triangles, the perils of nature and dark moments in history, from war to science to moviemaking, intrigue and inspire this consummate short-story writer, whose fourth collection is astonishing in its originality and impact.

Nonfiction

6. “Destiny of the Republic”

By Candice Millard (Doubleday). Kansas City-based Millard tackles her second presidential potboiler (after the Theodore Roosevelt tale “The River of Doubt” in 2005), this time uncovering the botched medical treatment following the assassination of James Garfield.

7. “In the Garden of Beasts”

By Erik Larson (Crown). Narrative nonfiction at its finest, this story drops into 1933 Berlin as William E. Dodd becomes the first U.S. ambassador to Hitler’s Germany — a tale of intrigue, romance and foreboding.

8. “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern”

By Stephen Greenblatt (W.W. Norton & Co.). A beautifully written history of the loss, preservation and recovery of ancient books in the 1400s and what that meant for modern intellectual history.

Young readers

9. “A Monster Calls”

By Patrick Ness. Inspired by an idea from Siobhan Dowd, with illustrations by Jim Kay (Candlewick Press). The stark black-and-white illustrations for this young adult novel enhance the story by giving a face to the monster of 13-year-old Conor O’Malley’s dreams, and also will help younger readers embrace this universal story of love, loss, grief and truth.

**10. “Wonderstruck”

By Brian Selznick (Scholastic Press). Selznick delights again with an illustrated novel that alternately tells the story of Ben, who searches for clues to his unknown father in the American Museum of Natural History, and the story of Rose, who 50 years earlier also followed her heart into the museum, and how their lives eventually intersect.