The Best of Friends
by Joanna Trollope | 
The Only Problem
by Muriel Spark | 
Vacant Possession
by Hilary Mantel | 
The Game
by A. S. Byatt | 
The Bat Tattoo
by Russell Hoban | 
Great Jones Street
by Don DeLillo | 
By Love Possessed
by James Gould Cozzens | 
Final Argument
by Clifford Irving | 
Aiding and Abetting
by Muriel Spark | 
A Singular Man
by J. P. Donleavy | 
Going Native
by Stephen Wright | 
The Heart of the Family
by Elizabeth Goudge | 
Nickel Mountain
by John Gardner | 
The Finishing School
by Gail Godwin | 
Shadow Play
by Charles Baxter | 
A Box of Matches
by Nicholson Baker | 
Take Me With You
by Catherine Ryan Hyde | 
Empire Falls
by Richard Russo |
Anne of Windy Poplars
by Lucy Maud Montgomery | 
The Sense of an Ending
by Julian Barnes |
Our supreme fabulist of the ordinary now turns his attention on a 9-year-old American girl and produces a novel as enchantingly idiosyncratic as any he has written. Nory Winslow wants to be a dentist or a designer of pop-up books. She likes telling stories and inventing dolls. She has nightmares about teeth, which may explain her career choice. She is going to school in England, where she is mocked for her accent and her friendship with an unpopular girl, and she has made it through the year without crying. Nicholson Baker follows Nory as she interacts with her parents and peers, thinks about God and death-watch beetles, and dreams of cows with pointed teeth. In this precocious child he gives us a heroine as canny and as whimsical as Lewis Carroll's Alice and evokes childhood in all its luminous weirdness.