This quaintly old-fashioned novel embraces a remarkable range of humor and pathos, deftly combines lyricism and realistic details, and deploys a cast of characters in an historically accurate setting (the Greek island of Cephalonia, occupied by Italian and Nazi troops during W.W.II). De Bernieres embraces the irony, futility and obscenity of war and the endurance of love.

After a social transgression and an emotional crisis, Edith Hope, an unmarried romance writer, is pressured by friends to go off along to the genteel Hotel du Lac in Switzerland. Anita Brookner's fourth novel, winner of England's 1984 Booker Prize, is a spare, arch account of a woman's progress toward self-awareness.

In this luminous first novel set on an island in Puget Sound, a man is on trial for the brutal murder of a brawny, taciturn salmon fisherman. Because it is the early '50s -- with World War II fresh in the islanders' memories -- the fact that the defendant Kabuo Miyomoto is of Japanese descent has packed the courtroom with people whose minds were made up before the testimony begins.

Jane Hamilton's book is set in America's heartland and grapples with domestic tragedy. A self-sufficient Wisconsin farm family is shocked by an accidental death and an accusation of child abuse. The author has a great gift for characterization, enabling her to express the smallest nuances of human behavior. A heartbreaking, harrowing novel.

This sequel to All the Pretty Horses tells the harsh story of a young Texan whose parents are murdered by horse thieves and whose kid brother is then killed in a confrontation with the thieves.

Kaye Gibbons writes graceful and spirited stories of North Carolina women. In her fourth novel, Charms for the Easy Life, Gibbons writes about three generations of women. The matriarch Charlie Kate Birth is a midwife and self-proclaimed doctor who meets her ferryman husband as she cross the Pasquotank River to deliver babies. Her granddaughter Margaret, narrator of the book, imagines, "Between my grandmother, her green eyes ... and the big-cookie moon low over the Pasquotank, it must have been all my grandfather could do to deposit her on the other side of the river." In 1910 the Birches move from Pasquotank to Raleigh, where Charlie Kate raises her daughter and granddaughter, practices medicine and becomes a Wake County legend.

In his first book, McCourt has constructed a splendid memoir from his family's ruins. The McCourts are poor Irish immigrants whose situation is so desperate they move from Brooklyn back to Ireland during the Depression when Frank was four. "It is a scrappy memoir of his boyhood in the slums of Limerick."

A Canadian writer, Munro supplies rich, daring and satisfying short stories, all rooted in rural Ontario, most of them about women balanced uneasily between a conventional past and a present that tips them in new and strange directions. The constants in Munro's stores are remorseless time, blind fate and the author's wry sense of the bizarre hidden in the ordinary.

Witless Bay, Newfoundland, in the early part of this century, is the setting for Norman's mesmerizing novel of a young man's coming-of-age. We learn on the first page that the bird artist has killed his mother's lover; the tale then backtracks to evoke a way of life, a distinctive community and a fatalistic view of human behavior. The novel sings with tension and sparkles with antic humor.

At once a playful sendup of biography and a serious exploration of the essential mystery of human lives, The Stone Diaries tracks a woman from her birth in Manitoba to her old age in Florida.