Another legendary enigma, Henry James, is the subject of ''The Master," by Colm Tibn, which invents a turbulent inner life for the writer, and ''Author, Author," by David Lodge, which presents James -- celebrity and failure -- in his social and historical context.
T. C. Boyle tackled a more controversial patriarch, Alfred Kinsey, in ''The Inner Circle," an oddly moving evocation of Kinsey's strange world and of postwar America at large. Sex of a sophomoric kind permeates ''I Am Charlotte Simmons," by Tom Wolfe, and also the ''The Line of Beauty," by Alan Hollinghurst, which won Britain's Man Booker Prize and dwells in the gay enclaves of 1980s London.
The National Book Award went to Lily Tuck's ''The News From Paraguay," an elegant novel based on the experiences of Irish beauty Ella Lynch, the mistress of Paraguay's mad 19th-century dictator, Francisco Lopez, who here perpetrates true horrors. In Drabble's ''The Red Queen," a modern academic is captivated by the life of another canny survivor, the 18th-century Korean princess whose journal permits heroine and reader to enter an ancient, alien world.
Here are 10 books, listed alphabetically by author, that made the reading year worthwhile.
The England of Kate Atkinson's ''Case Histories" is a haunted place populated by the walking wounded: parents who have lost their children, children who have lost their parents and their innocence. A private investigator, himself a casualty, takes on three old cases and enters other lives contorted by grief as Atkinson's laconic style and tough wit reveal the heart's resilience.
Brutality on a larger scale fills Hannah Musgrave's past in ''The Darling." Once a member of the Weather Underground, now a New England farmer, Hannah returns to Liberia, where she lost her husband, her three sons, and her chimpanzees to war. But frailty, not horror, is Banks's concern, and his portrayal of it here makes this political thriller one of his finest works.
