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Actually, I want to talk about all four of Ross’s mysteries, featuring Julian Kestrel, a fashionable young man in 1825 London. Although moving in the best circles, Kestrel is not the usual well-to-do fribble, but a man whose background—his aristocratic father married an actress and was cast off by his family and all of society—lets him look at that world slantwise. Having grown up on the Continent, Kestrel has been able to establish himself in society as a leader of fashion without revealing his background or his shaky finances. Kestrel reminds me of Selden in Wharton’s House of Mirth in his ability to stand to one side of society and critique it even while being a part of it.

In Cut to the Quick, Kestrel goes on a weekend visit at Bellegarde, country home of the Fontclairs. He finds a murdered woman in his bed and is forced to solve the crime in order to exonerate himself and his valet, a former pickpocket known as Dipper for his facility at his trade. In A Broken Vessel, Kestrel becomes embroiled in the world of prostitutes and reformers. Whom the Gods Love is the third book, in which Kestrel investigates the murder of Alexander Falkland, a man universally admired for his charm, intelligence, and artistic talent.

Over the course of the series, Kestrel comes to value the intellectual challenge of crime-solving and the meaning that it gives to his formerly rather aimless days. At the same time, he struggles with the consequences—of the crime, certainly, but even more interestingly, of the revelation of long-held secrets, an inevitable consequence of his investigations.

These are wonderful novels, with complex and well-drawn characters, satisfying puzzles, and a wonderfully conjured world of high and low society in Regency England. Sadly, there will be no more books in the series. Kate Ross died in 1998 at the age of 41.

Ross had been a trial lawyer, living in Brookline, Massachusetts. I feel as though I mist have known her. Maybe I brushed past her on the Brookline sidewalks as I went to visit friends. Perhaps we casually nodded to each other as we examined the treasures at the Gardner museum. I’m betting she was one of the spectators when my morris team danced the sun up on Maydays. She certainly knew about morris dancing; several times in the books she uses “morris off” as slang for “leave”.

I talked a bit about immortality last week. For a writer, as for any artist, any parent for that matter, our creations give us a chance of living on for a bit. Here I am, twelve years after her death, thinking about this woman whom I did not in fact know, wondering about the shape of her life, and feeling grateful that these four books keep her name alive.

On this Labor Day, it seems appropriate to think about the role of work in our lives. I remember the first time I visited the Tate, walking through room after room of Turner’s paintings with their huge splashes of light, and thinking: This is a man’s life. There can be no greater satisfaction than to be able to look around and say: I did this. I thought about visiting my friend, Susan, on her dairy farm. After I had regaled her with tales of my travels, my sons, my dancing and writing, she took me for a walk through the fields, pointing out one cow after another and telling me their names, laying a sun-browned hand on a flank or rubbing a dipped head. Now I think too of Stoner, that modest novel that has stayed with me over the months. At the end of his life, a life that would have left most men bitter, Stoner lies in bed holding the one book he has managed to write and believes that he has had a good life.

We all want—I believe—work to do that we can be proud of, that at the end of our lives we can point to and say: I did this. I reread these books every few years because I enjoy them, but also to celebrate Kate Ross and be glad that she had this accomplishment to be proud of at the end.

Last week’s Wolf Hall got me thinking about history. Since most of Mantel’s depiction of Thomas Cromwell’s character was invented, I wondered what right we have to tamper with persons and events from the past. Stories are what we remember, far more effectively than lists of facts. Those early lessons of Abe Lincoln reading in his log cabin and George Washington and the apple tree linger in some essential layer of our imagining, stronger than any later biographical reading, even after we know they are fictional. Film is even more lasting: biopics and even pure fiction about past events seem more real to us than the facts we carefully researched.

Milan Kundera’s Immortality investigates the effects of a tale told after someone’s death and how, told often enough, it can come to seem the truth, even when it is completely false, such as the images Bettina Brentano fabricated about both Goethe and Beethoven after their deaths becoming the ones that would be remembered. We see it today when politicians and talk radio blast a pernicious lie about someone in office, repeating it over and over until the foolish crowd comes to believe it is true. How much more insidious, then, to launch such a campaign after the person is dead and no longer around to defend themselves.

Writing a biography is a tremendously difficult task. Hard as it is to finish a novel—all those blank pages to fill—it is harder to write nonfiction, such as a memoir where you are limited to what actually happened and who people really are, at least to the best of your memory and perception. Biography is that much harder because you must research the person’s life, without your own memories to guide you. And it had better be someone who fascinates you because you are going to be spending years delving into the minutiae of that person’s days.

All these considerations increase my admiration for those historians and biographers who do make the huge investment to bring us stories of past lives. Some years ago, I heard Edmund Morris speak about Dutch, his controversial biography of Ronald Reagan where he inserted fictional characters and even an imaginary version of himself to help dramatise the story. Morris described the years of effort that go into researching a biography and his own horror when he realised that the person was simply not very interesting. While I don’t agree with Morris’s decision to fictionalise his biography, I do understand that in biography, as in memoir, you cannot help but distort the truth of a life by the scenes you decide to dramatise and the words you choose to describe them. Not that any of us knows what the truth is, even of our own lives.

I enjoyed Wolf Hall but knew little about Cromwell’s life and couldn’t evaluate the thoughts and feelings Mantel attributes to him. Certainly her picture of the man is consistent and believable. I did know a bit about the period and decided the best remedy for my uncertainty was to consult other sources.

I’ve always enjoyed Antonia Fraser’s histories. Her style is engaging and easy to read, even though she doesn’t resort to fictional techniques like invented dialogue. In this book, she gives us a Henry who becomes more and more impatient and self-indulgent, and sets this portrait within the context of the times, when marriage for love was rare for anyone, but especially so for a king. But her focus is really on each of the six wives in turn. She not only brings them to life, but uses them as a lens to look at the condition and treatment of women in the 16th century. For example, Anna of Cleves’s mother kept her close, not just to preserve Anna’s virginity with its cardinal importance as dowry, but also her sexual innocence, which gave her an air of virtue, perhaps even more prized than the hard-to-determine technical virginity. However, Anna’s ignorance was so great that she told her ladies-in-waiting that she believed her marriage had been consummated because Henry had kissed her and held her hand. She had no idea how to please the king in or out of bed. Her lack of education in languages and social intercourse—not uncommon in her Germanic home, but very different from the English court with its flirting and courtly humour and love of all things French—put her at a disadvantage and contributed to Henry’s disappointment in her, a disappointment so strong that, although he went through with the arranged marriage for diplomatic reasons, he could not beget the backup heir he so badly needed.

This is quite an interesting book, heavily sprinkled with footnotes which reassure the reader as to the authenticity of the material without interrupting the flow of the story. Sadly—for my purposes—Fraser does not have a lot to say about Cromwell, giving me nothing to set against Mantel’s picture of him. Her depictions of Henry, Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn do accord well with those in Wolf Hall. And of course, it is impossible to know the full truth about someone, even a near family member, much less a man who lived almost 500 years ago. It’s hard enough to know the truth about ourselves, as Cromwell discovered near the end of Mantel’s book when he realised that he had the face of a murderer.

This Booker Award-winning novel is based on the life of Thomas Cromwell, a commoner who rose to become a trusted advisor to Henry VIII. After running away from his abusive blacksmith of a father to become a soldier, Cromwell learns accounting, diplomacy, and many languages as he moves among the capitals of the various European empires. He becomes a lawyer and eventually a protégé of the powerful Cardinal Wolsey. Wolsey sets him to investigating and sometimes closing monasteries where corruption—the selling of indulgences, fathering of children, etc.—has run rampant. Cromwell is interested in the new religious reform movements, believing for example that everyone should have access to a translation of the Bible, but he has no hatred for the Catholic church, only for corrupt priests.

Most of the narrative is concerned with the period when Henry has become obsessed with Anne Boleyn. In searching for a way to marry her legitimately, he turns to Cromwell who has the extensive contacts, the balance sheet of favors given and received, and the shrewd insight to manage the people around him. By focusing on Cromwell's thoughts, plans, and feelings, we see how he manages with a delicate twitch upon the reins not only his employees and contacts, but also the Boleyn/Howard clan, the royal household, and Anne herself. A cautious man, he knows how to count the costs, how to balance his desire for revenge on those who made Wolsey’s downfall so humiliating with his recognition that today’s enemy may be tomorrow’s ally.

It is a fascinating ride, following the gradual hardening of this man, who starts out merely practical, loving learning and his family, and yet becomes the monster who haunts the history books. No single step seems so very bad. I’m reminded again of the children in The Diamond in the Window, one of the first books I discussed on this blog, and how their small choices in one game led them to quite different personalities than they expected or wanted.

Although some family trees and a cast of characters are provided, knowledge of the historical context is assumed. You don’t need to know it to enjoy the book. You can read this book simply as a novel about an interesting man and a perennially popular time period. You can read it for insight into how it is possible for someone to become as lost to human compassion as those we see in our own day prosecuting wars for their own personal benefit and inflicting torture on the powerless.

However, knowing Cromwell’s later fate as Henry struggles to rid himself of wife #4, Anna of Cleves, adds poignancy to Cromwell’s reaction to Wolsey’s downfall and to Cromwell’s attempts to bridle the king, who wants what he wants. Knowing about the later reigns of Henry’s two daughters makes their childhood influences more striking, such as Mary losing her title of Princess and being required to wait on her baby sister. Knowing the roles they will later play makes some of the minor characters more interesting, such as Anne’s musician Mark Smeaton and her pale lady-in-waiting Jane Seymour.

Cromwell’s huge accomplishment in having Henry declared head of England’s church is presented as one small step in a long string of diplomatic negotiations, as it undoubtedly was, no matter how much it may seem to us like a cataclysmic explosion. The religious controversies of the times are certainly part of this story but not the main thread, as they are with so many other novels of the times.

The strength of the book, aside from the character development, is in the details—of ordinary life as well as court life. Mantel’s research is so well integrated that it is only in retrospect that I can appreciate how extensive it must have been. Emotional detail, too, caparisons the story, as in the subtle changes in Cromwell’s relationship with Anne Boleyn and the gentle teasing from his daughters that he not only endures but cherishes. He is not a man who gives himself away; his opinions and feelings are hidden from us yet we learn to read the signs and come to understand this most complex man.

My one frustration with the book was that the dialogue is often not attributed, forcing me to go back over several pages of dialogue to untangle who said what. The pronoun “he” does not reliably refer to the last-named person, as we have been trained to expect. While this stylistic choice is consistent with Cromwell’s reticence and tendency toward self-effacement, it more than once made me throw down the book in disgust. But I always came back, wanting to immerse myself once again in the world of 16th century England and Cromwell’s ride into history.

I first read this book back when I was young and hoping to learn from novels what the world was like. Along with Middlemarch and Portrait of a Lady, House of Mirth filled me with a horrified apprehension about the possible consequences of a woman's choice.

The scene is New York in the 1890s. Lily Bart, one of the most intriguing characters in all of literature, lives with the aunt who took her in after her mother's death. With only a tiny income of her own, Lily is dependent on her aunt's occasional gifts and on the generosity of her friends, who invite her to house parties, concerts, and dinners. She knows she must marry money if she wants to regain her footing in the affluent world where she and her parents lived before her father's untimely death. The task should be an easy one: Lily is extraordinarily beautiful and possesses all the social graces to attract and hold whomever she chooses. Yet here she is, 29 years old and almost on the shelf.

The problem is the streak of independence that she's had since childhood, the ability (or curse) to view her social world from the outside with a sardonic eye. We watch as she almost lands a wealthy young man, only to lose him at the last moment by sleeping in and missing church, which she had promised to attend with him. Selden, a young man on the fringes of her social life, shares and reinforces her tendency to look down on the amusements and vanities of her wealthy friends.

One member of my book club thought the story read like a Greek tragedy, with Lily brought down by a character flaw. Others thought that what keeps Lily from social success is not a flaw, but rather a personal integrity that puts her society friends to shame for their hypocrisy and narcissism. One of the great strengths of the book is Wharton's biting social commentary and astute assessment of people's motives. For instance, she says of a young couple: “. . . the two had the same prejudices and ideals, and the same quality of making other standards non-existent by ignoring them. This attribute was common to most of Lily's set: they had a force of negation which eliminated everything beyond their own range of perception.”

Another book club member mentioned that the book is described as a satire, though none of us thought it satirical at all. In our view, the book criticizes a society where wealth combined with the right attitude can purchase status and security, where a woman's options outside of marriage are limited to the penurious existence of a do-gooder, or a subsidiary role providing social advice, or a shady life among the demi-monde.

Lily should be annoying, with her constant scheming and her desire to achieve the life of wealth and privilege that her friends enjoy. Yet I could not help but feel for her, as she sabotages herself every time she stands on the brink of success, falling lower and lower through the shoals of society until the poor working girl she once patronized comes to seem an enviable symbol of happiness.

One scene that particularly affected me comes right at the beginning, when Lily enters Selden's bachelor apartment, with its stacks of books and innocent entertainments. He says, “‘My idea of success . . . is personal freedom.'” Lily wishes that she could have just such an independent existence, where she could arrange her own furniture and choose her own curtains. But of course such a thing is impossible for an unmarried woman. Reading this scene, in my own comfortable study, surrounded by my acres of books, I was profoundly grateful that I live in today's world. With all its flaws, our society at least has given me the freedom that Lily could only dream about.

The title and the cover photo of a little girl in a red coat skipping through autumn leaves told me what this book was going to be about. I didn’t want to read it, the emotional journey being one I didn’t want to take. So I hesitated there in the aisle of my favorite used bookstore, holding the book in my hand, not opening it; just looking at the cover.

It’s a lovely cover. Since I’ve been learning about book design, I took a moment to analyze why it was so pleasing. First off, it is uncluttered. As in most book covers these days, the photo takes up the whole space. Your eye is drawn first to the figure of the girl in the top third of the cover. Her bent back leg exactly parallels the band of leaves which slight curves across the center. Her downward glance, her straight front leg, and the curve of the leaves all lead your eye to the author’s name and title at the bottom third. The palette is limited to the greyish white of the ground and stone wall, shades of tan and brown in the leaves and the girl’s skin and hair, and the red of her coat which is echoed in the leaves and in the color of the text. It’s a glorious cherry red, not strident as red can sometimes be.

I hesitated further because I’d enjoyed an earlier Helen Dunmore book, Love of Fat Men, which I picked up at an International Festival of Authors solely because of the title. Some might say that selecting a book because of its title or its cover design, even allowing myself to be influenced by this packaging shows how superficial my judgment is. I’m okay with that criticism. I am affected by packaging. The quirkiness of the title appealed to me. It told me that the book would be something out of the ordinary.

You have little else to guide you in selecting a book if you aren’t already familiar with the author’s work. You could open it up and read the first paragraph. Writers agonise over that first paragraph, the first sentence, to make it something that will capture your interest. Design experts say you have only six seconds to grab a potential reader’s attention.

Titles are important. They can intrigue you enough to make you pick up the book. They can hint at the contents or—as in the case of the book I held—tell you too much about them. I almost never use my working titles as final titles. Instead, for me, they function as reminders of the core of the story or of the original impulse. I think titles and the description on the back cover are the hardest things to write. They are so short and so important. There’s no chance to blather on and fix or supplement them in the next paragraph.

I did buy Mourning Ruby and read it. It was not as harrowing an experience as I’d feared: sad, often, but quirky, moving back and forth in time, exploring Rebecca’s life, introducing odd characters such as Mr. Damiano, originally a carnie but now creator of hotels where people find what they most want. Rebecca and her husband, Adam, a neonatologist, have a lovely marriage. The sensual descriptions of their life together are just delicious, captured in short chapters that read like prose poems, and the scenes of passion are the best I’ve read in a long time.

As in the Anne Michaels book, Rebecca and Adam are expelled from their paradise, not hand in hand, but separately, taking divergent paths. There is mourning, yes, but also recognition that we would not be who were are without these griefs. And then there’s love.

Images from this book linger; some I will carry for a long time: a blue and gold tent, a view of rooftops in St. Ives. I’m glad I read it, in spite of the cover.

The loss of blue-collar jobs in the U.S. has been widely documented, as more jobs have moved overseas or been eliminated due to automation. For decades, we have been told that the job market requires knowledge workers rather than skilled mechanics, machinists, plumbers, etc. Reacting to this trend, school systems across the country began in the 1970s to abolish shop classes in favor of increased classroom time.

Crawford musters arguments against this trend from many sources. Not only do some children learn better through working with their hands, but many blue-collar jobs have not, in fact, gone away. When your refrigerator stops working, a repair person from China or India is not going to show up at your house. When your car needs a new muffler, you are not going to take it to Indonesia for service.

What sets this book apart is that Crawford goes beyond these arguments to talk about his own experience as an electrician and a motorcycle mechanic. He describes the intrinsic rewards that working in such trades brings. For one thing, there is the self-confidence provided by a growing mastery of a skill few people can claim. For another, you don't need your self-esteem boosted, as so often happens in the classroom, by being rewarded based on some vague criteria that cannot be quantified. No, you get all the reward you and your pride need when that engine starts or the lights come on. The proof that you have done a good job is obvious for anyone to see.

Crawford persuasively makes the case that troubleshooting an engine takes as much if not more knowledge than cranking out a report on a computer. Also, diagnosing a mysterious ping in an engine or using a piece of wood with its own unique grain and flaws requires you to go outside yourself and pay attention to what the engine needs, what the wood needs. The narcissism rampant in our consumer culture will only get in your way here. You cannot make rules for how your car's engine will behave and expect that it will follow them. No. The engine follows its own rules. I was amused to learn the word “resistentialism”, the belief that machines are out to get you, but once you understand how a machine works, you can trace cause and effect, which relieves you of the need for such magical thinking.

There was a time when most everyone could do simple repairs. Owner's manuals had exploded views showing how to take things apart and put them back together. Crawford makes the point that by hiding from us how our cars and computers work, manufacturers leave us less in control of our lives and more like the automaton factory workers and complacent consumers envisioned by Henry Ford and Frederick Taylor and their successors. Crawford goes on to point out that even artificial intelligence and knowledge management efforts—meant to capture the knowledge of corporate experts and make it available to all—have the unintended consequence of making us mere cogs in the machine, with no expertise of our own.

These arguments all resonate with me. I learned to fix my first car, a 1966 VW bug, partly because it was cheaper to fix it myself, partly because I like knowing how things work, but mostly because I didn't want to be out on some highway far from home with two babies in the back and not know how to get us out of a jam, such as the Sunday night we got off the ferry from Martha's Vineyard, got in the car, and the brakes went right to the floor. I had a can of brake fluid in the trunk, and I knew what to do with it.

Unfortunately the book is marred by paragraphs full of ponderous academic prose. Much of it is almost unreadable, which is too bad because Crawford's arguments are good ones and important not just for educators, but also for parents who want their children to have the opportunity to live their best lives.

Ricci's fifth novel presents an interesting conundrum. Throughout the book I found myself wondering if I should keep reading because the prose is so well-crafted or toss it aside because the main character is so unpleasant.

A graduate student in Montreal in the 1980s, Alex is a mess. His apartment is a shambles, full of boxes he's never bothered to unpack. Constantly short of money, he seems incapable of feeding himself or otherwise attending to the basics of life. Late for the tutoring sessions he is supposed to lead, he is equally unprepared for his own classes. He cannot get started on his dissertation, having lost the impetus of his original notion of tying evolutionary theory to theories of narrative. He is haunted by the memory of the trip to Galapagos that started him down that path. He has no close friends, terrified as he is that someone will expose him for the fraud he believes himself to be. He cannot accept responsibility even for himself much less for the effect of his actions on others.

In the lobby of his apartment building, Alex meets Esther, a young woman trembling on her cane who asks him for a cigarette. She has none of the self-consciousness that plagues Alex, and immediately subjects him to a stream of personal information. It's not all give, though. She's equally intense about listening to Alex go on about his problems. Although it makes him late for his counseling session with Dr. Klein, whom he has been seeing since the breakup with his girlfriend, Liz, and a little put off by Esther's emotional neediness, Alex nevertheless spends several hours with her, going for a cappuccino and then shopping.

I can remember a time when I was as self-conscious as Alex, holding back in social situations to see what others did first, so wrapped up in my own insecurities that I could not begin to imagine what was going on in the other person's head. However, that was when I was a teenager, not in my mid-thirties like Alex. Reading this book, I could summon no sympathy for his maudlin narcissism. Alex squirms his way through life, casually and thoughtlessly damaging everyone he meets. Even the final redemption promised by one reviewer fails to convince; there is no reason to believe that he will begin to recognise that other people actually exist, not just as minor characters in his personal drama, but as stars in their own right.

And yet, there's the writing. Ricci's prose is not poetic, like Anne Michaels'. Rather it has a clarity that pulls you in and along until before you know it another hundred pages have flown by. One device that starts out hilarious but becomes quite moving as the story progresses is Alex's habit of maintaining a dialogue in his head with a number of interviewers, but primarily the television journalist, Peter Gzowski. These dialogues are part of an interview in some fictitious future when Alex's genius has been recognised by the world. They enable Alex to understand what is happening to him, while at the same time recasting it to make himself appear in a more positive light to his imaginary public. Of course, they also keep him from actually experiencing his own life.

I very much liked the structure of the book. One of the challenges of writing a novel is figuring out how to incorporate the back story—what has happened in the past—without bogging down the main narrative. Ricci's allusions to certain events in the past, such as the breakup with Liz and the trip to Galapagos, had me so curious that I was thrilled when he finally just plunged into the past to give us the whole story. In the hands of a less subtle writer, these hints and references could have been annoying, but Ricci judges perfectly how much is enough without being too much.

The characters, too, are brilliant, from Alex's young student, Miguel, who often seems to know more than Alex to the mysterious and slightly sinister Desmond who offers him a ship and a job on Galapagos. The female characters are less well-drawn, but that seems appropriate for a book from Alex's point of view.

I've often heard the proposition that while both men and women read work by men, men tend not to read work by women. Generalizations usually put me off, making me rush to think of exceptions, but I did find myself wondering if a male reader might be more sympathetic to Alex as a character. Not that men have cornered the market on irresponsible narcissism by any means, but when I was in my mid-thirties, I was a single parent working two jobs and still struggling to pay the bills and raise my children properly—not a position many men find themselves in—so maybe that was why I couldn't be bothered with this kind of whinging at the time and now find it so shocking in a man of Alex's age.

When the story focuses on action, such as in the Galapagos section, rather than on Alex's self-pitying maunderings, the story becomes far more interesting. The book has won many kudos, including the usually reliable Governor General's Award, so perhaps others were not so bothered by Alex as I was.

I have heard people complain about literary fiction, saying that a particularly felicitous image or turn of phrase throws the reader out of the book as she pauses to appreciate the author’s artistry. More commonly this complaint refers to an isolated literary bit in a book whose overall tone is directed to a more general, a.k.a. popular, readership.

While I agree that consistency of tone is important, I love those moments when something on the page spreads wings and carries me off, astonished and enchanted. I suppose this predilection is why I love poetry with its empty spaces and the surprising leaps that launch my own imagination.

Michaels is a poet with three poetry collections out, and she brings all of those skills to building this story. The tone is consistent throughout: a deeply sensuous language with layers of thought and imagery. Emotion runs deep as well, in sentences of almost unbearable beauty.

Young married couple, Avery and Jean, are living on a houseboat on the Nile while Avery works on a high-profile engineering project. It is 1964 and the flooding of the desert at Abu Simbel due to construction of the Aswan dam threatens the great tombs of Ramses and Nefertari, with their towering stone figures. Avery’s responsibility is to compute stresses and strains to ensure that the figures and the temple they guard are safely disassembled and reassembled on higher ground.

In short swells of prose that sing like poetry, each word carefully considered and placed, Michaels leads us backwards and forwards in time, building up resonances around what it means to flood this huge area. We learn about the blind man who climbs unassisted onto the knee of the Pharaoh every day and sings. We hear tales about the building of the tombs and about their discovery. We meet the sympathetic Hassan Dafalla, who is responsible for relocating the people of the villages that will be drowned. We learn of the date trees that the villagers have nurtured for hundreds of years that supply not just food, but also material for baskets, thatch for roofs, every necessity. We hear how shares in each tree have been split and split again until only the oldest woman in the village can determine how the harvest should be divided.

Avery considers his own responsibility in this endeavour, wondering if the reconstructed temple can ever be more than a simulacrum of its former self, like a recording of birdsong. He remembers a similar project back in Canada on the St. Lawrence where he met Jean. The stories of their separate lives and their coming together are nuanced and profoundly moving. Running through all the narratives are themes of loss and love, of change and the art of living, the hard work of sorting reality from illusion. “‘We become ourselves when things are given to us and when things are taken away,'” Avery’s mother tells Jean.

The story of these two people and their life together rides gently on these emotional and philosophic currents; it is engrossing by itself, but deepened by being rocked within these layers of meaning.

A stunning and beautiful book, one that made me breathless with wonder and left me thinking about the questions it raised: that is what I thought about Michaels’s first novel, Fugitive Pieces. This one is even better.

First published in 1990, this book consists of short stories that build up a picture of a ground soldier's experience in Vietnam and after returning home. O'Brien, a Vietnam veteran himself, speaks from experience.

The first story is almost unbearably good. O'Brien uses descriptions of the tangible things carried by a soldier to illuminate the intangible things that weigh them down. The specific weight of each item—the 26-pound radio, the 5-pound helmets, the 6.7-pound jacket, the 23-pound M-60—hits the reader like a hammer. I felt my own shoulders bowing. And then there are the good-luck charms—a letter, a photograph, a pebble—that sustain them.

As a stand-alone story, this piece has deservedly won many awards. The remaining stories expand upon this one, focusing on a single story and exploring how his destiny plays out. Some of the stories are the narrator's own present-day musings.

At first I feared that these stories were mere padding, designed to create an additional product (a full-length book) out of a successful story. But the tales that seemed complete in their first telling actually do bear further examination. O'Brien comes back again and again to certain incidents and each time they yield something further, just as rereading certain books, I've found, always provides new insights no matter how often I go back to them.

I also appreciated when, late in the book, O'Brien turns to the marshy area between truth and fiction. Just as I began to wonder if this book shouldn't be classified as a memoir, the author steps back and parses what's true from what's invented in the previous story. Sometimes, he explains, only fiction can get to the emotional truth of an experience.

I agree. I wish everyone would read this book and pause before plunging us into a war to weigh the true consequences.

Geraldine Brooks comes up with great ideas for her books. Year of Wonders is set in a small village cut off from the world by the plague. March follows the absent father in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women as he joins the army during the Civil War. One of my book clubs read the first and found it disappointing in spite of its intriguing premise; they declined to read the second when it was suggested. Our disappointment may have been in part a result of the tremendous hype around Year of Wonders. Most of us expected something pretty spectacular, so what seemed pedestrian might have struck us as rather good if we hadn't known anything about the book.

I had thought I would not read another of Brooks's books, but then I heard her speak last year about the genesis of this, her newest book. It sounded marvelous: based on the true story of the Sarajevo Haggadah, perhaps the greatest treasure in that beleaguered city. A holy book used in the celebration of Passover, this particular Haggadah dates from the 15th century. Most unusual are its illustrations which depict the figures of people from the holy stories, such as Adam and Eve, this during a time when it is thought that Jewish artists, like Muslims, believed that creating images of people was forbidden.

What drew Brooks to the story was that during the 1996 bombardment of Sarajevo, the book was rescued—under fire—by a Muslim librarian. Nor was he the only person of another faith to save the book at risk of his own life. An inscription in the book shows that a Catholic priest during the Inquisition had approved the book as containing no blasphemy, though it clearly did, and by doing so saved it from burning. Thus the book symbolises the multi-ethnic harmony and cooperation that Sarajevo had been known for and which made the city's fate during the Serbo-Croatian war all the more heartbreaking.

The title is the Muslim term Ahl al-Kitab, which describes non-Muslims whose faith includes a book of prayer. The Qur'an specifically mentions Judaism and Christianity, though other faiths have been added to the list as well. Those designated as people of the book are, according to Islamic law, inferior to Muslims but superior to other non-Muslims, and thus candidates for tolerant treatment.

As Brooks further investigated the art of book conservation, she learned that breaking apart the folios in order to restore the cover often brought to light small bits of things caught in the folds, and that these could be used to discover more about the book's history. She uses fictional items from the Haggadah's binding to anchor her imagined stories about the book's past, while using an overarching narrative about Hanna Heath, a young Australian who is brought to Sarajevo to restore the book's cover in 1996, when the city is still so unstable that she must be escorted by armed guards.

A great premise, excellent plotting, marvelous settings ranging from Venice to Seville: I thought this was going to be one terrific book. And it is good. Brooks's prose is very readable, and the pages flew by for me. Her obviously extensive research is fairly well integrated into the story. The historical narratives are credible and engaging, more so than Hanna's story.

What kept the book from being a “wow” read for me was that, although the characters seemed real enough to me as I read, they did not touch me. The one exception was a scene when the librarian in Sarajevo lambastes the U.S. and other western nations for ignoring the city's plight. Strong emotions honestly expressed: finally I was moved.

As readers, I believe we can tell when a writer has plunged wholeheartedly into the emotional life of his or her characters. As a writer, I find this difficult to do. So I celebrate Brooks's achievement as a good read and a thought-provoking one.