Date: 2005 Author: Nick Hornby Nick Hornby feeds on brainstorms. He gets and embellishes them. Consider the single-mother predator in…

Date: 1998; 2002 Author: J.M. Coetzee Read sequentially, these are Coetzee’s homages to the vexations of growing up. In “Boyhood,”…

Date: 1996 (2004) Author: Roberto Bolaño, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews A novel so deeply impressive makes you…

Date: 1988 (2005) Author: Brian Moore Graham Greene, a Catholic by conversion, stopped short of writing overtly religious thrillers. He…

Date: 1987 (2003) Author: Taichi Yamada, translated from the Japanese by Wayne P. Lammers Take “The Sixth Sense,” transfer the…

Date: 1982 (2004) Author: J.M. Coetzee Late in this bravura allegory, the Magistrate tells his murderous captor: “The crime that…

Date: 2005 Author: Alessandro Baricco, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein Barricco’s novellas are ruminative parables inhabited by sketches…

Date: 2004 Author: Mark Haddon The truest empathy is to inhabit a hindrance, to rent it out and show others…

Date: 1957-1960 (2005) Author: Lawrence Durrell Durrell’s quartet incarnates vanished colonial Egypt (“upper Egypt,” says Durrell, who focuses on Alexandria).…

Date: 1986 (2005) Author: Julian Barnes This starts promisingly enough, with fighter pilot Thomas Prosser seeing the sun rise twice…

Date: 2003 Author: Chuck Palahnuik Mix Cajun Gothic, the Marx Brothers, and Andy Warhol and you get “Diary,” a novel…