2007

Philip Roth. Everyman

The fate of Roth's everyman is traced from his first shocking confrontation with death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers, through the family trials and professional achievements of his vigorous adulthood, and into his old age, when he is rended by observing the deterioration of his contemporaries and stalked by his own physical woes.

2006

E.L. Doctorow. The March

In 1864, after Union general William Tecumseh Sherman burned Atlanta, he marched his sixty thousand troops east through Georgia to the sea, and then up into the Carolinas. The army fought off Confederate forces and lived off the land, pillaging the Southern plantations, taking cattle and crops for their own, demolishing cities, and accumulating a borne-along population of freed blacks and white refugees until all that remained was the dangerous transient life of the uprooted, the dispossessed, and the triumphant.

2005

Ha Jin. War Trash

A powerful, unflinching story that opens a window on an unknown aspect of a little-known war - the experiences of Chinese POWs held by Americans during the Korean conflict-and paints an intimate portrait of conformity and dissent against a sweeping canvas of confrontation.

2004

John Updike. The Early Stories

This grand collection of 103 stories gathers together almost all the short fiction that Updike published between 1953 and 1975, beginning with "Ace in the Hole" and ending with "Love Song for a Moog Synthesizer."

2003

Sabina Murray. The Caprices

2002

Ann Patchett. Bel Canto

A terrorist takeover at an embassy party brings together an unlikely assortment of hostages. Forced to reach out across the chasms of language, politics, and culture, the hostages, and their captors, must change their established beliefs, if they are to survive.

2001

Philip Roth. The Human Stain

Set in 1998, when ideological divisions are made manifest through public denunciations and rituals of purification, the newest novel by award-winning author Philip Roth concludes his eloquent trilogy of postwar American lives begun in American Pastoral and continued in I Married a Communist.

2000

Ha Jin. Waiting

Lin Kong is a devoted doctor in love with a modern young woman--a nurse who is educated, clever, and vivid. The only complication is the wife to whom he was married when they were very young--a tiny woman, humble and touchingly loyal, whom he visits in order to ask, again and again, for divorce.

1999

Michael Cunningham. The Hours

Cunningham Draws inventively on the life and work of Virginia Woolf to tell the story of a group of contemporary characters struggling with the conflicting claims of love and inheritance, hope and despair.

1998

Rafi Zabor. The Bear Comes Home

1997

Gina Berriault. Women in Their Beds

Berriault employs her vital sensibility--sometimes distracted and ironic, sometimes achingly raw--to explore the inevitability of suffering and the nature of individuality in a collection of stories that are such models of economy that they seem almost telepathic.

1996

Richard Ford. Independence Day

Frank Bascombe hoped to spend the upcoming Fourth of July weekend with his son, but the holiday turns out nothing like Frank had planned.

1995

David Guterson. Snow Falling on Cedars

A Japanese-American fisherman is charged with murder, and around his trial comes a haunting fugue of memory, including the childhood romance between a white boy and a Japanese girl, a land dispute, and wartime interment.

1994

Philip Roth. Operation Shylock

In this fiendishly imaginative, dizzyingly paced bestseller, Philip Roth meets a man who may or may not be Philip Roth. Someone with that name has been touring the State of Israel, promoting a bizarre exodus in reverse, and it is up to Roth to stop him--even if that means impersonating his impersonator.

1993

E. Annie Proulx. Postcards

Loyal Blood is forced to abandon his Vermont farm when he commits the most terrible of crimes. Thus begins an odyssey that stretches from New England to the coast of California. Blood mines gold, prospects for uranium, grows beans, ranches, traps, and hunts for fossils.

1992

Don DeLillo. Mao II

A novel about novelists and terrorists, the mass mind and the arch individualist. A love triangle that moves from New York to London to Beirut, Mao II tells an intimate story of faith, longing and redemption.

1991

John Edgar Wideman. Philadelphia Fire

Based on the 1985 bombing by police of a West Philadelphia row house owned by an Afrocentric cult.

1990

E.L. Doctorow. Billy Bathgate

Billy Bathgate is an urban Huck Finn who comes of age in New York City in the 1930s as the protege of Dutch Schultz, one of the most abominable gangsters of his time, but one of life's great teachers as well.

1989

James Salter. Dusk and Other Stories

1988

T.C. Boyle. World's End

This multi-generational novel ranges over the history of the Hudson River Valley from the late seventeenth cenutry to the late 1960s with low humor, high seriousness, and magical, almost hallucinatory prose. It follows the interwoven destinies of families of Indians, lordy Dutch patrons, and yoemen.

1987

Richard Wiley. Soldiers in Hiding

1986

Peter Taylor. The Old Forest and Other Stories