Holiday books: Fiction

Dagoberto Gilb

Grove Press, $24

Stories of boys and men trying to assert control over their situations in the face of life's often unexpected changes.

The Berrybender Narratives

A Novel

Larry McMurtry

Simon & Schuster, $32.50

Collected as a single volume, the adventures of an aristocratic British family in early 19th century America provide a portrait of the American West as its frontier was opening.

Blueprints for Building Better Girls

Elissa Schappell

Simon & Schuster, $24

The eight stories in this collection connect in unexpected ways and explore how contemporary women live.

The Cat's Table

A Novel

Michael Ondaatje

Alfred A. Knopf, $26

A young boy's sea voyage from Sri Lanka to England in the early 1950s centers on the company he dines with, far from the captain's table.

Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes

William Kennedy

Viking, $26.95

The latest in his Albany cycle, Kennedy's novel follows a young man to pre-revolutionary Cuba in the late 1950s.

The Deleted World: Poems

Tomas Tranströmer

Versions by Robin Robertson

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $13, paper

A collection of poems, many of which have never been published in the U.S., from the writer who was awarded this year's Nobel Prize for literature.

The Dovekeepers

A Novel

Alice Hoffman

Scribner, $27

The lives of four women intersect during the siege of Masada by the Roman army.

An Ermine in Czernopol

A Novel

Gregor Von Rezzori, introduction by Daniel Kehlmann

New York Review Books, $16.95 paper

The tragicomic story of a military officer, at the end of World War I, who refuses to accept both his wife's infidelity and the waning of his beloved Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Every Third Thought

A Novel in Five Seasons

John Barth

Counterpoint, $24

After falling and hurting himself in the autumn of the year, 77-year-old George I. Newett experiences visions connected to seasons and moments in his life.

Forever Rumpole

The Best of the Rumpole Stories

John Mortimer

Viking, $30

A selection of adventures featuring everyone's favorite, cigar-chewing London barrister, Horace Rumpole.

The Forgotten Waltz

A Novel

Anne Enright

W.W. Norton, $25.95

Our reviewer wrote that Enright "balances rapture and grief" in this tale of a woman's life turned upside down by an affair.

Harlem Renaissance Novels

The Library of America Collection

Edited by Safia Zafar

Library of America, $70, boxed set

Works from Langston Hughes, Claude McKay and Wallace Thurman are included in this two-volume set.

The Iron Boys

A Novel

Thomas Frick

Burning Books, $10, paper

The narrator of this novel takes readers into the heart of another century and an outlaw band of Luddites committed to rebelling against the future.

The Lady of the Rivers

A Novel

Philippa Gregory

Touchstone, $27.99

The bestselling author continues her "The Cousins' War" series by tracing the elusive, early life of Jacquetta, Duchess of Bedford, who found herself and her children caught at the center of the War of the Roses.

Los Angeles Stories

Ry Cooder

City Lights, $15.95, paper

The famed musician offers a quirky love letter to a bygone era in the City of Angels.

Lost Memory of Skin

A Novel

Russell Banks

Ecco, $25.99

Released from jail after having sex with an underage girl, the character the Kid settles under a causeway with other convicted sex offenders and tries to start his life over.

A Man of Parts

A Novel

David Lodge

Viking, $26.95

Near the end of his life, an ailing H.G. Wells looks back on his wives and mistresses, his politics and the literary career in which he invented our future.

The Marriage Plot

A Novel

Jeffrey Eugenides

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28

Eugenides, the author of Middlesex, offers a novel centered on a love triangle among recent Ivy League graduates.

Men in the Making

Stories

Bruce Machart

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $24

A debut collection of short stories from the author of last year's well-received novel "The Wake of Forgiveness."

Midnight Lantern

New and Selected Poems