Jennet Conant

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (Scribner, $13). Set on the Italian front during World War I, this is simply one of the best novels ever written about innocence, love, and loss. The first five paragraphs comprise a perfect miniature war story, full of grim foreboding about the beating that both the troops and Hemingway’s characters would take.

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The End of the Affair by Graham Greene (Penguin, $14). Really, I could have picked any book by Greene. But this is his most haunting work. The themes of pursuit, obsession, betrayal, and Catholic guilt are familiar from his suspense novels, but the language is crueler, and the condemnation more complete, because it is a thinly veiled portrait of his own tortured personal life. It is fiction as self-flagellation.

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A Death in the Family by James Agee (Vintage, $13). An American classic about a summons home that takes a tragic turn, and a hymn to small country towns, porch rockers, screen doors, and dewy summer nights. Because I spent part of my childhood abroad, I always missed having that sense of belonging, and Agee’s rootedness, his powerful sense of place, is mesmerizing.

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Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (Modern Library, $10). The first epic Russian novel I read, and the one that showed me there was much to learn in the pages of literature about a woman’s place in the world, the pitfalls of living life according to society’s mores, and the price of defiance.

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Burger’s Daughter by Nadine Gordimer (Penguin, $14). Gordimer is South Africa’s Tolstoy, and in this book she movingly chronicles a young woman’s coming of age against the background of turbulent social change, masterfully demonstrating how the political inexorably becomes personal.

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Devices and Desires

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