Robert Sullivan is the author of The Meadowlands and A Whale Hunt. His newest book is Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants.
The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler (Ballantine, $15). This novel is great, first, because Anne Tyler is a genius, a writer with the light touch necessary to play the deepest human chords, and, second, because it is about America and how, like Tyler’s hero, it strives to cocoon itself only in what it knows.
Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene (Penguin, $13). A funny story about a single father who, trying to support his teenage daughter’s horse-riding habit, reluctantly moonlights as a British spy. It’s excellent comic Greene, though in the end the joke is not completely a joke: Within it swirls the darkness of governments, their secrets, and deathly paranoia.
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The Van by Roddy Doyle (Penguin, $13). Two unemployed guys in Dublin with kids, babies, and wives buy a van from which to sell fish and chips during the World Cup soccer finals. They work hard, laugh, fight, don’t talk, nearly kill each other and their customers, but then manage, somehow, to stay friends. Brilliant.
Great Plains by Ian Frazier (Picador, $13). The factual is crafted to feel personal but never memoirlike in these stories that grow from Frazier’s travels out on the plains. This is a book you want never to end, but then it ends perfectly, a nearly empty gas tank talking.
The Heather Blazing by Colm Tóibín (Penguin, $13). A beautiful, gripping, yet supremely contemplative novel about a man looking back at his life and his father. Tóibín’s writing is like the surface of a quiet lake, still and quiet but deep and seemingly bottomless.
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