Washington Post: Books

TRESPASS By Rose Tremain Norton. 253 pp. $24.95 The ambitious and productive English novelist Rose Tremain sometimes writes about music (most notably in her 1999 Whitbread Award winner, " Music and Silence "), and, in fact, she reminds me of a classical composer in both her meticulousness and her...

WORLD AND TOWN By Gish Jen Knopf. 384 pp. $26.95 What a pleasure to read this smart, warm novel from Gish Jen. It's another in a small but growing collection of books about getting older -- not getting decrepit or sick or depressed, but just getting older, with all the perspective such maturity c...

MUST YOU GO? My Life With Harold Pinter by Antonia Fraser Nan Talese/Doubleday. 328 pp. $28.95 In describing how she and the playwright Harold Pinter met back in 1975 and eventually married, Antonia Fraser begins with an explanation of the rigid British social caste system.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share

A NOVEL BOOKSTORE by Laurence Cossé Translated from the French by Alison Anderson

Alas, Hodge's critique is not convincing and, in the oddest of ways, not even from the left. "The Mendacity of Hope" is a sloppily organized, badly argued and deeply reactionary book unlikely to have any influence at all on the way Americans think about their president.

If the previous seven installments in John Lawton's Inspector Troy series haven't made the point adequately, the eighth, "A Lily of the Field," makes it again, and solidly: Lawton's thrillers provide a vivid, moving and wonderfully absorbing way to experience life in London and on the Continent before, during and after World War II.

For horror fans who can't bear to watch as defanged vampires and cuddly werewolves make goo-goo eyes over some girl with shiny hair, there's still one monster who resists taming: You will never catch a zombie mooning pretentiously over his true love.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share

In "The Chocolate Wars," Deborah Cadbury, a relative of the Nestlé family, has done a wonderful job conjuring up an amazingly appealing two-century-long story of how chocolate came to be so important in our modern world.

Stacy Schiff, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, has dug through the earliest sources on Cleopatra, sorted through myth and misapprehension, tossed out the chaff of gossip and delivered up a spirited life.

HOW TO READ THE AIR By Dinaw Mengestu Riverhead 305 pp. $25.95