Claire Messud | The Nation

John Banville's latest novel, The Sea, winner of the Man Booker Prize, is a painstaking narrative of memory, grief and many losses, remarkable for what it richly conveys about what it is to be alive, while continuously experiencing loss.

Kazuo Ishiguro is a writer renowned for his capacity to create
beautifully controlled surfaces and to beautifully evoke the roiling
emotions beneath them.

Although the epigraph of Damon Galgut's novel is taken from Chekhov, it is the ghost of Graham Greene that hovers most palpably over The Good Doctor, and even in the cadence of its title.

Louis Begley is perhaps currently best known as the author of About
Schmidt, the novel from which the recent acclaimed film starring
Jack Nicholson was adapted.