Michael Wood | The Nation

After Dark, Haruki Murakami's edgy new novel, describes how the lives of a group of strangers intersect over the course of one night.

Gore Vidal's Point to Point Navigation is a brave and
continuous affirmation of life and an assurance that though the Republic
has been betrayed, we are not to give up hope.

Gabriel García Márquez's new novella begins as an
autobiography, but the passion-filled story of an old man, mad with
love and clinging to life, weaves Marquez's other fiction into the
tale.

It's hard to resist the misery of V.S. Naipaul's late fiction, hard not to surrender to its bleak and wary authority.

Norman Rush's first novel, Mating (1991), opens with a nervous
but gripping epigram: "In Africa, you want more, I think." The speaker,
an unnamed American anthropologist who doesn't want