Némirovsky's account of Paris awaiting the Nazi invasion and rural France at the start of the Occupation is astonishing. It rings true, but artfully combines several narrative threads. The author is moving, witty, observant and surprisingly detached, in the best sense. This novel, actually the first two parts of a sequence left unfinished because the author was sent to her death at Auschwitz in 1942, has won lots of praise, and rightly so. It is a masterpiece.

A brief and delightful account of a trip to Japan by a noted writer and his teen-age son, a fan of anime. With ironic humor and self-deprecation, Carey introduces us to Japan as he discovered it, blunder by blunder, while his reluctant son who has adamantly ruled out any effort to find "the real Japan" finds his own connections. The author suggests that the gap between Western and Japanese cultures is not much different from the one between adult and youth cultures.