Joyce, Trevor, Toíbín--one could be forgiven the belief that all of the greatest Irish short story writers are men. But a few hours with Edna O'Brien's latest collection, most of them set in her homeland, will put lie to that unwarranted conclusion.

One of O'Brien's preoccupations in the 11 stories of Saints And Sinners is the frictions that arise from Old World class differences. In "Inner Cowboy," she tells the story of Curly, a simple young man who's a witness to an environmental accident and soon becomes ensnared in the effort to conceal it. "Green Georgette" is the wickedly funny account of a disastrous afternoon tea a village woman and her daughter attend as guests of the local banker's pretentious wife.

Though the personal dominates the political in these stories, O'Brien doesn't refrain entirely from exploring a subject that's an unfortunate fact of Irish life. "Black Flower" obliquely touches on Ireland's history of sectarian violence. Nor do all of O'Brien's stories follow a conventional path: "Madame Cassandra" is the stream-of-consciousness rant of a woman on the way to consult a fortuneteller, seeking to confirm the depth of her husband's infidelity.

The collection closes with two strong stories that share the theme of family schisms and illustrate O'Brien's skill when it comes to matters of the heart. "My Two Mothers" sketches the conflict between a mother who "insisted that literature was a precursor to sin and damnation" and her daughter, a writer who "believed it was the only alchemy there was." In "Old Wounds," one cousin traces the course of a family feud, realizing in the midst of it that "with so many dead, there was no need for estrangement anymore."

Marrying deceptively simple prose to the gift of keen insight into the lives of her complex characters, Edna O'Brien reaffirms her place in the company of Ireland's most esteemed writers. --Harvey Freedenberg

With a war at the beginning (Vietnam) and one at the end (Iraq), Thompson frames an American family's path through 30 years of life in America, from 1973 to 2003. This portrait of the Erickson family in Grenada, Iowa, alternates viewpoints among family members and their cousin, Chip, a damaged vet of the Vietnam War.

The story opens with Anita's wedding to Jeff. She is the eldest of four children; the others are Ryan, Blake and Victoria. In vignettes that capture important as well as ordinary moments in each of their lives, a picture begins to build about who they are, what they want and what they will eventually settle for. The constant thread throughout all the stories is that these are basically good-hearted individuals, often saddled with more than they are equipped to handle. When Ryan buys the farmhouse that once belonged to Uncle Norm and Aunt Martha, prototypical examples of the classic American farm couple--thrifty, hardworking, honest, church-going and long-suffering--Blake says of them: "They didn't think in terms of happy."

Each of the Erickson children has thought in those terms, however, and mostly have come up short in the happiness department. Each of them has endured a difficult situation in the hope that it would change.

If this all sounds too, too grim, it isn't. In Thompson's (author of the story collection Do Not Deny Me) engaging style, each of these characters has a life filled with much humor, insight, reconciliation and understanding. At story's end, the next generation is starting to leave Iowa. Who knows what's ahead for them? Thompson keeps us hoping for the best for her characters, as she gracefully chronicles events and shows us interior lives.--Valerie Ryan

The day after protagonist Andrew arrives at Harrow, a centuries-old boarding school on the outskirts of London, he finds the only boy he's made friends with dead outside the school grounds and a skeletal figure with a cough that "combined the bark of a sick animal with a wet, slapping sound" standing over the corpse. That figure mysteriously vanishes, and it's determined that the boy died of unusual but natural causes. However, Andrew's dreams have been invaded by a similar apparition, bringing with it visions of violence and desire rooted in the school's past.

Meanwhile, the school's lone female student has set her sights on Andrew, noting his eerie resemblance to the young Lord Byron (a 19th-century “Old Harrovian,” as the school’s alumni are termed). She touts him to headmaster Piers Fawkes, commissioned to write a school play about Byron's life. Andrew, cast as lead, learns that his role appears to be connected to his menacing dream invader. He confides in Fawkes and the school librarian; unfortunately, the headmaster’s initial reaction is to string the situation along, hoping it will stir up enough drama to revitalize his dwindling literary career.

Evans ratchets up the suspense expertly, although his grip on the novel's voice occasionally falters. Most of the story is told from Andrew's or Fawkes’s perspectives; when Evans brings in other points of view, they almost always derail the otherwise precisely calibrated tone. You'll need a high suspension of disbelief to accept how Andrew's supernatural tormentor asserts itself in reality, but gradual revelations about ghostly motivation dispel those doubts. Once the story kicks into full gear, The White Devil becomes an authentic page-turner that may well be devoured in one sitting.--Ron Hogan

Roméo Dallaire (Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda) led the international peacekeeping mission in Rwanda after the Arusha Peace Agreement was brokered to end civil war in 1993. "I was given strict orders from the highest commanders of the UN not to act, merely to observe," he writes about his assignment. As a career Canadian Armed Forces officer, Dallaire knew about chain of command and obeying orders. When confronted with the massacre of Tutsis and Hutus in April 1994, however, he disobeyed his orders and saved the lives of some 30,000 people. He knew the order not to act was immoral in this case; 800,000 people died in that genocide as others stood by. From that experience, a new, extremely challenging journey began for him.

The horrors of Rwanda expanded in Dallaire's mind far beyond those statistics of slaughter as he considered that children had been used as soldiers in the civil war and the genocide. Attempts to reconcile his sense of childhood with the hate and violence he saw in the eyes and actions of those children led him to ask questions he felt others were avoiding about creating, using, disarming and reintegrating child soldiers. Wrestling with those questions has obsessed him for 15 years. His findings are as important and morally central to our age as they are profoundly disturbing. In Dallaire's tough, pragmatic language, children as soldiers "have military capabilities, net operational advantage and tactical effectiveness" that make them attractive to adults commanding operations. And he makes clear that we need to "understand how they operate as a weapon system... so that we can successfully neutralize their effect."

Dallaire has discovered that discussing children in terms of being a "weapons platform" can itself lead to a complete shut down of dialogues about eliminating the use of children as soldiers. To counter such sensitivities and to build bridges to keep all parties working for effective solutions, he has spearheaded the Child Soldiers Initiative; the daunting task and the progress made so far are awe-inspiring.--John McFarland

"I do not always like this, when another player is hungry. I like it when I am the only one who is hungry. Or when I am the most hungry," says Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga of his feelings about facing Trevor Crowe, the first batter up in the June 2, 2010, game he pitched against the Cleveland Indians. Crowe was soon out--and so began the game that will live in legend.

Galarraga continued to strike out batters and be backed up by his teammates' astonishing plays until, at the top of the ninth, he found himself just one out away from a perfect game. Galarraga sizes up Cleveland's Jason Donald: "I do not trust this rookie... He has something to prove, just like me."

As Galarraga tells it in this mesmerizing and emotionally complex revisit to that now-infamous game, the tension was nerve-racking. Then Donald connected with a pitch and ran, hell-bent on being the first man to reach base in this so-far perfect game.

A Detroit player fielded the ball and threw it to Galarraga, who was running to first base to tag Donald. Galarraga was feeling triumphant as he caught the ball and touched his foot to the base: the perfect game was his! But then first-base ump Jim Joyce made his infamous call: "SAFE!"

Nobody's Perfect achieves the remarkable feat of taking us inside the heads of both the pitcher and the umpire at the moment of that call, and during everything leading up to it. In alternating chapters, Galarraga and Joyce reveal what was behind their opaque game faces with surprising candor. Every revelation deepens our appreciation of their love of the game and seriousness of purpose in doing their jobs; with thrilling immediacy, Nobody's Perfect delivers the personal stories behind the public face of a game that will have its own page in baseball history.--John McFarland

Nobel Prize-winner Jose Saramago found a touching way to say goodbye to his readers in this short, fragile, posthumously published memoir. Saramago describes growing up in the rustic, ancient Portuguese village of Azinhaga, taking us back through "the illegible pages of destiny," from the thrill of first learning to read to the horror of witnessing his father beating his mother.

Saramago, meaning wild radish, was not a family name but a nickname by which his family was known in the village, made official by a drunk clerk at the registry office. That's just one of the old handed-down tales that Saramago loves, but while he treats us to his very brief adventure hooking the biggest fish in the river, he also shares tragedies like his four-year-old brother's death.

Saramago's family survived in a world of barely enough money, where the house blankets were pawned in the summer only to be bought back in cold weather. The book abounds in poignant moments, like when Saramago's grandfather, a few days before his death, embraces the trees in his garden one by one to say goodbye and thank them for their shade and fruit.

His memory disoriented and faltering as he attempts to peer back at a childhood 80 years in the past, Saramago allows us to join him in savoring "the small memories of when I was small." Sometimes not recalling the exact order of things, the great writer returns to events again to deepen them with new details, with "the courage to turn the coin over and show you the other side."--Nick DiMartino

Imagine a future Chicago that is recognizable only by the remains of the former Sears Tower and Hancock Building. That is the setting of this harrowing, haunting first novel. Beatrice Prior has grown up in the Abnegation faction, where her father serves as a council member. In this dystopian society, the citizens are organized into five factions that were established "to eradicate those qualities they believed responsible for the world's disarray." Now that she is 16, Beatrice must choose which faction to call home. First she submits to an aptitude test, which will indicate the faction best suited to her character traits. Beatrice's test results are "inconclusive"; she could go with any of three factions. But her test administrator tells Beatrice that her results mean she is "Divergent.... Being a Divergent is extremely dangerous," she warns. Beatrice must not confide her test results to anyone.

Roth shows Beatrice's fascination with Dauntless from the first pages. She's drawn to their reckless leaps from moving trains, their black attire and tattoos, as opposed to her plain haircut and gray uniform, which signals the selflessness of Abnegation. So the heroine's decision to leave her family, while difficult, is not a surprise. Instead, the surprises come from the new trappings "Tris" takes on in Dauntless and her process of figuring out which parts of her old self she wishes to keep and which to shed. As the guards of society's borders, the Dauntless initiation is violent and sometimes mentally abusive. Like Katniss in The Hunger Games, Tris must find her own moral compass. To her astonishment, Tris discovers that bravery and selflessness are "often... the same thing." Riveting.--Jennifer M. Brown