Gardeners will love reading Beverley Nichols’ Merry Hall, as well as the two books which complete the trilogy, Laughter on the Stairs and Sunlight on the Lawn. (They were originally published in the 1950s, in England.) Fans of British fiction of the sort written by E.F. Benson (as in Mapp and Lucia), Barbara Pym (my favorite is No Fond Return of Love), and even P.G. Wodehouse’s tales of Bertie and Jeeves--that is, lovingly humorous descriptions of people and places--will also adore these. And if you count yourself as both a gardener and an anglophile (and you know who you are!), then you have a double treat in store. Just from the first few sentences, you can get a feel for Nichols’ style and wry sense of humor: “Some fall in love with women; some fall in love with art; some fall in love with death. I fall in love with gardens, which is much the same as falling in love with all three at once.” He’s always happy to share his opinions on people and plants. For example: “Begonias are not flowers,” he states, “they are a state of mind, and a regrettable state into the bargain.” His tale of redoing a decrepit 200-year-old house and its gardens in post-World War II England all the while coping with the ghosts of owners past, and the descriptions of his encounters with the people around him, including Oldfield, the estate’s ancient gardener (whom he tries to persuade to plant the “boolbs” he so despises), his Wodehousian factotum, Gaskin (who believes strongly in “first things first” and bemoans his employer’s diversions from the task at hand, whatever it may be), and the vegetarian Miss Emily Kaye (who refuses to take no for answer), are simply delightful.

Of the many historical novels about the Civil War, only a handful take place during the period immediately following the war. Of that handful, Lee Smith’s On Agate Hill stands out. Smith’s protagonist, Molly Petree, is a gutsy heroine who’s buffeted about by both public events (the war and its aftermath) and private ones (the strengths and weaknesses that humans are prone to). We are made aware of these events through a montage of her journals, letters, songs, poems, and court records. This narrative style allows us both to see the world through her eyes, and to get a wider view of the world within which she is living. The journals begin in 1872, on Molly’s 13th birthday. She’s living at Agate Hill, her uncle’s dilapidated plantation house in North Carolina, where life (and the house) is going from bad to worse. She’s finally rescued by the mysterious Simon Black, her father’s best friend, who sends her off to an elite boarding school in Virginia (and keeps a benign eye on her for the rest of her life). After spending a rather turbulent four years at school, headstrong Molly decides to become a teacher in Appalachia, where she meets, falls in love with, and marries a sweet-talking musician named Jacky Jarvis. Their life together in a North Carolina mountain holler carries her--with joy and sorrow--though middle age, when a catastrophic event turns her life in yet another direction. Smith, a master storyteller, offers us in On Agate Hill both the opportunity to share the life of a memorable character, and entrée into a world that will be quite new to all but the Civil War history buffs among us.

It’s impossible for me to choose my all-time favorite book, but if I were pressed for my top ten, say, Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon is certainly among them. He’s probably best known for his über-cyberpunk science fiction novel, Snow Crash (first published in 1992 and the inspiration for the online virtual world, Second Life), but it’s Cryptonomicon, published in 1999, and often mis-shelved in libraries and bookstores alongside Snow Crash in the science fiction section, that I press on friends and strangers alike who are looking for a book that’s a page-turning adventure that will teach them things they didn’t know before (theory of randomness, and many facets of cryptanalysis, for two), and make them think. This wildly ambitious, brilliant novel is difficult to describe briefly, both because of its complexity and the large cast of characters; it’s set in various times and places, including the Pacific Theater during World War II, Bletchley Park in England, home to the men and women working on decoding Nazi transmissions, as well as a fictitious country called Kinakuta, where a group of contemporary computer geeks are attempting to set up a data haven. Stephenson’s main protagonists are invented, but they mix and mingle with historical characters like Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Douglas MacArthur, Ronald Reagan, and Alan Turing, among others. Stephenson deftly moves the action back and forth among time periods, locations, and the lives of his sundry characters, several of whom I developed a huge fondness for. Perhaps Stephenson’s closest literary compatriot is David Foster Wallace, whose writing--like that of Stephenson--also reveals a deep intelligence, prodigious imagination, and a sly sense of humor.        

In Spindle’s End, Robin McKinley uses the fairy tale Sleeping Beauty as a springboard into a totally original story, set in a world that’s vividly evoked. Here’s how the book begins: “The magic in that country was so thick and tenacious that it settled over the land like chalk-dust and over floors and shelves like slightly sticky plaster-dust. (Housecleaners in that country earned unusually good wages.)”
If there are fantasy fans who could resist that opening, I’m not one of them. And it only gets better. Out of revenge for an injustice done four centuries before, the evil fairy Pernicia casts a terrible curse on Princess Casta Albinia Allegra Dove Minerva Fidelia Aletta Blythe Domina Delicia Aurelia Grace Isabel Griselda Gwyneth Pearl Ruby Coral Lily Iris Briar-Rose’s naming day: one day, some time before her twenty-first birthday, the Princess will prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel, which will cause her to fall into a deep sleep from which no one can wake her. Sounds like Sleeping Beauty, right? Ah--but here’s where the differences begin: Katriona, a young fairy, determines to save Briar-Rose from this terrible fate, and she kidnaps the baby and takes her home to the village of Foggy Bottom, hoping to hide her from Pernicia’s evil. Will Pernicia prevail in spite of Katriona’s best intentions? Will good win out over wickedness? Will Rosie, who’s grown up as a more or less perfectly ordinary girl, accept her fate as the doomed princess? This beautifully conceived and executed novel is perfect for any reader, of any age, with a hint of romance in her (or his) soul.

You can always count on Kevin O’Malley for an entertaining picture book--his Little Buggy has long been a favorite of mine. But even by the standard of his past work, Gimme Cracked Corn & I Will Share is something special. In the spirit of the book and its barnyard setting, I’d go so far as to say that it’s something eggstra-special. Although it’s clearly aimed at five and six-year-olds who are just beginning to appreciate the possibilities of language and the pleasures of playing with words, this groanworthy, pun-filled picture book will delight the grownups in their lives, as well. “One night,” the book begins, “Chicken had a dream. He dreamed that in a beautiful barn, buried under a great pink pig, was a treasure of cracked corn--all the corn that any chicken could ever want.” When he tells his friend George, George says, “You must be yolking,” and “What are you--a comedi-hen?” Nevertheless, when Chicken sets out the next morning to follow his dream, George agrees to go with him, explaining that he’s been “feeling a little cooped up lately.” An adventure, and further wordplay, ensues. Readers, young and old, will probably cackle with amusement as they follow Chicken and George’s eggstrordinarily entertaining adventure.

Megan Whalen Turner’s The Thief is one of the most satisfying books for kids ten and up that I’ve read recently. It’s the first in a trilogy, followed by Queen of Attolia and King of Attolia. The eponymous protagonist is Gen, imprisoned deep in the King of Sounis’s dungeons after stealing the King’s gold ring. His chance at freedom comes when the King’s magus takes him along on a dangerous journey that requires Gen’s talents to succeed: he must steal Hamiathes's Gift (a precious stone that reserves for its owner the right to rule) from its well-guarded hiding place. If Gen succeeds, he’ll be rewarded; if he fails, he’ll die. And there will be no escape from the magus, who promises to track him down from one end of the earth to the other if he tries to get away. There are many adventures and not a few surprises in store for both Gen and readers alike before the last page is turned in this extremely satisfying novel. Gen is a terrific hero, a mixture of bravado and cunning, and the well evoked settings--three warring kingdoms, Eddis, Attolia, and Sounis, which loosely resemble the city-states of ancient Greece--will ring true to readers.