Hot Type

In her debut novel, The Living (HarperCollins), Annie Dillard chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century Puget Sound town. Bryan Burrough, co-author of Barbarians at the Gate, exposes the war between American Express and billionaire Edmond Safra in Vendetta (HarperCollins). Hole in Hie Sky (Knopf), by William Kittredge, is a memoir of the decline of the author's ranching family and the Wld West it pioneered. Ten years' research has gone into David McCullough's monumental biography, Truman (Simon & Schuster). All the Pretty Horses (Knopf) is a West Texas and south-of-the-border 1940s odyssey from novelist Cormac McCarthy. Doris Lessing presents haunting stories of contemporary London in The Real Thing (HarperCollins). Editors of The Angolite, and life-sentencees for murder, Wlbert Rideau and Ron Wkberg examine the social costs of life behind bars in Life Sentences (Times Books). Underworld (Poseidon) is the first work of fiction by British journalist Peter Conrad. Nigerian author Ben Okri won this year's Booker Prize for his novel The Famished Road (Doubleday). In The Erotic Silence of the American Wife (Turtle Bay), Dalma Heyn explores women's changing perceptions of extramarital sex. George Anders investigates the high-stakes world of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts in Merchants of Debt (BasicBooks). Dorothy is still in Kansas, sort of, in Was (Knopf), a novel by British writer Geoff Ryman. Hitler turns seventy-five in Fatherland (Random House), a surreal suspense novel by journalist Robert Harris. And The White Rhino Hotel (Viking) is an adventure novel set in East Africa, by activist and lawyer Bartle Bull.