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Books aren't like movies or Broadway shows: So many of them come out each year that even a professional critic can't be expected to read them all. So instead of handing down a list of the "best books" of 2005, we've asked some of our regular reviewers to write about their personal favorites - the books they felt passionate about, with no pretense of definitiveness. Several big names showed up more than once: Zadie Smith, Joan Didion, Ian McEwan.

But other, more surprising authors also made repeat appearances:

Hilary Mantel, Rupert Thomson, Elizabeth McKenzie.

Maybe you'll find some new favorites here yourself.

LAURIE MUCHNICK

Most of my favorite writers were quiet this year, which led to the distinct pleasure of discovering some new ones. Andrea Levy is a British author who had never been published in this country before; her masterful "Small Island" (Picador) led me back to her three earlier novels, all of which deserve an American audience. Levy is known in Britain as the chronicler of that country's Caribbean immigrants, but you'll want to read her for her deep characterizations and piercing wit.

Hilary Mantel is another British writer with a long backlist that I had somehow neglected. Her new novel, "Beyond Black" (Holt), is the story of Alison, a professional psychic whose encounters with the spirit world are much more disturbing than she lets on during her feel-good carnival act. A different kind of specter appeared in "Ghosting," by Jennie Erdal (Doubleday), a wry and observant memoir about the author's career as a ghostwriter for an eccentric British millionaire.

In "Great Big American Baby" (Knopf), Judy Budnitz writes stories that are like no one else's. I can't think of another writer who combines Budnitz's twisted imagination, sharp sense of humor and assured prose style with a real sense of having something to say about issues both intimate and global.

I spent my summer vacation reading Jennifer Weiner's collected works, and her most recent novel, "Goodnight Nobody" (Atria), was a pure delight. I followed that up with Ben Kunkel's widely hyped first novel, "Indecision" (Random House), which created an annoying narrator so skillfully that it was hard not to find the book itself annoying at times, but Kunkel is definitely a writer to watch.

Finally, let's not forget "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" (Scholastic). J.K. Rowling has become such a megastar that it's easy to take her for granted, but that wouldn't be fair. "Half- Blood Prince" ended with such a surprise that I've been thinking about it ever since.

DAN CRYER

The only thing predictable about E.L. Doctorow's "The March" (Random House) is the juxtaposition of real-life and fictional figures. That's a given in the old master's historical novels. In this Civil War saga, Gen. William Sherman is just one among many superbly realized characters. Most of them - black and white, high and low, Union and Confederate - are mere rag dolls devoured by Sherman's war machine, a telling metaphor for the corporate- industrial America on the horizon. Doctorow never lets this Olympian perspective shortchange his empathy or disrupt the steady flow of storytelling.

Ian McEwan's "Saturday" (Doubleday), though tightly focused on a single day in the life of a London neurosurgeon, is equally ambitious and broad-reaching. In tone, the novel is warily post- Sept. 11, in form a fast-paced thriller. Even so, the author manages to tell us a great deal about the clashes that define contemporary Britain - not only between generations and classes but between scientific and humanistic world views.

Though "The History of Love" (Norton) is only Nicole Krauss' second novel, it reveals flashes of genius reminiscent of predecessors like Bernard Malamud and Bruno Schulz. Krauss entwines the stories of Alma, an enterprising Brooklyn teenager, and Leo, a lonely octogenarian on the Lower East Side, into a beautifully rendered tale about loss in all its varieties. What, in other hands, might have become a dirge is transformed into an anthem.

Immersing myself in poetry this past year, I discovered a particularly inventive debut work, Ron Slate's "The Incentive of the Maggot" (Mariner). Don't be put off by the icky title. Slate, a former globe-trotting businessman, sets his poems in places as diverse as Tokyo and Argentina. Wit and charged, angular language are his signature tools for contemplating personal conundrums within a wider world perspective. Wherever he's traveling, I'm willing to follow.

TOM BEER

Publishers and booksellers report that 2005 was a bad year for fiction. "People only want to read the truth," a publisher at Simon & Schuster told The New York Times recently, pointing to the relatively strong sales of nonfiction titles. However, there was also a bumper crop of startlingly good fiction that shouldn't be overlooked. Ian McEwan's "Saturday" (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday) chronicled a day in the life of London neurosurgeon Henry Perowne. Though it addressed its share of "big" topics (terrorism, political protest, the criminal mind), "Saturday" was really the portrait of a middle-aged man; McEwan followed Perowne's turns of thought with an acuity worthy of Virginia Woolf.

Zadie Smith dazzled critics with her 2000 debut, "White Teeth," but her new novel, "On Beauty" (Penguin Press), was even better: both wiser and more heartfelt. Smith's homage to E.M. Forster's "Howards End" took as its subject two families in a New England college town, interconnected by love, sex, friendship and professional rivalry. It was a triumph of sophisticated style and broad vision - and a pure pleasure to read.

My favorite nonfiction books in 2005 were memoirs. MSNBC columnist Jeannette Walls told the story of her impoverished, nomadic '60s childhood in "The Glass Castle" (Scribner), and she told it honestly and unsentimentally. Joan Didion has garnered a lot of press (and a National Book Award) for "The Year of Magical Thinking" (Knopf), the account of one year in which her daughter fell gravely ill and her husband unexpectedly died. This is a book, however, that lived up to the hype: Didion described the terrors and delusions of grief with mesmerizing precision.

SCOTT McLEMEE

Both biographies and current-affairs books now often tend to be more or less cubical. And I mean that literally. Every bit of information available gets cobbled together across 800 or a thousand pages of text. The only form evident in the resulting book is strictly geometric. Or perhaps algebraic: The squareness of the page times the thickness of the author's royalties equals the volume of hair pulled out by the reader trying to finish the damned thing.

So when Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin's "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer" (Knopf) landed on my desk last spring, I sighed a couple of times before opening it.

Of course, the story of how Oppenheimer guided the creation of the atomic bomb, then later became the object of Cold War paranoia, is important enough to merit the 736 pages that Bird and Sherwin devote to it. But experience suggests that a book of such length is often a set of research notes reshuffled via the cut-and-paste function.

Not so, in this case. "American Prometheus" is true to its title: the really titanic biography of a figure whose motives and legacy were incredibly complex. I couldn't imagine the book being any shorter.

Likewise with "The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq" (FSG) by George Packer - a rich, well-told account of the run-up to the invasion, and a detailed, firsthand report of the first two years of its aftermath.

Packer supported the war on humanitarian-interventionist grounds. In one compartment of his mind, he still thinks that the resulting disaster could have been avoided through adequate planning. But another compartment - the one taking in everything he saw and heard on the ground in Iraq - probably knows better. That tension makes for one of the great works of contemporary journalism.

JOHN FREEMAN

Of the books I read in 2005, the ones that moved me were "true" stories - but it would be more appropriate to call them testimonies. In "Voices From Chernobyl" (Dalkey Archive Press), Ukrainian journalist Svetlana Alexievich gathered oral histories of the men and women who survived the world's worst nuclear disaster. There is a startling poetry to their descriptions. "I go to the cemetery," says one woman. "My mom's there. My little daughter. She burned up with typhus during the war. Right after we took her to the cemetery, buried her, the sun came out of the clouds. And shone and shone. Like: you should go and dig her up."

In "Refusing Heaven" (Knopf), reclusive poet Jack Gilbert also paced the limits of loss, here in poems so beautiful a single reading will brand them to your insides. This is from "By Small and Small: Midnight to 4 a.m.:" "For eleven years I have regretted it,/ regretted that I did not do what/I wanted to do as I sat there those/ four hours watching her die. I wanted/to crawl in among the machinery/and hold her in my arms, knowing the elementary, leftover bit of her/mind would dimly recognize it was me carrying her to where she was going."

Finally, I could not get some of the images of E.L. Doctorow's "The March" out of my mind long after I had put it down. The book follows Sherman's army on the warpath from Georgia to the Carolinas, and the characters range from the great general himself all the way down to the lowliest soldier. Doctorow's metaphor of a country being born out of destruction felt eerily relevant this year, as we celebrated democracy while watching Iraqi and American casualties climb. Sorry for the grim report, but I couldn't justify escapism this year - I just couldn't.

KERRY FRIED

Like so many, I hugely enjoyed "On Beauty" (Penguin Press), Zadie Smith's novel of parents and children, academe and attraction. When it comes to sounding familial fault lines, Meg Wolitzer is even more audacious, though her seventh novel, "The Position" (Scribner), didn't find the giant audience it deserved. Witty, affecting and brilliantly written, "The Position" explores the lives of four siblings following the entirely yicky discovery that their parents collaborated on a sex manual.

My other books of the year all seem to probe aspects of England and Englishness, past, passing and - in Rupert

Thomson's dystopian novel, "Divided Kingdom" (Knopf) - perhaps to come. In Thomson's new world order, Britain is suddenly divided according to the medieval theory of humors, and families are wrested apart forever. Though his publisher matched the author's inventiveness, offering an online personality quiz for readers (www.randomhouse .com/knopf/authors

/rthomson), too few have taken the bait.

As Edith Milton reveals in her enchanting, vital memoir, the England that embraced her as a 7-year-old German Jew in 1939 was far more comforting, even once World War II began. There's a bookstore in Oxford that shelves its titles by theme rather than genre. If they're wise enough to stock Milton's "The Tiger in the Attic: Memories of the Kindertransport and Growing Up English" (Chicago University Press), they'll have difficulty restricting it to one location. Offhand, it fits into Secret Lives, Innocence, Displacement, Desperation, Experience, Misfits, The Good Life and, of course, The Big Picture.

My copy, though, is shelved beside "The Fox in the Cupboard" (Touchstone), Jane Shilling's engaging account of learning to ride and hunt in her late 30s. This apparently close-focus memoir about indulging a late-breaking dream turns out to embrace entire worlds, past and present, and challenge the reader's own easy certainties.

Lastly, any year that offers a novel and a biography by the gifted Jonathan Coe is a happy one. The first, "The Closed Circle" (Knopf), his sequel to "The Rotters' Club," is a passionately funny and angry vision of contemporary England. The second, "Like a Fiery Elephant" (Continuum), his brilliant, beguiling life of the innovative novelist B.S. Johnson, won the Samuel Johnson (no relation) Award for nonfiction in the U.K. and met with unjust silence on this end.

MAUD NEWTON

My favorite novel published this year is a reprint of Peter DeVries' "The Blood of the Lamb," a tirade against faith inspired by the death of the author's daughter, originally published in 1961. Not since Graham Greene's "The End of the Affair" has man's rage against a hostile God been made so visceral. But DeVries' book is not technically new, so I'll point to another extraordinary novel concerned with the supernatural: Hilary Mantel's "Beyond Black" (Holt).

It drops you right into the place where the living and dead overlap. The protagonist, psychic Alison Cheetham, may whitewash the predictions and otherworldly reports she gives her clients, but she herself is relentlessly taunted by demons. Her spirit guide, Morris, is the worst of the lot. He terrorizes her day and night with his lewd jokes, groping, and compulsive masturbating. And his stalking becomes increasingly horrifying to behold when flashbacks reveal the violent role Morris - the man, not the demon - played in Alison's girlhood.

Yet another fantastic book, in both senses, is Rupert Thomson's dystopian "Divided Kingdom" (Knopf), which opens as soldiers tear a young boy from his home in the middle of the night under a plan to divide Great Britain according to Aristotle's four personality types.

Authorities reprogram the boy in a camp for the chosen children (the sanguine ones) and then reassign him to a different, happier family. But he ultimately finds himself longing for some melancholia and anger and magic to balance the cheeriness. Thomson takes the things humans dread and want the most, shuffles them together like so many cards, and deals them out on the page in some of the most straightforward but stylistically beautiful prose you'll come across.

Finally, Todd Hasak-Lowy's smart, sometimes uneven debut collection, "The Task of This Translator" (Harvest), bears a mention. The standout story is "Will Power, Inc.," an absurd and depressing look at the excesses of contemporary American culture. Our narrator, an alienated pothead journalist, sets out to write about a company that rents bodyguards to prevent wealthy clients from overeating. He tries one of the brutish food policemen for free, with unfortunate results.

JAMES MARCUS

The last year seemed to yield an especially strong and variegated crop of nonfiction. On the biographical front, there was Peter Guralnick's "Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke" (Little, Brown), as definitive a treatment as we're likely to see of the Thomas Edison of soul music. In his manic and marvelous "Trawler: A Journey Through the North Atlantic" (Knopf), Redmond O'Hanlon achieved the impossible: He made ichthyology funny. Equally amusing was William Logan's "The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin" (Columbia University Press), in which our wittiest critic of contemporary verse let loose one lethal shaft after another ("like," to borrow his characterization of Randall Jarrell, "a cobra with manners"). New York City got the red-carpet treatment from two very different writers in Jed Perl's "New Art City" (Knopf) and Ian Frazier's "Gone to New York" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), while Tom Piazza produced a no-less-ardent valentine to his adopted hometown in "Why New Orleans Matters" (Regan Books). And then there was "The Letters of Robert Lowell" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), nearly 700 pages of suave, scintillating, gossipy, heartbreaking prose and portraiture. "I can see us all being written up in some huge book on the age," a weary Lowell wrote to Theodore Roethke in 1963 - well, here it is.

As for fiction, I tended to steer clear of the familiar names and concentrated on new faces. I admired the snappy delivery of Elizabeth McKenzie's "Stop That Girl" (Random House) and the comic, campy overkill of Adrienne Miller's "The Coast of Akron" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Alix Ohlin brought the desiccated landscape of Albuquerque to life in "The Missing Person" (Knopf), while Lisa Selin Davis performed a similar service for down-at-the-heels Saratoga in "Belly" (Little, Brown). And finally, there was one Old Master who compelled my awed attention: Richard Stern. His career- spanning "Almonds to Zhoof" (Triquarterly) is one long display of linguistic fireworks, exquisitely timed and endlessly illuminating.

CLAIRE DEDERER

It was a great year for smart, funny, girlie books. Such books sound as if they'd be easy to come by, but they most certainly are not. It's a cliche to say that a narrator makes you feel like you've found a new best friend, but so it was with Julie Powell's account of cooking her way through Julia Child's first volume. Naysayers who dismissed "Julie & Julia" (Little, Brown) as disposable blogging simply revealed their own tin ears. Powell's crabby, vulnerable voice was a wonderful comic creation.

Melissa Bank's "The Wonder Spot" (Viking) was an adept follow-up to "The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing," recombining the same straightforward elements - love, family, work - in a new but still weirdly satisfying pattern. It's one of God's mysteries how Bank can make this stuff read like literary fiction when her imitators turn out such pap. Curtis Sittenfeld's school-is-hell novel "Prep" (Random House) was good fun rendered in admirably lucid, calm prose. Sittenfeld appears to be incapable of writing an ungainly or pretentious sentence. And despite the fact that I generally detest linked story collections, I was charmed by Elizabeth McKenzie's "Stop That Girl" (Random House), which contained my favorite line of dialogue of the year: "Do you think the song 'The Bear Went Over the Mountain' is anti-travel?"

Not so girlie but just as funny was James Hamilton-Patterson's "Cooking With Fernet Branca," a 2004 British novel released over here by Europa Editions. With an unreliable narrator, a lot of disgusting recipes (including one for jellied otter), and an expats- in-Italy setting, Patterson's scabrous novel left no literary convention un-mocked.

Finally, a rediscovery: Insomniac Press this year re-released Jane Rule's 1980 novel about a bed-hopping group of Vancouver artists. "Contract With the World" is a quicksilver novel set against the backdrop of mid-'70s gay liberation. Self-loathing has never been so tenderly portrayed.

SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN

Nearly a half-century after the peak of the Civil Rights movement, that crusade has become one of the most exhaustively documented periods of American life. From Taylor Branch to David Garrow, David Halberstam to Diane McWhorter, Richard Kluger to Juan Williams, so many major authors have delivered so many definitive accounts that even such fertile soil would seem certain to have been exhausted by 2005. Yet, two of the greatest books of this past year demonstrated there is still the stuff of memorable literature and illuminating history in the hands of the right writer.

In "Judgment Days" (Houghton Mifflin), Nick Kotz burrows deeply into the period of just a few years when President Lyndon Johnson and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. forged the partnership that culminated in the enactment of landmark civil rights and voting rights laws. One cannot read this book without grasping the true heroism of Johnson on this moral issue and without appreciating the political savvy of King. That the men became public foes over the Vietnam War shortly before King was assassinated only adds to the pungency and poignance of their alliance. Kotz tells the story with meticulous archival research and narrative elan.

Denise Nicholas, best known as an actress on the television series "Room 222" and "In the Heat of the Night," made a breathtaking debut as a novelist with "Freshwater Road" (Agate). Perhaps the best work of fiction ever done about the Civil Rights movement, "Freshwater Road" follows Celeste Tyree, a middle-class black from the North, during three eventful and trying months as a volunteer in Mississippi during 1964's "Freedom Summer. " This magnificent work, published by a small press from the Chicago suburbs, was unconscionably overlooked by many book-review sections. It deserves not only accolades, but a large, avid readership.

To the Kotz and Nicholas books, I want to briefly add three other volumes of accomplishment and distinction. In "Acts of Faith" (Knopf), Philip Caputo used his prodigious talents as a journalist to harvest the detail that informs a page-turning epic about the Americans sucked into the vortex of the Sudanese civil war. Mirta Ojito's "Finding Maana" (Penguin Press) combines finely etched family history with assiduously researched political history to depict the Mariel boat lift. Of the many books already published about the Iraq war, "The Assassins' Gate," by George Packer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), stood apart from the crowd for its reasoned intelligence and lucid prose.

HELLER McALPIN

2005 was the year of the couples' biography. Francine du Plessix Gray offers a masterful balance between research and reminiscence and between grievances and gratitude in "Them" (Penguin Press), a dazzling portrait of her image-conscious parents. Fashion icon Tatiana Yakovleva du Plessix Liberman and Cond Nast editorial director Alexander Liberman lived through both the Russian Revolution and the German occupation of Paris before becoming one of New York's first power couples.

Vikram Seth's "Two Lives" (HarperCollins), a dual biography of his beloved Indian-born great-uncle and German-Jewish-born great- aunt, also intersects with the upheavals of the last century. Shanti Uncle first met his wife, Henny, when he was studying dentistry in Berlin in the early 1930s. He ended up settling in London, where they renewed their relationship after Henny fled Nazi persecution. With the help of a trove of letters, Seth movingly traces what happened to family and friends she left behind in Germany.

Hazel Rowley's "Tte- ... -Tte" (HarperCollins), about the lifelong, unconventional love affair between Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, was the surprise page-turner of the year. With the deftness of a geometer, Rowley sorts out their many "contingent" love affairs, keeping all the eyebrow-raising, overlapping triangles straight.

Some of the most resonant fiction of the year was also double- edged, referring back to classics. Two favorites were Zadie Smith's "On Beauty" (Penguin Press) and Geraldine Brooks' "March" (Viking). Smith uses E.M. Forster's "Howards End" as a template for her stimulating, droll novel about a feud between two Rembrandt scholars and their families that encompasses issues of race, art, beauty and ethics. Brooks considers the costs of war when her idealist hero, Mr. March from Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women," goes south to serve in the Civil War and his moral certitudes are deeply shaken.

My favorite discovery of the year was the title novella in Jim Harrison's "The Summer He Didn't Die" (Atlantic Monthly Press). Harrison's prose, which conveys a passion for the wilds of America, bears earthy whiffs of morels and morals, booze and botany. His protagonist, Brown Dog, who's been cropping up in his fiction since 1990, is a charming muddler, a part-Anishnabe wood pulper with a philosophical bent who lives and lusts in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. This novella is about as joyous as fiction gets.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN

This was one of those unruly years in which I was disappointed by cherished authors whose novels I was eagerly awaiting (Ian McEwan's "Saturday," E.L. Doctorow's "The March") and novels that I opened out of a sense of professional duty turned out to be the tops. Mary Gaitskill is a proponent of the "everything is crap" school of writing, but the crucial difference between Gaitskill and her imitators is that she's not zeroing in on ugliness just for shock value; rather, the literary stroll through slime is her route to the ineffable. Her novel "Veronica" (Pantheon) is a charged story about the deep stupidity of youth and a very measured sense of redemption achieved by the hardened title character.

Nicole Krauss' splendid novel, "The History of Love" (Norton), doffs its hat to the great 19th century plot-twisters such as Dickens and Trollope in its interweaving of storylines across generations and continents, but the prevailing tone of this novel is up-to-the-minute edgy. A lost book serves as the McGuffin reuniting families rent asunder by betrayal, immigration and the Holocaust. A lost book also figures in Elizabeth Kostova's very entertaining blockbuster, "The Historian" (Little, Brown), which joins "The DaVinci Code" in the emerging "hidden signs and wonders" subgenre of thriller literature.

Nonfiction standouts this year were light on humor - with the exception of two memoirs: J.R. Moehringer's "The Tender Bar" (Hyperion), a wry and very wisely class-conscious account of the author's boozy coming-of-age in a neighborhood saloon, and Deborah Larsen's "The Tulip and the Pope" (Knopf), a look back in longing and dismay at the author's years spent in a Catholic convent during the early 1960s. As Joan Didion observes in "The Year of Magical Thinking" (Knopf), "books about mourning" is a category overrun with pat self-help tomes, but Didion endows that neglected corner of the canon with an unsentimental intelligence and restraint. "The Woman at the Washington Zoo" (PublicAffairs) is a posthumous collection of journalist Marjorie Williams' superb profiles and essays for Vanity Fair and The Washington Post. The final section of the collection contains Williams' own fierce reflections on her inexplicable and terrifying battle with liver cancer that claimed her life this year at the age of 47. Finally, Adam Hochschild's "Bury the Chains" (Houghton Mifflin) is a substantive and downright thrilling narrative history about the 18th century citizen's movement to end slavery in the British Empire. More than an illumination of a forgotten episode, it's also an inspired account of the evolution of an emotion - empathy - among the British people.

The last year seemed to yield an especially strong and variegated crop of nonfiction. On the biographical front, there was Peter Guralnick's "Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke" (Little, Brown), as definitive a treatment as we're likely to see of the Thomas Edison of soul music. In his manic and marvelous "Trawler: A Journey Through the North Atlantic" (Knopf), Redmond O'Hanlon achieved the impossible: He made ichthyology funny. Equally amusing was William Logan's "The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin" (Columbia University Press), in which our wittiest critic of contemporary verse let loose one lethal shaft after another ("like," to borrow his characterization of Randall Jarrell, "a cobra with manners"). New York City got the red-carpet treatment from two very different writers in Jed Perl's "New Art City" (Knopf) and Ian Frazier's "Gone to New York" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), while Tom Piazza produced a no-less-ardent valentine to his adopted hometown in "Why New Orleans Matters" (Regan Books). And then there was "The Letters of Robert Lowell" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), nearly 700 pages of suave, scintillating, gossipy, heartbreaking prose and portraiture. "I can see us all being written up in some huge book on the age," a weary Lowell wrote to Theodore Roethke in 1963 - well, here it is.

To the [Nick Kotz] and [Denise Nicholas] books, I want to briefly add three other volumes of accomplishment and distinction. In "Acts of Faith" (Knopf), Philip Caputo used his prodigious talents as a journalist to harvest the detail that informs a page-turning epic about the Americans sucked into the vortex of the Sudanese civil war. Mirta Ojito's "Finding Maana" (Penguin Press) combines finely etched family history with assiduously researched political history to depict the Mariel boat lift. Of the many books already published about the Iraq war, "The Assassins' Gate," by [George Packer] (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), stood apart from the crowd for its reasoned intelligence and lucid prose.

Nonfiction standouts this year were light on humor - with the exception of two memoirs: J.R. Moehringer's "The Tender Bar" (Hyperion), a wry and very wisely class-conscious account of the author's boozy coming-of-age in a neighborhood saloon, and Deborah Larsen's "The Tulip and the Pope" (Knopf), a look back in longing and dismay at the author's years spent in a Catholic convent during the early 1960s. As [Joan Didion] observes in "The Year of Magical Thinking" (Knopf), "books about mourning" is a category overrun with pat self-help tomes, but Didion endows that neglected corner of the canon with an unsentimental intelligence and restraint. "The Woman at the Washington Zoo" (PublicAffairs) is a posthumous collection of journalist Marjorie Williams' superb profiles and essays for Vanity Fair and The Washington Post. The final section of the collection contains Williams' own fierce reflections on her inexplicable and terrifying battle with liver cancer that claimed her life this year at the age of 47. Finally, Adam Hochschild's "Bury the Chains" (Houghton Mifflin) is a substantive and downright thrilling narrative history about the 18th century citizen's movement to end slavery in the British Empire. More than an illumination of a forgotten episode, it's also an inspired account of the evolution of an emotion - empathy - among the British people.