If you don’t buy Whistler for any other reason, buy it for the scene in which a man and a young girl discuss books while trapped in a wrecked automobile. It’s a literary gift you will treasure.

Ann Patchett’s latest novel begins when Daphne Fuller accidentally encounters Eddie Triplett, her former stepfather, after a lapse of more than 40 years. Everyone loves Eddie, but no one more than Daphne, our narrator, who recounts her mother’s unfortunate history of failed marriages. Daphne and Eddie...

This story has special significance to me. Its premise has remained in my head since I read it years ago and is a factor in my upcoming novel, Asperger.

Blood Music revolves around Vergil Ulam, a research scientist whose laboratory blunder results in an intelligent virus. Brilliant but flawed, he causes the virus to spread, resulting in consequences that are either catastrophic or benevolent, depending on your point of view.

This is more than an apocalyptic tale in which human beings try to...

The “haves” in this world tend to treat the “have-nots” as invisible. Their mute desperation makes us uncomfortable, so we look through them. Kazu Mori, the narrator of Tokyo Ueno Station, is literally invisible. He is dead, his spirit seemingly fated to linger among the homeless people who come and go through the train station and memorial park where he met his end.

Kazu recounts a life of hardship and personal tragedy. Born in 1933, the same year as the Emperor, he took any sort of job he...