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"Runaway: Stories," by Alice Munro (Vintage Contemporaries). Set in rural Canada, these brilliant stories render the characters' lives with almost Tolstoyan resonance. "Trespasses" pivots around a couple's revelations to their daughter about the traumatic circumstances surrounding her birth.

"Margot Fonteyn: A Life," by Meredith Daneman (Penguin). Daneman, a novelist and former professional dancer, recounts the birth of British national ballet and the multiple heartbreaks Fonteyn (1919-91) survived.

"The Burial At Thebes: A Version of Sophocles' 'Antigone,' " by Seamus Heaney (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). In this fine translation by the Irish Nobel laureate, Creon is an inflexible autocrat patterned on George W. Bush, while the unbending rebel, Antigone, radiates purity.

"Christmas at The New Yorker: Stories, Poems, Humor, and Art," by the editors of The New Yorker (Modern Library). Culled from more than 75 years of fine writing and drawing, this holiday anthology includes James Thurber's rewriting (in Ernest Hemingway's voice) of Clement Moore's poem "A Visit From Saint Nicholas."

"Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended," by Jack F. Matlock Jr. (Random House). Widely praised for having won the Cold War, Ronald Reagan emerges here as a pragmatist who succeeded in nurturing a new kind of Soviet leader in Mikhail Gorbachev.

"Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders," by John Mortimer (Penguin). Mortimer's beloved barrister, Horace Rumpole, at last tells the tale of the court case that began his career some 50 years ago: defending a young man accused of murdering his father, a war hero.

"An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power," by John Steele Gordon. (HarperPerennial). With a firm grasp of political economy, finance and popular history, Gordon explains how, in less than 400 years, the United States has gone from a collection of European outposts to a dominant military and financial powerhouse.

"The Family Tree," by Carole Cadwalladr (Plume). Three generations of a wacky English family clash.

"An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World," by Pankaj Mishra (Picador). Mishra's intellectual autobiography shares what he has learned from the Buddha's legacy. As Mishra describes him, Siddhartha Gautama, the sixth-century B.C. Indian princeling who would become known as the Buddha, was not a religious figure but a secular one, concerned with relieving material suffering.

"Toast: The Story of a Boy's Hunger," by Nigel Slater. (Gotham Books). In vignettes centered on food (tinned raspberries, boiled ham and parsley sauce), Slater, a celebrated British food writer, recalls his childhood in moving detail.