A Dog's Life, by Peter Mayer This is an imagined memoir of a dog. It's a must read for dog-lovers, especially if you can't stop yourself from anthropomorphizing them.

*Under the Tabachín Tree: A New Home in Mexico, by Celia Wakefield

This memoir takes you back to Mexico in 1975 as Celia and her husband, Richard, begin their first year of retirement in Colima. You'll delight in their recognizable Mexico.



*Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, by Richard Feynman

Anecdotes by the playful genius of the quantum physics heyday.



Encounters with Animals, by Gerald Durrell

Lawrence Durrell's brother kept it light and wrote about animals he met on expeditions to Africa, South America and elsewhere.

Local Girls, by Alice Hoffman Girls growing up in a Long Island neighborhood. A deadpan, funny novel.

Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino (translated from Italian)

Thoughtful meditations both marvelous and … difficult to describe, but don't let an inadequate annotation stop you: read this short one or anything else by Calvino.



Borges and the Eternal Orangutans, by Luis Fernando Verissimo (translated from Portuguese)

A Brazilian translator of detective fiction, who also loves the work of Borges, meets the great writer, and together they solve a murder mystery. Literary and philosophical references abound.



My Dog Skip, by Willie Morris

This memoir is a sweet little time capsule of the 1940s.



Morality Play, by Barry Unsworth

A banished priest encounters a theater troop that travels to stage morality plays in the 14th century. Together, the priest and troop stage a play to solve a mystery-and the morality play morphs into a mystery story and a love story.



Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived, by Penelope Lively

A memoir by the distinguished British fiction writer about her childhood in Egypt from the mid-1930s to 1945.



*The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon

In this novel, an autistic boy tries to solve a crime while undertaking a journey-to a difficult geographic destination and to the parent who could help him-and discovers the personal resources within his own mind.



So Long, See You Tomorrow, by William Manchester

"A small, perfect novel," according to Washington Post World. I remembered this gem when reading Ian McEwan's large, perfect novel, The Atonement, because of their shared themes of guilt and atonement.



To the Wedding, by John Berger

A European wedding at the turn of the century, complete with tragedy, joy and dance.



Remembering Laughter, by Wallace Stegner

A novela with a great weight of disaster in its story of family relationships.



A Small Place, by Jamaica Kincaid

The small place in this small novel is Antigua, shrewdly observed by the eloquent writer.



Off Keck Road, by Mona Simpson

A woman comes of age in the 1950s in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The novel reflects half a century of American life.

Evenings at Five, by Gail Godwin The title refers to happy hour; the novel dwells on loss, love and loneliness-and an indestructible marriage.

A Room with a View, by E. M. Forster

You should have read this one already, but it's never too late. It's a love story and a social commentary, with a character named Lucy Honeychurch. "You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you."



Heat and Dust, by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Booker Prize-winning novel about India and a scandalous marriage between an English colonial wife and a minor Indian prince.



Fire on the Mountain, by Anita Desai


Clear, cool, beautiful prose by another Indian novelist writing in English.



The Lover, by Marguerite Duras

This novel is sexually charged at its core as it relays the story of a young woman and her lover in China. It presents moments of sadness and joy, hostility and love.



The Body Artist: A Novel, by Don DeLillo

Funny, with a death, maybe a ghost, and a somewhat subdued display by this dexterous and controlled writer.



The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by Muriel Spark

The classic story of an unorthodox teacher and her special, ultimately damaging relationship with her students.



The Return of the Soldier, by Rebecca West

A novel about war that teaches a harsh moral lesson about reality.



Waiting for the Barbarians, by J. M. Coetzee

An allegory of the war between oppressor and oppressed. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.



*Voyage in the Dark, by Jean Rhys

A teenage girl, without family in London in the 1930s, comes to depend on an older man, and then he tires of her, and then…. Read it for the cautionary story and the spare, riveting prose.

*A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess This is a classic tale of thugs and a punishing society-original, violent, engaging in its linguistic invention that makes an invented world a complete world.

Black Dogs, by Ian McEwan

"Brilliant…[a] meditation on the intoxications of violence and the redemptive power of love." -The New Yorker



Coming Through Slaughter, by Michael Ondaatje

An atmospheric novel set in early jazz-era New Orleans and chronicling the hard-playing life of jazz cornet legend Buddy Bolden.



*Fools of Fortune, by William Trevor

Murder, revenge, love and courage combine in this Irish tale. Winner of the Whitbread Novel of the Year award.



*The Kingdom of the World, by Alejo Carpentier (originally published in 1949 in Mexico; translated from Spanish)

The destruction of a brutal Haitian regime, with (per the book blurb) "voodoo, racial hatred, erotomania and fantastic grandeurs of false elegance."

*The Swallows of Kabul, by Yasmina Khadra "Beautifully written…. Puts a human face on the suffering inflicted by the Taliban …[It] will stay with you long after you've finished it," according to a reviewer at the San Francisco Chronicle.

*Into the Forest, by Jean Hegland

This novel depicts how two young women survive in a post-apocalyptic world, in a forest in northern California, as the author slyly celebrates nature. All is rendered in a lovely, lyrical style.



The Dying Animal, by Philip Roth

A fierce novel of a man's descent into sexual jealousy and loss.



Bodega Dreams, by Ernesto Quiñonez

Dreams in the dark underworld of Spanish Harlem.

*Night, by Elie Wiesel "A slim volume of terrifying power," says The New York Times. This book is the author's anguished account of the death of his family, and others, under the Nazi regime. The Biblioteca has the new edition translated by Wiesel's wife.

Vicki Gundrum reads and edits books in her San Miguel apartment. You can contact her at vicki.gundrum@excite.com