Best of '87

Fiction

THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES by Tom Wolfe. From the foibles of criminal justice in the Bronx to the follies on Wall Street, New York City and its movers and shakers are done to a crisp by the leading social satirist of his generation.

THE CHILD IN TIME by Ian McEwan. This story about a girl kidnaped from a supermarket checkout bridges the gap between private anguish and public policy in contemporary England. A masterly work by one of Britain's finest young writers.

THE COUNTERLIFE by Philip Roth. In a metaphysical thriller, Nathan Zuckerman, the author's durable doppelganger, once again becomes an instrument for examining the relationship between fact and fiction.

MORE DIE OF HEARTBREAK by Saul Bellow. An eminent botanist is the hapless hero of the Nobel laureate's rueful, comic tale of love and money among the intellectuals.

A SPORT OF NATURE by Nadine Gordimer. In her ninth novel, the distinguished South African writer tells the visionary story of a wayward young white woman's efforts to help turn her homeland over to its long-suffering inhabitants.

Nonfiction

THE FATAL SHORE by Robert Hughes. An indefatigably researched and uncompromising history of Australia that lays bare that nation's buried origins as a penal colony. Hughes is the art critic of TIME.

A HISTORY OF THE JEWS by Paul Johnson. Everything anyone ever wanted to know about the Chosen People, brilliantly organized, interpreted and narrated by one of Britain's most distinguished journalist-scholars.

THE LIFE OF KENNETH TYNAN by Kathleen Tynan. The widow of the late great theater critic and sexual propagandist is astonishingly frank about her husband's demons and demonettes.

THE MAKING OF THE ATOMIC BOMB by Richard Rhodes. The best account to date about the ideas, politics and people responsible for the nuclear age -- to say nothing of the Age of Anxiety.

NIXON: THE EDUCATION OF A POLITICIAN 1913-1962 by Stephen E. Ambrose. The first of a two-volume biography of the most complex and controversial politician of our time examines the former President's beginnings in California.