Best of '88

Fiction

BREATHING LESSONS by Anne Tyler. The funeral of a friend's husband distracts Maggie and Ira Moran, but not disruptively; this deft novel is a hymn to stable, unassuming married life.

LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Florentino Ariza endures a half-century of solitude waiting for Fermina Daza to become a widow. The background is an imagined South American city, magically real.

OSCAR AND LUCINDA by Peter Carey. Two decidedly odd young Victorians, both addicted to gambling, meet by accident and hatch an improbable plan: to build a glass cathedral and put it in the Australian outback.

S. by John Updike. The scarlet letter on the dust jacket stands for Sarah Worth (nee Price), a wayward Massachusetts wife who runs off to an Indian guru's ashram in Arizona. Her messages home are consistently, if unconsciously, hilarious.

THE TENANTS OF TIME by Thomas Flanagan. A failed uprising by Irish nationalists in 1867 ends with the Battle of Clonbrony Wood, which generates this subtle tale of people struggling within the coils of history.

Nonfiction

A BRIGHT SHINING LIE by Neil Sheehan. Some 16 years of research went into this absorbing account of U.S. Army Lieut. Colonel John Paul Vann, a man as high- minded and flawed as the mission he undertook in Viet Nam.

CAPOTE: A BIOGRAPHY by Gerald Clarke. A judicious, sympathetic portrait of an artist who wrote well, knew everyone and courted scandal, almost always successfully. Clarke is a TIME contributor.

PARTING THE WATERS by Taylor Branch. The magisterial first of two projected volumes devoted to the U.S. civil rights movement takes Martin Luther King Jr. -- and a huge supporting cast -- through boycotts, sit-ins and marches.

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE GREAT POWERS by Paul Kennedy. The scholarly best seller offers an exhaustively documented theory of historical relativity: the U.S. faces a tough future not through loss of strength but because its competitors are growing stronger.

TOLSTOY by A.N. Wilson. One of Britain's most accomplished comic novelists tackles a profoundly somber subject: a literary titan's turbulent relationships with God, Russia and women.