There's wit and good writing aplenty in Nick Hornby's "About a Boy." But the plot is a well-worn homily of emotional growth.

Carry Me Across the Water
By Ethan Canin
224 pages; Random House; $23.95.

Pasadena
By David Ebershoff.

Joan Didion has checked out of California—but as her new memoir, Where I Was From, shows, she can never leave.

Seabiscuit: An American Legend, By Laura Hillenbrand; The Hole in the Universe, By K. C. Cole

In her strange new novel, "Spending," Mary Gordon has taken the themes of Jackie Collins and transposed them to the Upper West Side.

Alan Hollinghurst’s fourth novel is a scathing examination of the sexual, racial, and class fault lines of the Thatcher era.

A ballyhooed Corrections knockoff from Down Under points up the stalled state of the social novel.

Kissing in Manhattan
By David Schickler
Sister Crazy
By Emma Richler