Beloved, Toni Morrison (Knopf). Without “Beloved,” the...

Beloved, Toni Morrison (Knopf). Without “Beloved,” the story of an escaped slave living with her daughter, her mother-in-law and an enchanting intruder, “our imagination of the nation’s self has a hole in it big enough to die from” (John Leonard).

Touch, Elmore Leonard (Arbor House). “A classy mystery. It has guns, sex, con artists, intrigue and what one has come to expect in an Elmore Leonard novel, crackling dialogue gleaned from the stuff of life” (Philip C. Rule).

The Quarterback Speaks to His God, Herbert Wilner (Cayuse Press, P.O. Box 9086, Berkeley, Calif. 94709). This book about people “poised on the fulcrum of life and death (is) . . . both powerful and heartbreaking in its intense desire to see, to understand and to record, literally before it’s too late” (Carolyn See).

Best Intentions: The Education and Killing of Edmund Perry, Robert Sam Anson (Random House). A “concerned, evenhanded and conscientious” account of why “an exceptional kid happened to die an ugly punk’s death” (Elaine Kendall).