The YEAR'S BEST

THE LEOPARD, by Giuseppe di Lampedusa. The author, a Sicilian prince, did not live to see his book published and become a bestseller in both Europe and the U.S. The hero is his own autocratic great-grandfather; in grave, glowing prose the story tells how Sicily's great landowners were brought low by revolution and their own stubborn resistance to change. Probably Italy's finest postwar novel.

THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST, by Nikos Kazantzakis. To this excellent Greek writer, God and man were one. His last book, a biographical novel of Christ, reflects the spiritual torment of the man who wrote it. His Christ is neither the Jesus who is worshipped as the Son of God nor Jesus the gentle teacher bereft of divinity, but a man who experienced a sense of divine mission and achieved it only by conquering his own weaknesses and fears.

CASANOVA'S CHINESE RESTAURANT, by Anthony Powell. The fifth installment of The Music of Time, in which Britain's most delicate and coruscating social Geiger counter moves through the class shambles of the late 30s.

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, by Harper Lee. The little-girl heroine is only five when the book begins, only nine when it ends, but in that time she learns a lot about life in her Southern town and about life's continuing confrontation of good and evil. A fine first novel.

INCENSE TO IDOLS, by Sylvia Ashton-Warner. What happens when a beautiful and amoral French pianist with a taste for men sets her sights on a God-filled, Bible-thundering minister in a dull provincial town. In this one, New Zealand's Sylvia Ashton-Warner triumphantly proves that her remarkable Spinster last year was no happenstance.

THE LAST OF THE JUST, by Andre Schwarz-Bart. Through one family, a bitter, largely self-taught first novelist follows the unrelenting horror of anti-Semitism from medieval England to Hitler's Germany. The author's grim tale belies his dictum: "To be a Jew is impossible."

CLEA, by Lawrence Durrell. Last of a quartet of novels in which Durrell, one of the few real English stylists alive, examines the shifting nature of truth against the sultry background of old Alexandria and through the devious natures of the kind of odd cast of characters that only Durrell can assemble.

THE CHILD BUYER, by John Hersey. Not consistently on target but full of troubling truth, this satire snaps and slashes at the antihumanist trend that sees men as tools rather than souls. The Swiftian plot concerns parents, educators and politicians who acquiesce in the actual sale of a boy genius to industry.

THE NEPHEW, by James Purdy. A moving and delicately controlled demonstration that even the most seemingly placid lives are sometimes tenuously suspended over the deep. An aging brother and sister discover that the nephew they had loved and raised and who died in Korea had made some dark emotional commitments beyond the old folks' understanding.

THE TRIAL BEGINS, by Abram Tertz. Smuggled out of Russia, author unknown, this short novel moves with surgical precision through the surrealist world of Soviet prison camps and the larger reservation that is Communist society. At one end of the spectrum stands the conditioned Soviet organization man, at the other the disillusioned idealists who wonder whatever happened to their dream.

THE GOOD LIGHT, by Karl Bjarnhof. A sequel to the blind Danish author's autobiographical novel of boyhood (The Stars Grow Pale) that is every bit as good as the first. The walls imposed by sightlessness and the desperate efforts to break through to contact with the life of the seeing are described with candor and beauty, without sentimentality or self-pity.

ALL FALL DOWN, by James Leo Herlihy. An odd-lot family and a trusting girl direct their love toward a big brother and lover who pays them back in evil coin. The boy hero is the symbol of all deceived childhood, and the author ranges from the wretchedly seedy to the near lyrical with authority and originality.

THE LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA, by Elizabeth Spencer. Told with an economy that only serves to enlarge its virtues, this story of an American mother and her daughter in Italy faces two cultures with a rare knowing delicacy and skillfully uses the confrontation to create deep emotional tensions.

CAPTAIN CAT, by Robert Holles. An English novel, rich with lowest-class slang, in which two rebels at a military-cum-reform school discover that boyish idealism is no match for The System and the venom of original sin in which their regimented mates are steeped.

RABBIT, RUN, by John Updike. This talented, depressing book contains some of the best and some of the most shocking writing of the year. Its hollow, spineless central character leaves a trail of misery and tragedy in the wake of his weakness, a condition that, the author seems to imply, infects a great many average U.S. young men without the stamina to face the facts of life.

A SEPARATE PEACE, by John Knowles. In this quietly brilliant exploration of adolescence, a youngster makes the discovery that hatred and admiration are mixed in his feelings for his best friend, and that hatred can be tragically stronger.

NONFICTION

THE METAMORPHOSIS OF THE GODS, by Andre Malraux. With impressive erudition and zeal, Malraux tries to elevate the world's great art to the level of religion. He is persuasive enough when he finds the "spark of the divine" in religious art, less successful when he looks for it in secular painting. But few art critics have ever been more fervent in uncovering the meaning behind the artist's intention.

THE EDGE OF DAY, by Laurie Lee. An English poet describes his poverty-stricken boyhood in Britain's Cotswolds with great good humor and lyrical delight.

THE WAR MEMOIRS OF CHARLES DE GAULLE: VOL. III, SALVATION 1944-1946. The last volume of De Gaulle's Memoirs grimly but eloquently describes what happened when the triumphant hero found himself on home soil surrounded by politicians who, according to him, preferred intrigue and political anarchy to his own iron patriotism.

COLLECTED POEMS, by Lawrence Durrell. With a beauty of language rare among modern poets, Durrell celebrates children and his beloved Mediterranean world.

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH, by William L. Shirer. The most successful effort yet to get into one volume the grisly and disheartening history of Naziism, from the birth of its creator to his suicide in a Berlin bunker. In Hitler, argues Shirer with a wealth of supporting evidence, the German people got just what they wanted.

PORTRAIT OF MAX, by S. N. Behrman. British Perfectionist Max Beerbohm, novelist, drama critic, cheerfully malicious caricaturist, let the 20th century wash past him during more than four decades of retirement in Italy. Edwardian dandy to the end, coolly satisfied with his own limitations and common-sensibly appalled by people who did not recognize theirs, he delighted in civilized talk of the kind that Playwright Behrman expertly caught.

BRAZEN CHARIOTS, by Robert Crisp. The most vivid of all books about tank fighting in World War II, by a British officer who fought against Rommel in Africa.

THE KREMLIN, by David Douglas Duncan. Somehow Photographer Duncan persuaded Nikita Khrushchev into allowing him to photograph the art treasures of the czars that are still preserved in the Kremlin. The result: a stunning book.

VICTORY IN THE PACIFIC, by Samuel Eliot Morison. This 14th volume of Morison's History of United States Naval Operations in World War II includes exciting accounts of the battles of Okinawa and Iwo Jima, brings to a close the best of all U.S. service histories.

FELIX FRANKFURTER REMINISCES. More than 50 hours of recorded talk in answer to questions from a Columbia University historian show the many sides of the waspish, brainy lawyer and teacher whom F.D.R. elevated to the Supreme Court. Sometimes flat, more often incisive. Frankfurter's chatter is sure to supply many a footnote to the history of his era.

MANI, by Patrick Leigh Fermor. Mani is a desolate Greek district, which modern civilization has not yet touched, whose poverty-stricken people are the descendants of the Spartans and still speak familiarly of Helen of Troy. British Author Fermor describes their way of life and their dramatic, forbidding countryside with a knowledgeability and high style that make Mani the year's best travel book.

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