A Painted House

It's almost impossible to believe that this beautiful, lyrical book was written by the same man who penned The Firm. Told from the perspective of the 7-year old son of a cotton sharecropper in 1952 Arkansas, it's one of those stories whose beginning and end are purely arbitrary points in time, because what counts is not the actual sequence of events but a powerful evocation of time and place. Here's one reader who hopes Mr. Grisham has made a permanent shift in genre -- while I certainly enjoy his stories about lawyers, I'm happy to give them up in exchange for more thoughtful and compelling works like A Painted House.