March book: "What is the What" by Dave Eggers and Valentino Achak Deng

A memoir of one of the "Lost boys" of Sudan - refugees fleeing the violence of southernSudan in the 1980s making their way to refugee camps in Kenya and eventually to the United States.

February book: Seeing by Jose Saramago

A follow up to Blindness- voters cast blank ballots in the capital

January Book: Quarentine by Jim Crace

This extraordinary novel, a sometimes realistic, sometimes hallucinatory account of the 40 days Jesus spent in the wilderness, is the latest by England's Crace, a writer of great gifts (The Gift of Stones, Continent), and was reportedly the runner-up to The God of Small Things for the Booker prize. It is a remarkably successful attempt to put a story known by everyone into a convincing physical and historical context. The beauty and precision of Crace's writing, as well as his store of knowledge about such arcane matters as weaving two millennia ago and the fauna of the Judean desert, give what could have been a fey experiment an air of overwhelming authority. For a start, Jesus, portrayed as a rather callow youth befuddled by prayer, is not at the center of the canvas. That spot belongs to Musa, a stout, lecherous, bullying merchant with a beguiling tongue, whose skinny and long-suffering wife, Miri, has left him for dead in his tent as the story begins.