10 Terrific Reads of 2010

By Helen Simonson
368 pages; Random House

The shy romance between a retired British officer and a local Pakistani shopkeeper is the main plotline of Helen Simonson's Major Pettigrew's Last Stand. But this delightful debut novel is as much a gently p.c. look at the British class system tucked inside a sly comedy of manners as it is a love story. Curmudgeonly Major Ernest Pettigrew is a widower bewildered by the ways of the modern world, personified largely by his insufferably social-climbing, metrosexual adult son... Read more