NYT Books

The British author, best known for her “Old Filth” trilogy, never paid much attention to literary fashion, and her 22 novels range widely in genre, tone and style.

“The Queen of the Tambourine,” “Old Filth” and other fiction vividly captured both working-class and aristocratic Britain in the last years of the colonial era.

To oblige an eager reporter, he invented a story about the holiday’s origin. He didn’t realize it would turn out to be his “Andy Warhol moment.”

A longtime columnist for The Washington Post, he also wrote dozens of books about basketball, baseball, tennis, football and the Olympics.

Mistakes happen, he theorized, because multiple vulnerabilities in a system align — like the holes in cheese — to create a recipe for disaster.

She explored tensions among the social classes and within families in fiction that prompted Roddy Doyle to call her “Ireland’s greatest writer.”

An indefatigable gardener, she was one of the first nutritionists to emphasize the connections between farming practices and consumers’ health.

Didion’s influential account of the era, “The White Album,” captures the ripples of terror provoked by the 1969 murders.

He won a National Book Award for “Spartina,” beating out novels by Amy Tan and E.L. Doctorow. A longtime professor, he lived for a time without electricity on an island.

In novels like “The Glitter Dome” and nonfiction works like “The Onion Field,” he took a harsh, unglamorous look at the realities of law enforcement.