Two novels center on small acts of valor, from a little onion’s quest to free his unjustly imprisoned father to an orphaned boy carrying messages for the French Resistance.
The nonfiction spy thriller “The Falcon and the Snowman,” which became a film, grew out of his work as a journalist covering the West Coast for The Times.
In January, the Book Review Book Club will read and discuss Xenobe Purvis’s debut novel, about a small English village grappling with a dangerous rumor.
Her 1960 essay about the frustrations of educated women prefigured Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique.” She later wrote books on John Quincy Adams and others.