While "How Green Was My Valley," by Richard Llewellyn, is a marvelous novel, it is not the work to which Burroway should have referred.

Everyone who read Nicholson Baker's marvelous first novel, "The Mezzanine," wondered what he could possibly do for an encore.

Jonathan Franzen's marvelous new novel, "The Corrections," starts out as discouragingly as any marvelous new novel you'll ever read.

(Ages 10 and up) Identity theft is at the heart of Eva Ibbotson's quiet, marvelous new novel.

For the next 675, I could only wonder, Who in the world is this woman, and how has she managed to compose such a marvelous first novel?

Though the reader may miss the more surreal excursions into the marvelous that animated her earlier novels, she makes her new pared-down style work.

The result is a "marvelous novel" that is "affecting and humorous and always absorbing," Julie Gray wrote here last year.

Pseudonymously written by Joyce Carol Oates, this "marvelous metaphysical novel" is less effective as a realistic tale, but "seen as a dreamscape, the book becomes completely satisfying."

A character in "Suder," his marvelous first novel, is a deranged woman intent on jogging the circumference of a town while wearing her overcoat.

Written pseudonymously by Joyce Carol Oates, this is "a marvelous metaphysical novel," Susan Fromberg Schaeffer said here last year.