THE LAST HURRAH, by Edwin O'Connor. A lusty, irreverent and affectionate fictional portrait of a shrewd gasbag who became a powerful political boss. The story stays on target so steadily that Boston's ex-Mayor Jim Curley still thinks he was having his picture taken.
THE STRAIGHT AND NARROW PATH, by Honor Tracy. Probably the year's funniest novel, a fine Irish stew of a farce in which a visiting Englishman takes on not only the Irish clergy but Ireland as well, in a contest of face saving and legpulling.
THE MERMAIDS, by Eva Boros. The year's best love story, and the one most neglected by reviewers. In a prewar Hungarian setting, a tubercular girl and a supposedly self-contained man play out one of the oldest emotional exchanges, within a framework of exceptionally sensitive writing.
THE LONELY PASSION OF JUDITH HEARNE, by Brian Moore. The painfully etched life of an old maid as she moves from helplessness to hopelessness in Belfast, Ireland. Dreary and appalling, but so bitterly true that Novelist Moore achieves a small mas terpiece of human defeat.
BEYOND THE AEGEAN, by llias Ve-nezis. The lyrical recollection of a Greek boy's pre-World War I childhood in Anatolia. One of the year's most attractive novels—a remem brance of things past, explored with joyous wonder, grace and dignity.
A SINGLE PEBBLE, by John Mersey. Novelist Hersey's best fiction performance to date; a short, graceful story of what happened when a practical U.S. idealist ran head on into ancient Chi nese superstition and stubbornness on the Yangtze River three decades ago.
THE QUIET AMERICAN, by Graham Greene. Novelist Greene's expedition to wartime Indo-China, showing him as skillful as ever at playing fictional charades with good and evil. His U.S. idealist, born out of Greene's pathological anti-Americanism, comes off only a little worse than his morally bankrupt Englishman, but the book's importance lies in the fact that many Europeans share Greene's phobia.
DOUBTING THOMAS, by Winston Brebner. A brief, deceptively simple novel whose hero, a clown, brings a timely reminder that the fatal flaw of any totalitarian regime is its congenitally inhuman disregard of humanity's best impulses.
YOUR OWN BELOVED SONS, by Thomas Anderson. A first novel about the Korean war that has virtues seldom encountered in more highly praised war novels: a surprisingly accurate feeling for the way men really feel during combat, an understanding of the relationship between the leader and the led, a sense of soldierly compassion that never becomes maudlin.
THE PRESENCE OF GRACE, by J. F. Powers. A collection of short stories that move about with impressive sureness in the U.S. Roman Catholic world of harried priests and puzzled parishioners, and put Author Powers in the highest bracket of his craft.
THE SAILOR, SENSE OF HUMOR & OTHER STORIES, by V. S. Pritchett. Critic Pritchett, who is also one of Britain's top short-story writers, sketching directly from life. The best items in this collection, extremely funny and uncommonly shrewd about people, have the impact of a bitter quarrel overheard.