6 UNDERWORLD // Don DeLillo (Scribner, $27.50) After he lost to Frazier at this year's National Book Awards, DeLillo walked around passing out his habitual note cards: ''I don't want to talk about it.'' Even if he had, surely his powers of language were exhausted with this gargantuan opus, which spans five decades and the entire Cold War. Less a political novel than a dark, unflinching comedy about the psychic fallout of nuclear terror, it might not be DeLillo's Big Book, but it's your standard-issue masterpiece nonetheless.
7 WHAT FALLS AWAY // Mia Farrow (Doubleday, $25; paperback Bantam, $7.50) In one of the many priceless anecdotes packing this grim fairy tale of an autobiography, French matinee idol Charles Boyer tells the 10-year-old Farrow, ''Your life will be a wonderful one, but difficult I think.'' And how! Pile the polio bout, the Sinatra and Previn marriages, the Beatles friendship, the dozen or so kids, l'affaire Woody onto a coupla acting jobs, and it's amazing that the onetime Peyton Place waif can actually write. But she can — and well. Maybe it's the Irish in her.
8 THE PERFECT STORM // Sebastian Junger (Norton, $23.95) For once, it wasn't Stephen King behind the Most Nightmarish Passage of the Year. The honor goes instead to Junger, for his excruciating description of the sensation of drowning. Worse, this is nonfiction — the harrowing reconstruction of swordfishing boat Andrea Gail's engulfment by a freak convergence of three storms in 1991. Ferociously dramatic, vividly told — and thoroughly tragic.
9 CROOKED LITTLE HEART // Anne Lamott (Pantheon, $24) The bookish heroine of Lamott's much underappreciated 1983 novel Rosie has grown into a 13-year-old cheating tennis champ who, ruffled by the wayward ways of those around her (pregnant doubles partner, preoccupied mother, and a possible pervert named Luther), still mourns her idealized, long-dead dad. Set in the author's familiar, convivial, 12-step Northern California world, this beautiful, warbling sequel squeezes as much poetry as could possibly be extracted from a difficult adolescence.
10 HERE ON EARTH // Alice Hoffman (Putnam, $23.95) For 20 years, Hoffman has spun stories that flit effortlessly between serious literature and pop fiction — often overlaid with the dreamy gauze of magic. This, her 12th novel, is no exception. It begins with a fortysomething woman revisiting her hometown for a funeral, stirs in many troubled characters, and ends a darkly complicated, Wuthering Heights-esque brew of abuse, familial love, and female identity. Oprah, are you listening?
THE WORST
1 MEG // Steve Alten (Doubleday, $22.95) Wistfully, one recalls the licentious preppies who rolled around in the sand — and were duly punished — in Jaws. Their '90s counterparts: grim, Crichton-esque lab coats, whom one is not really sorry to see gobbled by the great white shark's fearsome ancestor, Carcharodon megalodon. A draining would-be Jurassic Shark.
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