Book Critic Maureen Corrigan's Best of 2004

Straub's new novel is a time-travel fantasy about a 40-year-old woman who's tending to her ailing father — until, that is, the day she's transported to her childhood home on her 16th birthday.

After years as a reporter, Avi Issacharoff co-created an action series about an elite unit of the Israeli military whose members work undercover in the West Bank. Fauda is now streaming on Netflix.

"I don't use my life as inspiration," says the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist. Her new book, Manhattan Beach, imagines the lives of the women who worked on the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II.