"This is a wise, humane and consistently entertaining novel," Isabel Colegate said here last year.

Not letting the story tell you - even if it's one you've been hearing from the beginning, as Jews have heard the story of the Promised Land and the restoration of the Temple in Jerusalem - is the cautionary ideal of this funny, humane, wised-up novel.

A humane novel of Midwestern malaise, teeming with vagrants and thieves.

A rich, spacious and humane first novel, set in the 19th century, by a Dutch writer whose protagonist, an Ashanti prince from the Gold Coast, is more or less taken hostage in the 1830's and compelled to live out his life in an exile that places no value on a black man.

This is "a genuinely wise and humane novel, by a very good writer," Malcolm Bradbury said here earlier this year.

He has written a wise and humane novel that both amplifies the themes of identity and exile he addressed in "Native Speaker," and creates a wonderfully resonant portrait of a man caught between two cultures and two lives.

A wise, humane comic novel in which a freewheeling Californienne collides with French social and cultural values.

Adapting such a humane novel will undoubtedly carry Mr. Egoyan even further away from the high-tech trappings of his earlier work, though he is still capable of using dense jargon.