I was dazzled, and readers will be, too. Joanna Hershon’s A Dual Inheritance (Ballantine, May 7) gets my vote for best book of the year, hands down. It reminds me of The Great Gatsby and Amor Towles’s Rules of Civility. The reader walks into two lives: that of Hugh, a Boston Brahman leading a life of privilege, and that of Ed Cantowitz, a penniless, unapologetic, and ambitious kid on a scholarship to Harvard. The novel begins in 1963. Ed and Hugh are separated by class but strangely connected. Hershon (The German Bride) follows these two lives for several decades, filling the pages with gorgeous texture, elegant structure, and powerful, masculine prose. I fell in love with Ed and Hugh—cheered for them, wept for them, and I was sadly reminded of the ever-present curse of race and class. There is no doubt in my mind that this is Hershon’s most accomplished novel, and in my opinion, a classic in the making!

Diane Garrett, Diane’s Books, Greenwich, Conn.