The Corrections

Alfred and Enid Lambert live in St. Jude, a suburb in the Midwest. Alfred, a retired railroad engineer, is losing ground to Parkinson's disease and dementia. Enid has one aim left: to gather their three grown children under the family roof for a last Christmas.

The children have all moved east, and none of them is steady. Gary, a banker in Philadelphia, frets over his investments, his marriage and his own state of mind. Chip, formerly an academic in New York, is out of work and has been pulled into a doomed scheme in Lithuania after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Denise, the youngest, cooks brilliantly. Her ambition and her tangled love life keep landing her in trouble.

The novel is a family drama with a comic, sharp edge. It moves back and forth between the decades that shaped the Lamberts and the approach of that final Christmas, so each child's present is read against the household that raised them.

The book took the National Book Award for Fiction in 2001 and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 2002, and the Pulitzer Prize shortlisted it. The question running underneath is what parents and children owe one another, and whether Enid can get everyone to the table.