Janet Maslin stepped down from full-time reviewing this year, but she remains a contributor of reviews to The Times. Look for selections from her recently hired replacement, Jennifer Senior, next year in this space.

Michiko Kakutani

“The Story of the Lost Child” By Elena Ferrante. Translated by Ann Goldstein (Europa Editions). This concluding volume to the author’s dazzling Neapolitan quartet spans six decades in the lives of its two unforgettable heroines: Elena, the conscientious good girl, and her best friend, the tempestuous Lila. Their intertwining stories give an indelible portrait of Naples, and an intimate understanding of the women’s daily lives and their efforts to juggle the competing claims of men, children, housework and their own artistic aspirations. We see how time changes (and fails to change) old patterns of love and rivalry, and how their lives are imprinted by success and disappointment and almost unbearable loss. (Read the review.)

“The Whites” By Richard Price writing as Harry Brandt (Henry Holt and Company). This novel’s title is a not-so-oblique reference to the Ahab-like obsessions that drive a group of New York cops and former cops, who remain haunted by cases they handled in which shameless criminals — their white whales — “walked away untouched by justice.” Mr. Price surrounds his good-hearted, weary-souled hero with an appealing ensemble, and uses his gifts as a writer — his matchless ear for street dialogue, his kinetic prose, his heat-seeking eye — to turn what is essentially a police procedural into an affecting study in character and fate. (Read the review.)

“M Train” By Patti Smith (Alfred A. Knopf). This achingly beautiful memoir is a ballad about love and loss, an elegy for the author’s husband, Fred (Sonic) Smith; her brother, Todd; and her friend Robert Mapplethorpe. It’s an elliptical, almost stream-of-consciousness prose poem that traces Ms. Smith’s many quixotic travels (Reykjavik, Iceland; Mexico City; a small town in northwest French Guiana so she can visit the ruins of a French prison colony) and maps the landscape of her mind. There are ruminations on books and music, on people, places and memories — a requiem for all that she has “lost and cannot find” but can remember in words. (Read the review.)

“Leaving Orbit: Notes From the Last Days of American Spaceflight” By Margaret Lazarus Dean (Graywolf Press). In this wonderfully evocative book, the author sets out to chronicle “the beauty and the strangeness in the last days of American spaceflight,” and while she overstates the end-times nature of NASA’s future, she writes with the passion of a lifelong lover of space exploration. She conveys, with great energy and verve, the glory and danger of its missions — from Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, on through the final flights of the space shuttle. (Read the review.)