Critics' choices for Christmas: W. Shepherdson Abell.

I don't read many novels but one I have greatly enjoyed is Mark Salzman's Lying Awake (Alfred A. Knopf, $12, 192 pp.). The protagonist is a Carmelite nun who is gifted with visions and who writes inspiring (and best-selling) poetry about them. But the visions are accompanied by debilitating headaches. The novel centers on her decision over whether to have surgery to relieve the headaches, a surgery that may mean the end of her visions.

Faith is at the core of this book, which is surprising in a way since the author calls himself an agnostic. Yet Salzman has not only constructed a small masterpiece about religious faith, but has also painted a vivid portrait of life in a women's monastery--a portrait which a friend of mine who is a cloistered Carmelite has confirmed as being strikingly accurate. Salzman's spare but beautiful prose illuminates the vocation of a contemplative.

Faith is also central to a book first written in 1934 but reprinted this year, In the Steps of the Master (Da Capo Press, $16, 400 pp.), by the British travel writer H. V. Morton. Morton published more than a dozen travel books, with special focus on the British Isles, Italy, and the Middle East. All of them display a wide knowledge of history and culture, invitingly presented.

In the Steps of the Master may be Morton's best, perhaps because in it he was able to marry his Anglican belief and his love of travel. The Holy Land, of course, was a different place in 1934 than it is now, but anyone fortunate enough to have visited there during the past decade will recall with pleasure many of the holy sites, much as Morton depicts them.

Morton knows his Bible and takes pains to recall the passages appropriate to each site. He effortlessly weaves in history and archaeology, and while a great deal more is known today, thanks to discoveries made over the past seventy years, his account remains relevant and a delight to read.

As a child of his time and of the British Empire, Morton assumes Anglo-Saxon superiority. His comments about Arabs and Jews sometimes made me wince. Yet I highly recommend the book as a substitute for the pilgrimage which, it sadly appears, few of us will be able to make in the foreseeable future.

We read daily of the troubles in Palestine and Iraq, but we don't readily make the connection between those places and Winston S. Churchill. We should. Churchill served as British Colonial Secretary in 1921-22. In that role he traveled to the Middle East and was instrumental in drawing the boundary lines of what are today Jordan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, as well as installing three Arab sheiks as their rulers.

And yet that was only a small part of an extraordinary career. Not only did Churchill serve in Parliament almost continuously from 1900 until his death in 1963, but at one time or another he held virtually every high cabinet post in Britain. All the while, he supported himself and his family in lavish style, not from his family inheritance (which was minimal) or from his government salary, but from writing books and articles. He is said to have been the highest-paid nonfiction writer of the twentieth century. He had to be, given the style in which he lived. He famously remarked that his requirements were simple: "the best of everything." (Actually, not everything; he seems to have had virtually no religious faith.)

There is a boom in Churchill studies--at least four important biographical works in the past twelve months alone--but two books are particular standouts: Roy Jenkins, Churchill: A Biography (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $40, 1,002 pp.) and Geoffrey Best, Churchill: A Study in Greatness (Hambledon & London, $30, 384 pp.).

Best's volume, modest in length, is a balanced assessment of the man and his accomplishments. It is far from hagiography. He does not hesitate to criticize, for example, Churchill's policy on India. But he traces how Churchill did change the course of history--and just how close Britain came to defeat in 1940. Best's judgments are careful and grounded in a combination of original sources and recent scholarship. He has produced what I consider the best Churchill biography of its length.

Jenkins's volume, which could double as a doorstop, paints a much richer portrait of the man and of his era. Not only has Jenkins mined the literature for the most appropriate stories and apt quotations, but he has enjoyed a long career in Parliament himself, and even held two of the same cabinet positions (home secretary and chancellor of the exchequer) Churchill held. As a result, he can comment on many episodes from a firsthand perspective. His treatment is often more critical than Best's--he gives a good sense of how impossible Churchill was to work with--and his writing is more interesting (though marred every few pages by an irritating use of obscure words and French expressions--a sort of bilingual William F. Buckley Jr.). You won't go wrong with either of these fine presentations of the life of perhaps the greatest person of the last century.

W. Shepherdson Abell is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center.