If 2009 was a tough year for the book industry (continued layoffs and corporate reorganizations, the growing popularity of e-books, Dan Brown's shocking inability to sell a copy of "The Lost Symbol" to every man, woman and child in America), many fine books nevertheless were published. Authors produced a wealth of diverse memoirs, definitive biographies and memorable novels. It was also a remarkable year for short story collections, many written by women.

We present here our favorite books of 2009: 100 fiction and nonfiction titles, five poetry titles, and 50 notable Bay Area titles. Of course, there are a few additional books we wish we had been able to include - that can happen when tens of thousands of titles get published every year - and we welcome you to post your own lists of favorites at sfgate.com/books. Meantime, here's to being blessed with more good reads in 2010.

- John McMurtrie

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Fiction

All the Living, by C.E. Morgan (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 199 pages; $23). Readers won't forget Morgan's first novel, a lovely little book set in the bone-poor Kentucky mountains.

The Anthologist, by Nicholson Baker (Simon & Schuster; 243 pages; $25). If you want lightly ironized, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny prose from a hapless fictional poet and a sneaky introduction to poetry that conveys real information despite its fictional disguise, this book will be a delight.

Asterios Polyp, by David Mazzucchelli (Pantheon; 344 pages; $29.95). Mazzucchelli's funny, harrowing and thought-provoking graphic novel is a remarkable portrait of an architect who is forced to build a new life for himself.

Atlas of Unknowns, by Tania James (Knopf; 336 pages; $24.95). This dazzling and deeply absorbing debut novel follows two sisters, one of whom leaves for New York while the other remains in India.

The Believers, by Zoë Heller (Harper; 335 pages; $25.99). Heller takes an acidly anthropological look at a dysfunctional clan's convictions as a patriarch lies in a coma.

Between the Assassinations, by Aravind Adiga (Free Press; 339 pages; $24). Adiga's second book - interconnected stories all set in the fictional city of Kittur - further proves his talents for observation and pinpointing the complexity of modern India.

Blonde Roots, by Bernardine Evaristo (Riverhead; 269 pages; $24.95). Despite the seriousness of the subject - African slave dealers raid the British Isles in this alternative history - a lot of fun rubs off on the reader.

The Book of Genesis, illustrated by R. Crumb (Norton; 224 pages; $24.95). Crumb's literal interpretation of the first book of the Bible is beautifully detailed, fully engaging and, yes, sometimes graphic, but blessedly free of any sophomoric undertones.

Brooklyn, by Colm Tóibín (Scribner; 262 pages; $25). This absorbing, nuanced read - about a young Irishwoman who immigrates to Brooklyn, N.Y., shortly after World War II - gradually surprises us with its moral resonance.

The Children's Book, by A.S. Byatt (Knopf; 675 pages; $26.95). In her majestic novel, the author of "Possession" once again transports us back to the 19th century, this time to its last years, as the Victorian ethos empties into the various channels that led society into the 20th century.

Chronic City, by Jonathan Lethem (Doubleday; 480 pages; $27.95). Lethem's ingenious and unsettling novel gradually diverges into a world where assumptions of what is real dissolve in a puddle of virtual constructs put into place to keep the machine running.

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 733 pages; $30). Davis' delightful strangeness, in all its range and wonder, is on full display in this treasure, which contains all her stories to date.

Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese (Knopf; 541 pages; $26.95). An epic tale about love, abandonment, betrayal and redemption, this Bay Area writer's first novel is a masterpiece of traditional storytelling that spans three countries and six decades.

Don't Cry: Stories, by Mary Gaitskill (Pantheon; 226 pages; $23.95). Gaitskill is a fiercely empathetic writer, and this collection is wonderfully Machiavellian in its excavation of character.

Drift: Stories, by Victoria Patterson (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 240 pages; $12.95). In Patterson's extraordinary collection of interlinked stories, she introduces us to an unexpected Newport Beach, where many flounder among the yacht-clogged harbors of Orange County.

Every Man Dies Alone, by Hans Fallada (Melville House; 543 pages; $27). Fallada's final novel, a grimly realistic mosaic of Berlin under Hitler, based on the Gestapo file of a couple's quiet rebellion against the Nazi regime, is a belated revelation.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned: Stories, by Wells Tower (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 238 pages; $24). Tower's striking, often savage first collection of stories, about men down on their luck who behave badly, focuses on the cracks in civilization.

A Happy Marriage, by Rafael Yglesias (Scribner; 371 pages; $26). A deeply personal story about infatuation, love, betrayal and loss, Yglesias' largely autobiographical novel is a sprawling yet intimate account of his 27-year marriage that will break readers' hearts while renewing their faith in the institution of matrimony.

Homer & Langley, by E.L. Doctorow (Random House; 208 pages; $26). Doctorow's novel about the lives of the Collyer brothers, the two famous New York City hoarders, transforms into a stately, beautiful performance with great resonance within the narrow range of the siblings' apartment-bound lives.

The Housekeeper and the Professor, by Yoko Ogawa (Picador; 180 pages; 14 paperback). Ogawa has built a quiet and deliberate story of a deepening friendship, one of whose binding agents is the beauty and consolation of math.

I Am Not Sidney Poitier, by Percival Everett (Graywolf Press; 234 pages; $16 paperback). In this tour de force of purposeful nonsense, the title character is a picaresque hero whose increasingly absurd experiences allow readers a funhouse-mirror glimpse into race relations and cultural collision.

The Immortals, by Amit Chaudhuri (Knopf; 342 pages; $25.95). Set in 1970s and '80s Bombay, following the lives of a bourgeois family, this novel is impressive and rare; it seems somewhat old-fashioned in its slowness, its refusal to tip toward facile plotting and postmodern irony.

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, by Daniyal Mueenuddin (Norton; 247 pages; $23.95). A resignation to life's blatant unfairness permeates Mueenuddin's prose in his compelling collection of linked short stories about an aging feudal landlord.

Inherent Vice, by Thomas Pynchon (Penguin Press; 369 pages; $27.95). Pynchon has written a delicious dark comedy - a pastiche of the noir detective novel - about Southern California in the late '60s and early '70s.

The Invisible Mountain, by Carolina De Robertis (Knopf; 364 pages; $24.95). A galloping saga of three generations - particularly their women - a partial chronicle of Uruguay and Argentina, and a celebration of art and language, this Oakland author's first novel is a hugely ambitious work.

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, by Geoff Dyer (Pantheon; 296 pages; $24). Dyer's enigmatic novel is quite the mind game: The reader is left with two stories, nominally related by a single character, that take place in two waterlogged cities.

The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper; 507 pages; $26.99). Set in milestone-studded history, this novel is a supremely ambitious work: a dense picaresque, glitteringly alive.

Lark & Termite, by Jayne Anne Phillips (Knopf; 254 pages; $24). In her extraordinary novel, which splices the Korean War with West Virginia, Phillips weaves together a story of overlapping lives, loss and love.

Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann (Random House; 368 pages; $25). In his National Book Award-winning novel, McCann both resurrects and redeems the horrors of Sept. 11, creating a metaphorical landscape of human endurance in the face of unspeakable tragedy.

Little Bird of Heaven, by Joyce Carol Oates (Ecco; 442 pages; $25.99). Oates' mix of realism, romance and myth on the subject of contemporary life in anti-pastoral upstate New York triumphantly comes together in this story of a murder and its aftermath.

Love and Obstacles: Stories, by Aleksandar Hemon (Riverhead; 210 pages; $25.95). These linked coming-of-age stories become scarred elegies, quickened with poetry, anger, violence, wistful love and Hemon's extraordinary lyric freedom.

Lowboy, by John Wray (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 258 pages; $25). A teenager escapes from a New York mental institution and shuttles madly across the city, by subway, in Wray's masterful third novel.

My Father's Tears and Other Stories, by John Updike (Knopf; 292 pages; $25.95). On display in Updike's final book are the cardinal virtues of a writer who bestrode the American literary landscape for more than half a century: a virtuosic talent for sensual description, the seemingly effortless weaving of image and theme, and an almost Proustian capacity to absorb the reader in the quiddities of childhood and adolescence.

Nobody Move, by Denis Johnson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 196 pages; $23). This lean, addictively suspenseful crime novel delivers a steadily pleasurable dose of voyeuristic dread.

Nothing Right: Short Stories, by Antonya Nelson (Bloomsbury; 304 pages; $25). Deceptions, disappointments, failures - all these trouble Nelson's characters, yet there is an unmistakable sense of delight in these stories, too.

Once the Shore: Stories, by Paul Yoon (Sarabande; 269 pages; $15.95 paperback). In this breathtaking collection of eight interlinked stories, Yoon writes with such sparse precision as to create a visceral portrait of lost souls, each searching in worlds both living and dead.

The Piano Teacher, by Janice Y.K. Lee (Viking; 328 pages; $25.95). Lee's remarkably assured, altogether enjoyable first novel has not one but two epic romances, both involving denizens of Hong Kong's monied expat community.

Sag Harbor, by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday; 273 pages; $24.95). Where Whitehead's first three novels tackled society and race with complex metaphors, "Sag Harbor" - set in the Hamptons in the 1980s - works within a smaller realm, one more immediately recognizable as our own.

A Short History of Women, by Kate Walbert (Scribner; 239 pages; $24). Walbert's exquisite novel, told through the interwoven stories of five generations of highly intelligent but variously thwarted women, considers women's place in society over the course of more than a century.

Spoiled: Stories, by Caitlin Macy (Random House; 240 pages; $24). What Macy renders so well in these stories of the profoundly entitled and chronically dissatisfied is the queasy nature of self-deception.

That Old Cape Magic, by Richard Russo (Knopf; 261 pages; $25.95). Russo's latest is a fine and funny novel about parents and children, about remembering and forgetting, and ultimately what it means to be a grownup.

The Thing Around Your Neck, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Knopf; 218 pages; $24.95). Adichie's first collection of short stories showcases her insights into human nature in social, ethical, cultural and personal dilemmas.

Tinkers, by Paul Harding (Bellevue Literary Press; 191 pages; $14.95). On its surface, Harding's stunning first novel is the story of a dying old man in New England; below the surface, it's a series of heart-wrenching inquiries into the nature of life on earth.

Too Much Happiness: Stories, by Alice Munro (Knopf; 304 pages; $25.95). Munro's canvas may be small, but her brush strokes are fine, her vision encompasses humanity from its most generous to its most corrupt, and the effect is masterful.

The Vagrants, by Yiyun Li (Random House; 337 pages; $25). A meditation on fate, causality and suffering, the Oakland author's first novel, set in the hysterical paranoia of China post-Mao, post-Gang of Four, is not for the fainthearted; nonetheless, the book, written with austere beauty, stands as a testament.

The Way Through Doors, by Jesse Ball (Vintage; 240 pages; $13.95 paperback). A delightful prose experiment, this novel toys with plot and language with a skillfulness we don't often find, conjuring up a tradition of surreal playfulness on the theme of the search for identity and the quest for romance.

Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel (Henry Holt; 532 pages; $27). Mantel's magnificent Booker Prize-winning novel, set in the court of Henry VIII, reads the way a great film races - a breathtaking, brainy, sexy, political thriller.

The Women, by T.C. Boyle (Viking; 451 pages; $27.95). In Boyle's novel about Frank Lloyd Wright's tempestuous personal life, the author's prose moves with equal parts vigor and grace.

Woodsburner, by John Pipkin (Nan Talese/Doubleday; 370 pages; $24.95). Pipkin, in his excellent debut novel, catches Henry David Thoreau in an uncertain, though not unguarded moment, basing his novel on an actual event, when Thoreau set fire to Concord Woods.

The Year of the Flood, by Margaret Atwood (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday; 434 pages; $26.95). Atwood's enthralling novel takes place in a not-far future, in the wake of a viral pandemic, and two factors make the book compelling: the writing and - true to Atwoodian form - her vision's frightening realism.

Nonfiction

Ayn Rand and the World She Made, by Anne C. Heller (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday; 567 pages; $35). Heller, in her splendid account, has taken the forbidding author of "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged" and made her real, a person of greater complexity than Rand herself would admit.

The Bolter, by Frances Osborne (Knopf; 300 pages; $30). Lady Idina Sackville was famous for being a "socially outlawed femme fatale," but Osborne reveals the desperation that fueled her great-grandmother's attention-seeking escapades, and succeeds in making Sackville fascinating.

Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, by Barbara Ehrenreich (Metropolitan; 235 pages; $23). In a voice urgent and passionate, Ehrenreich makes the case for living with a clear head, eyes wide open.

Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor, by Tad Friend (Little, Brown; 353 pages; $24.99). This is a gorgeously written memoir of a man born into privilege; but nowhere in this book does the author allow self-pity or longing for times past to creep in.

Cheever: A Life, by Blake Bailey (Knopf; 770 pages; $35). This sympathetic and deeply engaging biography details the life of a high school dropout who achieved his dreams of fame, wealth, marriage, children and outward respectability as an author - all while leading a complicated, messy personal life.

Closing Time: A Memoir, by Joe Queenan (Viking; 338 pages; $26.95). Queenan drops his cool, sarcastic, funnyman persona in this shocking memoir and looks back at his horrific childhood in Philadelphia.

Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker, by James McManus (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 516 pages; $30). McManus, who happens to be one of the best poker players around, has written a captivating history of the game.

Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression, by Morris Dickstein (Norton; 598 pages; $29.95). Dickstein has written the definitive book about Depression culture for our time, which, with the economic downturn, has unmistakable echoes of that decade.

Dawn Light: Dancing With Cranes and Other Ways to Start the Day, by Diane Ackerman (Norton; 240 pages; $24.95). Ackerman sheds light on the waking world, exploring dawn through science, mythology, art and etymology and her own deeply personal observations.

Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, by Linda Gordon (Norton; 536 pages; $35). Lange deserves reconsideration - documentary portraiture is not in vogue these days - and this wide-ranging, richly detailed biography will help.

Down at the Docks, by Rory Nugent (Pantheon; 290 pages; $24.95). In his breezy, gritty book, Nugent takes us on a tour of New Bedford, Mass., a Mafia-infested wilderness of drugs, crime and joblessness - a far different city from the town Herman Melville portrayed in "Moby-Dick."

Eating Animals, by Jonathan Safran Foer (Little, Brown; 352 pages; $25.99). Much of Foer's book is a catalog of the horrors that factory-farmed animals endure, but it's ultimately a compelling work of moral philosophy.

Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer, by Novella Carpenter (Penguin Press; 276 pages; $25.95). Carpenter's account of farming in inner-city Oakland is a riveting inquiry into our culture's complex relationship with food.

A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon, by Neil Sheehan (Random House; 534 pages; $32). Sheehan's exciting and highly readable book is a history of something that did not take place (World War III), told through the biography of the man responsible for the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles.

The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, by T.J. Stiles (Knopf; 719 pages; $37.50). This San Francisco author's absorbing book - which won the National Book Award - is much more than a biography; it's filled with important, exhaustively researched and fascinating details that would profit every student of American business and social history to read.

Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City, by Greg Grandin (Metropolitan; 416 pages; $27.50). In his impressively researched book, Grandin details the Ford Motor Co.'s failed escapades in the Brazilian jungle.

Gabriel García Márquez: A Life, by Gerald Martin (Knopf; 642 pages; $37.50). A towering achievement of Latin American literary studies, this biography reads beautifully, almost like a novel.

Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963, by Kevin Starr (Oxford University Press; 564 pages; $34.95). In the eighth volume of his monumental chronicle of California, Starr covers the entire social, economic, political and artistic history of California during the '50s and early '60s and extrapolates it into an dazzling account of the emerging American Century.

Googled: The End of the World As We Know It, by Ken Auletta (Penguin Press; 384 pages; $27.95). Auletta, in his richly reported book, has provided the fullest account yet of the rise of one of the most profitable, most powerful and oddest businesses the world has ever seen.

The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, by Richard Dawkins (Free Press; 470 pages; $30). In his brilliant and immensely readable book, Dawkins gives us dozens of clues from the fossil record and from today's genetics laboratories to persuade us all that evolution is indeed real and that the process has in fact made us all relatives, however distant, of everything else alive.

In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language, by Arika Okrent (Spiegel & Grau; 342 pages; $26). Okrent takes the reader on an illuminating and entertaining tour of human folly and brilliance.

The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates, by Peter T. Leeson (Princeton University Press; 271 pages; $24.95). Leeson offers a fascinating perspective into the world of pirates in his highly readable book.

The Last Empress: Madame Chiang Kai-Shek and the Birth of Modern China, by Hannah Pakula (Simon & Schuster; 787 pages; $35). Pakula's well-written biography reveals her subject to be a person of ability and character, who rose to the top (without holding office) by charm, determination and willingness to be simply the wife of Chiang Kai-shek.

Lit: A Memoir, by Mary Karr (Harper; 386 pages; $25.99). With grace, saltiness and profanity galore, Karr, author of "The Liars' Club," re-establishes herself as one of our finest memoirists and storytellers.

Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth, by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou (Bloomsbury; $22.95 paperback). This imaginative and often funny graphic novel centers on Bertrand Russell's life and philosophy.

Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, by David Grann (Doubleday; 352 pages; $27.50). In his entertaining book, Grann follows in the footsteps of Percy Harrison Fawcett, who became so convinced that a lost civilization had once flourished in the Amazon that he took his son on an expedition into its darkest reaches, where they disappeared.

Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son, by Michael Chabon (Harper; 306 pages; $25.99). In this hilarious, moving and beautifully written collection of essays, the Berkeley author turns the focus on himself.

Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City, by Eric W. Sanderson (Abrams; 352 pages; $40). This is an exuberantly written and gorgeously illustrated exploration of pre-European Gotham.

The Mercy Papers: A Memoir of Three Weeks, by Robin Romm (Scribner; 213 pages; $22). In her sad, searing and often witty memoir, Romm recounts the three somber weeks leading up to the death of her mother from breast cancer.

Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town, by Nick Reding (Bloomsbury; 255 pages; $25). Reding's insightful saga about the deadly, illegal narcotic focuses on the small towns of Iowa and Missouri.

The Music Room: A Memoir, by William Fiennes (Norton; 216 pages; $24.95). Fiennes pokes holes in his depiction of an idyllic childhood by letting in its darker side; his fantasy years in a castle were haunted not by ancestors past but by the live ghost of his brother, who suffered brain damage from epilepsy.

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, by Barbara Demick (Spiegel & Grau; 314 pages; $26). Demick's excellent book humanizes a downtrodden, long-suffering people whose individual lives, hopes and dreams are little known abroad.

Open: An Autobiography, by Andre Agassi (Knopf; 386 pages; $28.95). Agassi's riveting and sometimes very funny memoir is the story of a man attempting to grasp choice and responsibility in the fishbowl of celebrity.

A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, by Rebecca Solnit (Viking; 353 pages; $27.95). In her large-spirited book, the San Francisco author argues that disasters are opportunities as well as oppressions, each one a summons to rediscover the powerful engagement and joy of altruism, grassroots community and meaningful work.

Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line, by Martha A. Sandweiss (Penguin Press; 370 pages; $27.95). As Sandweiss details in her compelling biography, King, a 19th century Western explorer and writer who moved in the highest societies of his day, lived a secret double life as the husband of a black woman.

Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, by Terry Teachout (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 475 pages; $30). Teachout has written a definitive narrative biography of the jazz great.

Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life, by Carol Sklenicka (Scribner; 578 pages; $35). This Bay Area author's exhaustive and definitive biography is not merely a great portrait of the man, but often an astute critical assessment of his writing as well.

Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, by Matthew B. Crawford (Penguin; 246 pages; $25.95). Crawford has written an unusual and compelling book that seduces us to succumb to the passions that are dormant within us, begging for release.

The Slippery Year: A Meditation on Happily Ever After, by Melanie Gideon (Knopf; 212 pages; $24.95). One expects certain things from a memoir: angst, revelations of childhood abuse, crazy mothers; forget all that, for with this memoir the Oakland author has written a lovely song to her family and to life.

The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream, by Patrick Radden Keefe (Doubleday; 414 pages; $27.50). A strength of Keefe's research and writing is his willingness to tell the story of a smuggler from various perspectives.

Somewhere Towards the End: A Memoir, by Diana Athill (Norton; 183 pages; $24.95). By writing with refreshing frankness about such unmentionables as the relative ease of letting go of sex compared with giving up driving, Athill reassures us that there's still a life force despite the diminutions of old age.

Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness, by Tracy Kidder (Random House; 277 pages; $26). Told with compassion and deep humanism, Kidder's book follows a young African medical student's inspiring odyssey from war-torn Burundi to crime-ridden New York and back to Africa.

Tamalpais Walking: Poetry, History, and Prints, by Tom Killion and Gary Snyder (Heyday; 143 pages; $50). The latest product of the creative collaboration between Killion and Snyder is a joy to hold and behold.

Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, by Robin D.G. Kelley (Simon & Schuster; 588 pages; $30). It's surprising that the authoritative biography of this mysterious and eccentric personality has taken so long to arrive, but Kelley has delivered it with this exhaustively researched work.

This Lovely Life: A Memoir of Premature Motherhood, by Vicki Forman (A Mariner Original/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 272 pages; $13.95 paperback). As Forman illustrates in her deft and fearless book, medical authority can trample the intimacies of the body and pathologize the most private ordeal.

True Compass: A Memoir, by Edward M. Kennedy (Twelve; 532 pages; $35). Readers will enjoy this upbeat, gossipy and often uproariously funny book for its sweep, its readability and its characters, as fascinating as they were famous.

The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez's Farm Worker Movement, by Miriam Pawel (Bloomsbury Press; 372 pages; $28). The Bay Area author's engrossing narrative is an astringent corrective to a long shelf of books, many bordering on hagiography.

The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America, by Douglas Brinkley (Harper; 940 pages; $34.99). Brinkley brings into relief the biography, cultural influences and political record of the most effective conservationist in history.

Woman From Shanghai: Tales of Survival From a Chinese Labor Camp, by Xianhui Yang (Pantheon; 302 pages; $24.95). Starvation and death permeate these stories; death, however, didn't extinguish the yearning for love and dignity.

Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers (McSweeney's; 342 pages; $24). Eggers' account of one man's Orwellian ordeal in post-Katrina New Orleans is both gripping and moving.
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