FICTION

Birds Without Wings

A Novel

Louis de Bernieres

Alfred A. Knopf: 560 pp., $25.95

Louis de Bernieres is an angry man, and the destructive manifestations of nationalism, above all in pointless warfare, make him seethe with fury and contempt. Only those with the strongest of stomachs will be able to read his horrifyingly brilliant account of trench warfare during the Gallipoli campaign without flinching: All five senses are exploited to the fullest. He agonizes over what he calls the conspiracy to forget the Armenian genocide. He shows, in detail and for his individual characters, just what mass uprooting and exile mean in human terms. “Birds Without Wings” is a quite astonishing, and compulsively readable, tour de force.

-- Peter Green

Conspirators

A Novel

Michael Andre Bernstein

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 506 pp., $25

Pick up any of the Viennese journals, one of the characters says in Michael Andre Bernstein’s “Conspirators,” “and you will see right away that in our politics, in our dreams ... and certainly in our fashionable plays and novellas, all we talk about is murder.” This strange, hypnotic first novel takes us into the murky, perplexed heart of Mitteleuropa on the eve of World War I. It is a world well known from the writings of Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Bruno Schulz, Joseph Roth and Thomas Mann -- a world of literary cafes, decadent art, military parades, psychoanalysis, secret police, poverty and catastrophic premonitions. Bernstein’s beautifully written, intricate and entrancing novel seems to prove that to show true love of the past, or true love of life, a writer must resist the urge to treat the past as prologue.

-- Jaroslaw Anders

Cruisers

A Novel

Craig Nova

Shaye Areheart Books: 306 pp., $24

Let it quickly be said that “Cruisers,” though rich in symbols and glittering with images, is a tense and fast-paced chronicle, told in prose as nimble and shiny as a pellet of mercury. Russell Boyd is, after all, a policeman, and “Cruisers” is, among other things, an oblique police-procedural novel, in which trooper Boyd from time to time seeks clues to a roadside killing “like a blind man ... who kept going around a room with no door.” In the effective way the author mixes vivid prose, existential riddles and violent incident, Nova bears comparison to such contemporaries as Robert Stone, Pete Dexter, Thomas Berger and Jim Harrison.

-- Tom Nolan

The Daydreaming Boy

A Novel

Micheline Aharonian Marcom

Riverhead Books: 214 pp., $23.95

“The man who has no mother’s form to form him is a sad man, unanchored man, vile and demoniac,” confides Vahe Tcheubjian, narrator of Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s beautiful and disturbing second novel, which details in stark terms the psychic aftermath of the Armenian genocide. Having written compellingly about the 1915-18 massacre of more than a million Armenians in Turkey (“Three Apples Fell From Heaven”), Marcom turns her attention to the recurring distress of that event in the life of one man. “The Daydreaming Boy” is a dazzling and disquieting account of what happens when our dreamscapes stop working as a defense against the past and the awful reality of what we do to one another reasserts itself.

-- Bernadette Murphy

The Egyptologist

A Novel

Arthur Phillips

Random House: 386 pp., $24.95

Arthur Phillips’ second novel, “The Egyptologist,” reads like a love child of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” and Vladimir Nabokov’s “Pale Fire,” with Oscar Wilde’s Bunbury from “The Importance of Being Earnest” as godparent. Phillips proved himself a writer to watch with his first novel, “Prague” (2002), his cynical, caustic, frolicsome and moving view of a new lost generation seeking to make its mark in Communist-pocked Central Europe. “The Egyptologist” shifts to sandier turf, a murder mystery in the Egyptian desert told by some of the most amusingly unreliable narrators you’ll find in literature. “The Egyptologist” is about taking that most creative and desperate of urges, the desire to secure one’s legacy and immortality, to the most outlandish extremes imaginable. It offers a king’s bounty of lively, sparkling conceptions and misconceptions.

-- Heller McAlpin

Graceland

A Novel

Chris Abani

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 324 pp., $24

“Graceland” opens in 1983, in the teeming city of Lagos, Nigeria, where 16-year-old Elvis Oke, who hopes to become a dancer, is trying to earn money performing in the street, doing impersonations of the more famous American Elvis. As evoked in this novel by Nigerian writer and poet Chris Abani, Lagos is a city of startling contrasts. “Graceland” amply demonstrates that Abani has the energy, ambition and compassion to create a novel that delineates and illuminates a complicated, dynamic, deeply fractured society.

-- Merle Rubin

The Green Lantern

A Romance of Stalinist Russia

Jerome Charyn

Thunder’s Mouth Press: 358 pp., $22

Jerome Charyn’s dream life must be exceptionally rich. Author of nearly 40 books -- from knowledgeable police novels to picaresque tales of the Bronx, nymphomaniacs and Pinocchio; nonfiction books documenting his fascination with the movies, Broadway and pingpong; memoirs of his immigrant Jewish family; and distinguished short fiction and essays -- he now rewards his readers with “The Green Lantern,” subtitled “A Romance of Stalinist Russia.” In this novel, the ‘60s tradition of black humor evolves into what could be named Red humor. Of course, this is not new in the Russian experience; Gogol, Bulgakov and an exile like Nabokov created despairing absurdities that apply to the world, not just Russia. Like them, Charyn also knows that “the old love game went on and on and on,” a simple statement in a book of rococo and burlesque that can pierce the heart of a reader. One of the ways to live with the memory of tragic times is to laugh if you can. Charyn can.

-- Herbert Gold

A Hole in the Universe

A Novel

Mary McGarry Morris

Viking: 376 pp., $24.95

There are few contemporary American writers whose work can absorb readers so fully and with such immediacy that the line between character and reader begins to seem dangerously thin. Among these few is the brilliant Mary McGarry Morris, who has written several exceptionally fine books, all of them so dense with dread and complexity that you are hard-pressed not to keep reading until her battered characters’ troubles have been resolved. “A Hole in the Universe” is the superbly drawn story of Gordon Loomis, a man just released from prison after serving a 25-year sentence for the murder of a young pregnant woman. “A Hole in the Universe” is not exactly a mystery, but it has the tautness and suspense of one -- the sense, threaded through its pages, that something is genuinely at stake: Gordon’s redemption and acceptance by society, perhaps, and by proxy an assurance to readers that clemency wins out over chaos in the end.

-- Francie Lin

Honored Guest

Stories

Joy Williams

Alfred A. Knopf: 214 pp., $23

“It sounds as though you had a very fortunate childhood until you didn’t,” says Francine to her gardener, Dennis, who seems to have an obsessive crush on her. He’s been telling Francine about his childhood nanny, Darla, of whom Francine reminds him, and her response in many ways sums up Joy Williams’ penetrating and thoughtful collection of stories, “Honored Guest.” In these tales, Williams, an incomparable novelist and short-story and essay writer, gives us characters who have good lives until they don’t -- people who revel in fortunate experiences until fortune gets tired of them. In wonderful, stark relief, Williams gives us a glimpse into the pliability of the human heart, its marvelous ability to withstand adversity and accommodate whatever comes next.

Bernadette Murphy

The Inner Circle

A Novel

T.C. Boyle

Viking: 418 pp., $25.95

The 10th novel by T.C. Boyle, “The Inner Circle,” is the story of John Milk, a fictional cohort in the otherwise nominally real team of researchers employed by Alfred Kinsey in the 1940s. The two volumes that issued from their work, “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” and “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female,” transformed the way people everywhere thought about sex; in America, at least, this was not a universally welcomed change. “The Inner Circle” covers a great deal of literal and psychic geography, and its supporting cast is large. The story paints an effective picture of America’s clammy, stultifying, erotically punitive atmosphere in the early and mid-1940s. It has impressive momentum and formal reach, and a fair amount to impart about wrong turns, anger, dependency and disillusion.

-- Gary Indiana

It’s All True

A Novel of Hollywood

David Freeman

Simon & Schuster: 274 pp., $23

David Freeman’s “It’s All True” is a wry, observant and forgiving Hollywood novel. I’m not certain that it is, in the full sense of the word, a novel at all. It is more like a collection of loosely interrelated short stories about an intelligent, literate man trying to survive in a town where intelligence and literacy are not as highly valued as, say, the lettuce assorte salad the studio exec orders just before hearing Henry’s pitch for a movie in which aliens intervene, to good effect, in the life of a Midwestern counterfeiter.

What we have here is neither Nathanael West nor Jackie Collins. It lacks the bleak hysteria of the former and the latter’s breathless desire to put a glaze of glamour on trashy, preposterous behavior. “It’s All True” is more radical than that. It is a book about normal people engaged in an admittedly abnormal, even exotic, business yet trapped in their ordinariness, their variously expressed needs to make their livings in a place that rewards them only grudgingly with just enough success to keep them in its game. In this epitaph for a small winner there is wit, poignancy and seductive grace.

-- Richard Schickel

Last Lullaby

A Novel

Denise Hamilton

Scribner: 358 pp., $25

Eve Diamond is a romantic whose job as a Los Angeles Times reporter requires her to be a cynic. This conflict gives ex-Times reporter Denise Hamilton’s third Diamond mystery novel, “Last Lullaby,” much of its interest and unpredictability. One of Hamilton’s strengths is her grasp of the Southland’s shifting ethnic landscape. “Last Lullaby” leads us through seedy Chinatown hotels, a trendy Asian fusion restaurant, a backyard barbecue for her lover Silvio Aguilar’s abuelita (grandmother) and a cyber-cafe that might as well be an opium den, so oblivious are its denizens to the outside world. Hamilton’s narrative prose can recall potboilers past, but it can also display so much freshness and sass (“I climbed up spongy wooden stairs that creaked under my weight as the termites held hands and moaned.”) that comparisons with Raymond Chandler aren’t too far out of line.

-- Michael Harris

The Lemon Table

Stories

Julian Barnes

Alfred A. Knopf: 244 pp., $22.95

Julian Barnes takes up the theme of aging unflinchingly in “The Lemon Table,” his second collection of stories. Erotic yearning, missed opportunities, regret and other somber chords predominate in this collection, although nearly always with wry wit.

Barnes’ novels rely upon pyrotechnics, lexicographer’s puns and postmodernist devices; these new stories are filled with emotional resonance and hard-won wisdom. “The Lemon Table” is a virtuoso performance of remarkable clarity and insight.

-- Jane Ciabattari

Little Black Book of Stories

A.S. Byatt

Alfred A. Knopf: 244 pp., $21

Although A.S. Byatt is best known for the Booker Award-winning 1990 scholarly romance “Possession” and four overstuffed Frederica Potter novels of ideas set in the 1950s and 1960s (“The Virgin in the Garden,” “Still Life,” “Babel Tower” and “A Whistling Woman”), she also has written her own fabulist’s tales over the years.

In “Little Black Book of Stories,” Byatt continues her reinvention of the fairy tale, focusing on the darker mysteries of madness, violence, grief and transformation and using the uncanny power of language to reach deep into the imagination, thrilling and terrifying in equal measure. These bewitching stories are immensely readable, fiercely intelligent and studded with astonishing, refracting images.

“Little Black Book of Stories” is a virtuoso performance by a master storyteller; Byatt spins pure gold from the darkest elements in our nature.

-- Jane Ciabattari

Little Scarlet

A Novel

Walter Mosley

Little, Brown: 310 pp., $24.95

In his continuing portrait of black and white life in Los Angeles, Walter Mosley has dipped his pen into the nightmare of the Watts riots and come up with his most searing and unforgettable account of America to date. Indignation, ferocity, excoriation scorch the pages of “Little Scarlet” like a fiery sermon, powerful for its nuance, poignant for its humanity and all the more compassionate for coming from the heart and mind of Easy Rawlins. “Little Scarlet” is a novel about who we really are and who we all can become. Argue it. Question it. You cannot read this story without recognizing the poison we feed one another. Mosley makes it clear that the real nightmare of the Watts riots had less to do with that hot summer evening in 1965 than with everything that preceded it.

-- Thomas Curwen

The Master

A Novel

Colm Toibin

Scribner: 342 pp., $25

The biographer is bound by fact, but the historical novelist need only be plausible. His characters may bear the names of those who once actually lived, but he enjoys a liberty that the biographer does not. Even the most amply documented of lives contained moments in which important words went unsaid, scenes determined by a level, all-knowing stare or the way one pair of eyes avoided another. That’s the kind of unspoken communication in which the fiction of Henry James delights, and no biographer can possibly treat James’ inner experience with the kind of freedom he brought to his characters. That is precisely what the Irish writer Colm Toibin has achieved in his deeply engrossing novel “The Master,” which follows James through what have been called the most treacherous years of his life. It begins in 1895, when his bid for popular success as a playwright had failed, and ends in 1899, with his purchase of a house in the English coastal town of Rye.

Toibin gives us an infinitely patient intelligence and an entirely convincing portrait of a writer at work: the glimmer of an idea with which a new story first comes, the way a tale is produced by the lamination of moments widely separated in time and space. He shows us that fiction never provides a transcript of experience but instead offers a variation upon it, a sense of how things might have gone if only they had been different.

-- Michael Gorra

Natasha and Other Stories

David Bezmozgis

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 150 pp., $18

“Natasha and Other Stories” chronicles, in seven tales spread over 23 years, the fate of the Berman family, Latvian Jews who fled the Soviet Union in 1980 for Toronto. Mark Berman, the only child of Roman and Bella, narrates the stories, and through him we learn, as if for the first time, what it means to remake a life in a new country and language. Like Philip Roth, and Isaac Babel before him, David Bezmozgis is fascinated with the varieties of ethical responsibilities demanded by Jewish family and culture, and the limitless ways of transgressing them. Bezmozgis makes his characters, and the state of marginality itself, uniquely his. This hysterical, merciless yet open-hearted excavation of a Jewish family in the process of assimilating gives his literary predecessors a run for their money.

-- Daniel Schifrin

Nothing Lost

A Novel

John Gregory Dunne

Alfred A. Knopf: 338 pp., $24.95

John Gregory Dunne, who died last December, was the most modern of American novelists -- that is, he was as much a reporter as a fabulist. This gave his fiction the weight and gravity of truth. His great subjects were American institutions and enterprises: the courts, prisons, the media, the Catholic Church and Hollywood. “Nothing Lost,” his final novel, is a sprawling story of murder, corruption and mistakes. This book is often gripping and cuts deep. In time, I think -- with “Playland” and its predecessor, “The Red White and Blue,” in which Jack Broderick is introduced -- “Nothing Lost” will come to be seen as part three of Dunne’s American trilogy. America was his great subject, and he pursued it, depicting it, trying to contain it, allowing himself to be dazzled (though ever surprised) by its malicious heart. He reveled in chicanery and human folly; it gave him his voice. John Gregory Dunne was our great connoisseur of venality.

-- David Freeman

The Persistence of

Memory

A Novel

Tony Eprile

W.W. Norton: 300 pp., $24.95

Charged with a shining imagination, “The Persistence of Memory” is reflective of everything it meets up with, at once capacious and finely honed. Think Laurence Sterne meets Proust meets the antic, dissembling spirit of Stanley Elkin. It’s part bricolage, part lyric paean to the passage of childhood, part bitter yet nonmoralistic indictment of a country -- South Africa -- steeped in horror and exploitation yet also a country like any other, with suburbs where wealthy housewives trade recipes for lamb curry with their black housekeepers. This is an unforgettable book.

-- Daphne Merkin

The Plot Against America

A Novel

Philip Roth

Houghton Mifflin: 392 pp., $26

“The Plot Against America” may join Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 “It Can’t Happen Here” and Philip K. Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle,” a 1962 novel set in an America defeated in World War II (the big holiday is Capitulation Day) and partitioned between Japan and Germany. Describing the rise to power of Charles Lindbergh, it may be plumbed in years to come as a cautionary tale about the fragility of the democratic spirit in America or as a metaphorical rendering of the United States and its president today.

“The Plot Against America” is written with the sense that at any moment the lives of a small boy, his family and his country can spin out of control, that every assumption underlying the orderly progress of ordinary life may be contradicted, countermanded and reversed. It leaves you breathless, right up to the point when the cavalry comes riding over the hill and the great train of American history is switched back onto the right track, and we emerge from the book as if nothing had happened at all. Effortlessly, it seems, Philip Roth has led us to suspend disbelief; then he makes us believe; then he suspends this belief and finally removes it. The result is that the present seems already in the past. Anything can happen; it is happening now.

-- Greil Marcus

Pushkin and the Queen of Spades

A Novel

Alice Randall

Houghton Mifflin: 282 pp., $24

The novels of Alice Randall are deliberate reinterpretations of classics refracted through a Negro-centric lens. Her first novel, “The Wind Done Gone,” was a strident rebuttal to “Gone With the Wind” told from the point of view of Tara’s former slaves, who, in contrast to Margaret Mitchell’s simple-minded “darkies,” outwit their weak white masters at every turn. “The Wind Done Gone” is a little ditty compared with “Pushkin and the Queen of Spades,” Randall’s operatic, far more audacious and accomplished second novel. In the guise of a mother’s rant against her son’s choice of bride, her new novel is an impassioned aria on the ferocity and consummate importance of parental love. It is also a complex manifesto on why and how race and roots matter, especially “in the face of love.” This is a stunningly gutsy, literate and original novel.

-- Heller McAlpin

Soldiers of Salamis

A Novel

Javier Cercas

Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean

Bloomsbury USA: 224 pp., $23.95

It is difficult to give “Soldiers of Salamis” the serious attention it deserves without making the novel sound ponderous and unappealing. This is a shame. The book is funny and gripping and a tear-jerker in the best sense of the word. I laughed and cried while reading it, even though I didn’t quite fall in love. The key to the novel’s charm is that it works on so many levels. On one level it is the story of a man without direction who finds meaning in his life; at the same time it is the history of a curious incident in the Spanish Civil War; it is also a meditation about what makes someone a hero, or a decent human being; finally, it is a story about how and why we remember the past. It has sold more than 500,000 copies in Spanish and been made into an equally well-received movie. The novel’s success in France, Germany and England suggests that it strikes a chord in any country or individual with ghosts to face.

-- Rebecca Pawel

The Stone That the Builder Refused

A Novel

Madison Smartt Bell

Pantheon: 750 pp., $29.95

In any bin marked “historical novels,” one is likely to find two diametrically different kinds of reading. The first bulging pile consists of collages of good-to-middling research and stagy period drama. A second, much smaller stack glows with unquenchable life. These are the true time machines, books that completely transport, that seem not so much to have sprung from a writer’s imagination as to have taken possession. It’s here one would find, say, Robert Graves’ “I, Claudius,” Gore Vidal’s “Burr” or Yukio Mishima’s “Spring Snow.” Now the stack is a little taller with the addition of the final volume of Madison Smartt Bell’s sweeping trilogy of the life of Haitian liberator Toussaint L’Ouverture, the leader of the only slave colony to throw off its own shackles. The great beauty of this work is its language, the authoritative formal lilt of English and French, the weaving in of Creole as spoken then. Just as characters in “The Stone” are possessed by the lwa -- spirits who guide souls -- so too has Bell opened to the spirits of his characters, imagined and real.

-- Kai Maristed

Sweet Land Stories

E.L. Doctorow

Random House: 150 pp., $22.95

In this age of skepticism, when a writer uses the word “sweet” in a title, our irony detector shifts to high alert. We know not to expect saccharine sentimentality. A wistful aura of disappointment pervades Doris Lessing’s “The Sweetest Dream,” Russell Banks’ “The Sweet Hereafter,” Reginald Gibbons’ “Sweetbitter” and Tennessee Williams’ “Sweet Bird of Youth.” What is sweet in the land of the free and the home of the brave for the misfits in E.L. Doctorow’s new book, “Sweet Land Stories,” is mainly the freedom to nurture their personal delusions. In the tradition of the best American fiction, “Sweet Land Stories” prods the beached whale of the American dream in order to examine its underbelly. Less complex and tangled than his recent novels, these are deceptively simple but subtle morality tales that showcase Doctorow’s deftness as a storyteller.

-- Heller McAlpin

True North

A Novel

Jim Harrison

Grove Press: 390 pp., $24

Jim Harrison may well have started out to write a book about greed, sex and religion, but what he has given us is a story about love and forgiveness and the trials they entail. For all the hype about this writer’s machismo, Harrison consistently commands our attention for his humanity and tenderness. That he can create such tension in the process -- a tension not released until the last page -- and in the end forge such violence shows his skill as a storyteller and makes “True North” a great achievement. When the book was still a work in progress, Harrison described the plot as a “tight little knot” combining greed, sex and religion. The task of untying that knot has fallen to the novel’s narrator, scion of a family of timber barons.

Is the past ever really past? In “True North” this question is played for all it’s worth. Here lies the great paradox of American life: In a country created on the premise of escape and reinvention, there is no real freedom, and the dreams of one generation are often a curse for the next. Such is the peril of being an American: The more we understand the past, the more we are haunted by what can never be. Our lives are gripped by forces we only dimly understand. The real effort, Harrison implies, is to act in spite of those forces, correct for deviance and find our own true north.

-- Thomas Curwen