FIRST FICTION

Derek Beaven’s debut novel, “Newton’s Niece,” won a Commonwealth Prize when it was published in Britain in 1994. Beaven’s second novel, “Acts of Mutiny,” which was short-listed for the Guardian Fiction Prize, is his American debut, and it’s an ambitious, relentlessly ominous and, at times, wonderfully satisfying account of a sea voyage from England to Australia in 1959. The Cold War is in full bloom, the empire is on the wane and mutinous acts of the heart, soul and body politic abound. Into this stormy historical moment sail young Ralph (who tells this story from the untrustworthy vantage of middle age) and his mother, Erica, an impressionable military wife who has taken a womanizing American naval officer named Dave Chaunteyman as her lover. As the Armorica is tossed by gales in the Bay of Biscay, glides through the Straits of Gibraltar and into the blue Mediterranean, makes calls at Port Said and Colombo and eventually sails for Adelaide, Ralph--seemingly nonchalant about his mother and Chaunteyman--turns his curiosity upon another newly forged illicit couple: Penny, sailing alone to Australia to start a new life with her stultifying husband and two boys, and Robert, a clear-eyed bachelor on his way Down Under to be a satellite tracker. As Penny and Robert scandalize the microcosmic society of the Armorica, Ralph--obsessed with ray guns, H-bombs and giant squids and prone to poking around the ship’s deepest holds--rightly comes to suspect that adultery isn’t the ship’s only dangerous cargo. Beaven’s bracing tale of moral, political and emotional seasickness is an illuminating travelogue of the treacherous point at which the modern world truly became modern.

PLAN B By Jonathan Tropper; St. Martin’s: 358 pp., $24.95

Turning 30 can be a real bitch, especially if you’re Ben, the smart-guy hero of Jonathan Tropper’s comic novel about a clique of NYU alums trying to hold themselves together 10 years after graduation. The closest Ben, an aspiring novelist, has come to literary greatness is making lists for Esquire magazine (lists of people, clothes, music), and he compulsively lists the reasons why turning 30 is so intense: “When Kurt Cobain was my age he’d been dead for two years.” “Soon they’ll have to start sending an annual search party up my rectum to check on my colon.” But there’s even more cause for panic: Ben has just undergone a divorce, and Jack, his best college buddy and now a major Hollywood star, has developed a nasty coke habit and a penchant for punching maitre d’s in the nose. Alison--the responsible Upper West Side lawyer--comes up with the idea of an intervention to save Jack from his Hollywood self and, soon enough, Lindsey, the directionless beauty whom Ben has always been in love with, and Chuck, the girl-crazy surgeon whose life is, according to Ben, “a beer commercial,” are helping Ben and Alison smuggle their self-destructive pal up to the Catskills. When the enraged Jack busts out and goes missing, the police, the FBI and the news media besiege the house, while Ben and his friends perform small, unexpected interventions on themselves, coming clean of their own ulterior motives, past regrets and future dreams. In the end, nothing turns out as planned, but it all makes sense anyway; to Tropper’s credit, “Plan B” is a bit like life--or, at least, like entertainment.

MUMMY’S LEGS By Kate Bingham; Simon & Schuster: 208 pp., $20

Kate Bingham is a young British poet whose elegant first novel, “Mummy’s Legs,” has nothing to do with Egyptology or embalming. It does, however, bravely explore the dusty recesses of memory, uncovering emotional artifacts with strenuous delicacy as it delivers a double-helix narrative about the difficult bond between a woman named Sarah and her mercurial mother, Catherine, a frustrated writer who, when she’s not “bleary with Valium,” cranks out the occasional review for the TLS. While we witness the adult Sarah taking a bus to Catherine’s townhouse in South Kensington, withstanding a hail of maternal criticisms and baking a birthday cake for the helpless ingrate, we follow, in flashbacks, the younger Sarah as she is delivered by her patient, long-suffering father, to a cousin’s house in the country. Here, Sarah rides out the dissolution of her parents’ marriage, Catherine’s affair with a dashing yet unfaithful poet and, most of all, Catherine’s addictions, half-hearted suicide attempts and cruelly manipulative disappearing acts. Although Catherine naturally disdains Sarah’s present relationship with an inoffensive guy named Ben, we--and Sarah--recognize it as Sarah’s best hope for emotional triage. And it may be just the thing that gives Sarah the strength to continue coping with Catherine--to be, in effect, her mummy’s legs--even as she attempts to get a life of her own.