Discoveries

The Swallows of Kabul: A Novel

Yasmina Khadra

Nan A. Talese/Doubleday: 200 pp., $18.95

Mohammed Moulessehoul, an Algerian army officer, took the feminine nom de plume Yasmina Khadra to stay under the radar of military censors, and it isn’t hard to understand why. The destruction wrought, the suffering created, the perversion and havoc in lives and relationships are, in this fugitive novel, created by the tyranny of the Taliban in Afghanistan, but it could be any tyrant. “The Swallows of Kabul” rotates between two couples: the jailer Atiq Shaukat, 42, and his dying wife Musarrat; and ex-aristocrat Mohsen Ramat, 32, and his beautiful ex-magistrate wife, Zunaira. Atiq cannot control his rage. He feels trapped caring for his wife of several decades, whom he does not love. Mohsen, gentle by nature, nonetheless finds himself helping an angry mob stone a prostitute in a public square. When he tells his wife, she rejects him. Enraged, Zunaira, who has always refused to wear a burka, turns against her husband and becomes a zealot. These personal tragedies play out against the squalor of Kabul, the devastation of a nation: “The Afghan countryside is nothing but battlefields, expanses of sand, and cemeteries,” the author writes. “Artillery exchanges shatter prayers, wolves howl at the moon every night, and the wind, when it breathes, mingles beggars’ laments with the croaking of crows.”

They are all undone by hatred. But who could survive such a life in such a place?

*

What Else but Home: A Novel

Sharon Rolens

Bridge Works: 302 pp., $23.95

It’s extremely uncomfortable to read the 1948 vernacular of Old Kane, Ill., to see Drayton Hunt mention in passing that he taught his little sister (age 9) how to “pleasure a man.” Or that he killed his son’s best friend because he was gay. These and other childhood memories in Sharon Rolens’ novel “What Else but Home” take readers well beyond their usual comfort zones. Hunt gets out of prison, goes home to his dead mother’s house in Old Kane, gets religion and tries to make peace with his estranged son, Cappy.

None of it means you’re going to like the guy or even that he succeeds. People with names like Oleeta, Worthy, Chastity and Tick are among the unforgiven. And something within expands when you read about them.

*

Malibu Diary: Notes From an Urban Refugee

Penelope Grenoble O’Malley

University of Nevada Press: 186 pp., $24.95

Reporter Penelope Grenoble O’Malley moved to California from upstate New York in 1969. After two decades in Los Angeles, she fled the city for Point Dume. Working as a reporter for the Malibu Times put her in a position to learn everything about her new home, from the Chumash to the zanjas, the ditches that carried water to settlements. She covered the 1993 Old Topanga Fire, the 1998 flooding of Las Flores Creek and other stories recounted in “Malibu Diary.” She refers often to original Malibu settlers Frederick and Rhoda May Rindge (nicknamed “the Queen of Malibu”), who came west in 1887. Woven throughout is the thread of development and its effect on Malibu. With a reporter’s eye and a resident’s heart, O’Malley remembers her friend Hana, who held weekly dinners in her old home, everyone “sitting on the back patio ... watching Tom the turkey peck at stones at the far end of the back yard.” About the time Point Dume ceased to resemble the Malibu that Hana and her family loved, they were forced to move. “When I lived in the city, I felt buffeted by forces beyond my control,” O’Malley writes. “I longed for a piece of ground I could preside over exclusively. I had lost touch with what my father had confided to me in those other mountains in upstate New York so many years before: that each one of us ... develops toward maturity in the same manner as the natural life that surrounds us, by taking in sustenance and putting forth energy toward the well-being of the whole.”