DISCOVERIES

Among Other Things, I’ve

Taken Up Smoking

A Novel

Aoibheann Sweeney

Penguin Press: 286 pp., $23.95

CONSIDER how many novels have at their core unhappy parents, or parents with secrets, or depressed mothers. Writers and readers alike struggle through a child’s effort to set things right, to figure out the source of unhappiness and banish it once and for all. Aoibheann Sweeney’s “Among Other Things, I’ve Taken Up Smoking” is structured, like Book I of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” around Chaos, the Age of Silver, the Age of Bronze and the Age of Iron.

Miranda Donnal grows up on a remote island in Maine. When she is still very young, her mother takes a boat and disappears forever into the fog. Miranda lives alone with her father, a classicist who spends his days translating “The Metamorphoses.” Her closest friend is Mr. Blackwell, a fisherman of Native American descent. When she is in her late teens, her father sends her off to stay with old friends in New York’s West Village. It is here that she pieces together the riddle of her father’s life and is able to move on with her own. The weight of myriad mysteries, so common in childhood, is lifted.

Carrying a reader through her character’s childhood and young adulthood, maintaining a credible voice as clouds part and epiphanies arrive, takes a gentle, steady hand and writing free of ego and flourish. Rare in a first novel, but Sweeney does it.

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The Tenderness of Wolves

A Novel

Stef Penney

Simon & Schuster: 384 pp., $25

ALSO rare in a first novel: complete immersion in another time and place, the dense imaginings that require a writer almost to enter another state of mind. Stef Penney takes us into the dark heart of Dove River, a Scottish immigrant settlement on the north shore of Ontario’s Georgian Bay, in 1867. (“The land swallowed us up and was hungry for more. Hacking land out of the forest, we gave our places names that sprang from things we saw.”) A French trader employed by the Hudson Bay Co. has been found murdered and scalped. Suspects include the narrator’s young son. Her love for him is the only positive thing in her life, part of which has been spent in a mental asylum and part in a marriage drained of intimacy.

Penney peoples Dove River with town elders, flirtatious young girls, company men, trackers and fur traders. She makes trackers of her readers: We follow clues into the forest; we pull together stories from raw instinct and a few footprints in the mud.

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Alone in the Kitchen With an Eggplant

Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone

Edited by Jenni Ferrari-Adler

Riverhead: 288 pp., $22.95

“PEOPLE lie when you ask them what they eat when they are alone,” writes Laurie Colwin in the title essay, “Alone in the Kitchen With an Eggplant.” “A salad, they tell you. But when you persist, they confess to peanut butter and bacon sandwiches deep fried and eaten with hot sauce, or spaghetti with butter and grape jam.”

This collection of essays on eating alone was inspired by editor Jenni Ferrari-Adler’s realization that the ability to live alone and take care of oneself is an important stop on the road to adulthood. But the book is also full of whimsy and ingenuity -- such as, for instance, grace almost every sentence Colwin has ever written. Ann Patchett prefers oatmeal when alone, “as Patchetts have done for generations before me.” A notable number of contributors prepare meals around a solitary item, whereas others, like Amanda Hesser, make themselves elaborate concoctions (“Truffled Egg Toast”). Marcella Hazan confesses that she rarely cooks for herself because she sees cooking as something one does for others as an expression of love and intimacy. Many of these essays are funny and self-deprecating, like Jonathan Ames’ “Eggs Over Uneasy,” which begins: “Yesterday I poisoned myself cooking three eggs.” There is a happy absence of McKitchens here: The scale is small, the mood inventive. Loneliness appears infrequently and only as one of many ingredients.

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susan.reynolds@latimes.com