Noteworthy Fiction

The narrator, 10-year-old Evelyn Bucknow, lives with her welfare mother in a small Midwestern town where she learns hard lessons about love and loss. Like any child, Evelyn confronts a world of baffling contradictions and competing claims for her affection, from which she must construct a moral code. There's no cheating in this novel, no phony breakthrough, or precious reconciliation, just a sweet, often comic series of tender moments spun from real-life battles. (July 13)

Readers who know Morrison's work only from her surreal classic "Beloved" will be surprised by the subtlety and humor of her latest novel, about a group of women who revolve around the memory of their late patriarch and lover. Morrison plays up the gothic comedy of these warring old women well, but she also presses deep into the complexity of their ruined affection for each other. Ultimately, "Love" reaches a point of real reconciliation, but it's cast, as it must be, in the dark light of lives wasted in conflict, spent trying to satisfy a man who should have been denied. (Oct. 28)

Ozeki balances intimate and environmental concerns well in this story about a frustratingly irresponsible woman who ran away from her parents when she was 14. Now, 25 years later, hearing that her parents are near death, she returns to their Idaho farm and discovers that they're the heroes of a bus load of eco-hippies who worship her father's natural farming. It's a jungle of a plot, a riot of literary species, sown with strains of satire and tragedy. (March 13)

At the center of Power's new novel is an unlikely romance that develops between the daughter of a black doctor and a German physicist who's just escaped the anti-Semitism of Europe. They try to blend their different cultures in the lives of their children, but it's a hard melody to maintain amid the din of American racism. Powers has orchestrated a cast of characters rich enough to pose the most forbidden questions about race but sensitive enough to capture the most intimate struggle for identity. (Jan. 23)

With a breathless intensity that's both dazzling and exhausting, this story focuses on the fertile mind of an English teacher in Botswana. Ray is an American, a Milton scholar, a happily married man, and a spy with the CIA. We meet him just as the legs of his elegant life are buckling. Rush has re-created the mental life of an original man from the ground up, raising a host of profound questions about the limits of love and language. (June 5)

Smiley re-creates the 1980s real estate boom, along with the savings and loan debacle, but the novel stays tightly focused on a real estate agent in a small New England town who overextends himself to make a killing. The excesses of this era were so ludicrous that it would have been natural for Smiley to slip into parody, and there's plenty of wit here, but this is a novel of admirable restraint and sensitivity. (April 10)

Vanderbes explores an unusual sibling relationship between Elsa and her mentally handicapped sister on an expedition to Easter Island before World War I. The intensely private, beautifully intimate moments captured here between these sisters are like nothing I've read elsewhere. A parallel story develops by alternate chapters about a scientist in the 1970s who comes to the island after a bad marriage to a world-famous botanist. Among the many pleasures of this novel are the scientific issues laced so gracefully through these lives. The archeological details are fascinating and even suspenseful. (May 29)

Page: 1 | 2 | 3