2007 first-time novelists

Published September 13, 2007 at midnight

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The Art Thief

By Noah Charney (Atria Books, 304 pages, $25).

Author’s background: Charney, 27, is founding director of the first consulting group on art crime prevention. He has masters degrees in art history from the Courtauld Institute in London and Cambridge University and is pursuing a doctorate degree in the history of art theft at Cambridge. He divides his time between New Haven, Conn.; Cambridge, England; and Rome, Italy.

Plot in a nutshell: This mystery involves the baffling theft of three priceless pieces of art: from a Baroque church in Rome; the National Gallery of Modern Art in London, and the basement vault of the Malevich Society in Paris. The crimes are being investigated by world-renowned art detective Gabriel Coffin, Parisian art historian Genevieve Delacloche and Inspector Harry Wickenden of Scotland Yard in London.

The plot twists and turns as forgeries arise, individuals are double-crossed and unusual clues are left at the crime scenes. As the story unfolds, readers are enlightened with inside information on the world of art collectors who frequent private galleries and museums, as well as real-life art thefts and forgeries that have occurred over the years.

Sample of prose: "It was a sight to behold, the exceedingly reedy Jean-Paul Lesgourges, with putty-stretched cheeks that look rouged, and a glassy cackle in his eyes, whooping with joy, as the puff adder Bizot, like a broken aqueduct, every facet spherical, rumbled mercilessly, the table and his knees pinching him in place, bright smile tears puddling up around his tiny, hidden eyes. His brambly peppered beard was a tangle of chin and leftovers, and bounced of its own volition, revealing his gummy smile."

Author reminds me of: He has a unique style, though the novel’s intrigue rivals that of The Rule of Four, by Ian Caldwell.

Best reason to read: Descriptively brilliant and filled with witticisms, this fine romp features a clever and well-drawn cast of characaters, as well as educates readers about real masterpieces and the artists behind them.

- Verna Noel Jones

Confessions of a Wall Street Shoeshine Boy

By Doug Stumpf (Harper Collins, 304 pages, $24.95).

Author’s background: Stumpf lives in New York, where he’s a deputy editor at Vanity Fair magazine, which is not-very-well-disguised as Glossy magazine in the book.

Plot in a nutshell: Glossy writer Greg Waggoner is reaching the end of his contract without producing the home-run story he needs to make the publication’s A-list of writers. He befriends a Brazilian immigrant shoeshine boy Aguilar Benicio, known to his friends as Gil.

Gil has recently gotten the shoe-shining concession at the major Wall Street firm of Medved, Morningstar and Bigelow. When his cousin Eddy gets fired after stumbling upon one of the firm’s hottest traders on his cell phone in a utility closet (the signature move of illegal inside trading), Gil asks Greg for help.

Greg, sensing the big story he needs for his Glossy gig, then follows the scent of what could be the biggest financial scandal since Ivan Boesky.

Sample of prose: In his fractured English, Gil talks about his shoe-shine work: "If I came from a real rich family, I don’t think I’d ever be able to do it. You know when you’re rich, you don’t want to do that, you don’t want to shine shoes. Sometimes when I used to walk into that place, I was like, damn, how they look at me, the traders? Not now. Now, I’m more comfortable. Because I don’t go there to shine their shoes. I go there to socialize. To talk, see how they doing.

"I’m more like an entertainer. I like that. It makes me feel good."

Author reminds of: The milieu is pure Tom Wolfe, social satire against a background of big money.

Best reason to read: What Herman Melville was to whaling, Stumpf is to shining shoes. There are several detailed excursions into the trade, techniques and culture of clean, polish and buff. Once you’ve conquered the argot, the rhythm and pace of Gil’s narration rock the story along nicely.

- Dan Whipple

Electricity

By Ray Robinson (Grove, 368 pages, $14).

Author’s background: Robinson holds an MA in creative writing from Lancaster University in England. Electricity began as a short story, submitted as part of his degree, and is based on his memories of his cousin Lisa’s seizures.

Plot in a nutshell: Lily O’Connor’s life has been difficult, with a mother who veered between neglect and abuse, a sexually abusive stepfather, poverty, drinking, and foster care. What sets her apart is epilepsy — a brain disorder that results in several different types of seizures. For Lily, it means losing control of her bowels, her limbs, and her voice.

At age 30, Lily lives alone in a seaside resort town, working in a bingo hall, measuring her days by her medication, secure in her comfort zone — until her hated mother’s death jolts her out of her routine, and back into contact with her family. She reconnects with half-brother Barry, a professional gambler with more than a few secrets, but her own brother Mikey is nowhere to be seen. With her share of funds from the sale of her mother’s house, Lily decides to track him down.

While a boyfriend sabotages Lily in a horrifying way, her friend Mel stands by her, helping her uncover her family’s past.

Sample of prose: Lily describes an epileptic seizure in her childhood: "I would wait for the fit to come. For my spirit to rip itself out of me and send me back to that moment when I couldn’t walk but I could fly. Soaring down the stairs towards the bottom step. I would wait for that moment when I flap my elbows like stiff jaggy wings and that breeze of quietness and gorgeousness comes over me. And it was then, just before the blackness, that I saw the image of Mam behind a stack of tins in the supermarket, hiding from her little f------- embarrassment.

PICK YOURSELF UP, YOU HEAR ME, PICK YOURSELF...

Author reminds me of: Clare Allan, author of Poppy Shakespeare.

Best reason to read: For Lily’s grittiness and her seizures — intense and high voltage. Readers will also be touched by Lily’s friendship with Mel.

- Christine Jacques

Ghostwalk

By Rebecca Stott (Spiegel & Grau, 320 pages, $24.95).

Author’s background: Stott is a professor at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England, and the author of several non-fiction books. She is also a regular contributor to BBC Radio.

Plot in a nutshell: Lydia Brooke is a ghostwriter charged with completing the manuscript of an historian who was recently found drowned in the river Cam. She soon discovers that the manuscript holds clues connecting a series of suspicious deaths that occurred 300 years apart in Cambridge: the first series taking place in the mid-17th century, and the others in the early 21st century.

Working in an isolated studio, unnatural lights and strange dreams begin to wear thin the veil between past and present as Lydia’s research brings together Isaac Newton and a network of European alchemists with present day neuroscience and a violent animals rights group.

Sample of prose: "I saw the white hair first. A thin young man...his university gown was scarlet. He met my eyes. Mutual recognition, a raised eyebrow, the slightest upturning of the edges of his mouth. What was I doing hallucinating Newton on a bridge in Cambridge? He was as definite as a picture in a frame, yet around him everything fell away. There was a smudge around him. As if what I was seeing was something underneath the surface of my reality, as if someone had rubbed away the surface of my Cambridge."

Author reminds me of: Iain Pears, author of An Instance of the Fingerpost, for an intelligent portrayal of science and mystery in 17th-century England.

Best reason to read: For its successful combination of mystery, thriller, and historical narrative, all set against the timeless backdrop of ancient, gloomy Cambridge.

- Steve Ruskin

Mary Modern

By Camille DeAngelis (Shaye Areheart, 352 pages, $24).

Author’s background: Deangelis received an M. A. from the National University of Ireland, Galway, and currently lives in New Jersey. The story’s premise came while she was scrutinizing her great-grandparents’ engagement portrait.

Plot in a nutshell: Two romances, 80 years apart, weave through this unusual novel featuring protagonist Lucy, a 28-year-old biogenetics researcher who finds that she is infertile. Lucy lives in her grandmother Mary’s house surrounded by Mary’s clothes and furniture. She wants so desperately to have a baby that she uses a sample of Mary’s DNA and a coerced boyfriend to mix up a fetal brew in her basement.

Unfortunately, Lucy brings to life a 22-year-old Mary rather than an infant. Mary’s confusion at her new life turns to rage at what has happened to her — and she’s determined to resurrect her beloved Teddy, creating another set of problems.

Sample of prose: Of the cloned Mary, the narrator writes: "She finds a leather handbag of her mother’s in someone else’s wedding trunk. Inside are a cigarette case of tarnished silver and an ivory holder. Under the lid of the same trunk is stapled a warrenty card stamped with an expiration date of December 31, 1947. After donning her favorite velveteen dress, her Donnegal tweed coat, and a blue cloche she’d found hanging on a hat rack, she descends the attic stairs, her heart in her throat at the prospect of meeting the distant future head-on."

Author reminds me of: Alice Hoffman and Mary Shelley, as she pushes the envelope beyond the usual range of perceived reality.

Best reason to read: This is a quirky novel, so well-crafted that the lighter moments easily balance the more serious issues raised.

- Joan Hinkemeyer

The Sabotage Café

By Joshua Furst (Knopf, 272 pages, $23.95).

Author’s background: Furst graduated the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the same cadre with Nick Arvin. His first publication was a collection of short stories, Short People. He teaches at Pratt Institute in New York City.

Plot in a nutshell: Sabotage begins from Julia’s point of view: a mentally unstable mother living in suburbia, dependent on pills to keep her illness and her traumatic past at bay. The story moves quickly to her daughter Cheryl as she runs away to become part of the homeless youth in the Twin Cities. Throughout the cruelty, squalor, half-starvation and awkward sex that is Cheryl’s new life, Julia hovers over her daughter from afar, seemingly by telepathy. As an occasional presence, her awareness of how she’s failed her child makes her voice strong and despairing.

There’s no happy reunion in the end. But there are some pinpoints of redemption, and their light is in proportion to the misery around them.

Sample of prose: Julia has a breadown that sends her to an institution, but Cheryl doesn’t leave home then. Instead, she runs away after her mother returns from the asylum. Julia wonders why didn’t Cheryl go earlier, when "she’d watched me revert from the sometimes-wise, sometimes-lovely, sometimes-weird Mom into the smaller thing I’d always been, the frightened animal I’d kept hidden from her. I’d winced and cowered, I’d shivered. I'd quaked. I’d shown myself to be, at least for a time, incapable of doing her any good. And I can’t fathom, I don’t understand at all, why she didn’t leave then when everything was broken, why she waited instead for everything to be fine."

Author reminds me of: Martha Cooley’s The Archivist, in his description of how the mad feel about their madness.

Best reason to read: Julia’s struggle to do the right thing, in spite of her illness, and in spite of — and sometimes with — her husband’s help is captivating.

- Christine Jacques

Satisfaction

By Gillian Greenwood (Crown, 304 pages, $24).

Author’s background: Educated at Somerville College, Oxford, Greenwood became editor of the Literary Review in her 20s, followed by work in arts television. She currently is executive producer of the South Bank Show and lives in London.

Plot in a nutshell: At its simplest, Satisfaction tells the story of friends and family members who love and betray one another, suffer anxieties and face deep disturbances in their lives. Yet there’s much more to this intriguing story.

It opens with Amy Fielding, who has come to see clinical psychologist Patrick McIlhenny with the puzzling confession that she suffers from "an excess of happiness." The novel then bounces intermittently between two decades, employing this vehicle to unveil the short-circuited lives and dreams of the characters. There are lots of secrets and miscommunications as the story details the deep complexities of love, family and friendship. To say more would only spoil the plot. Like Alice in the rabbit’s hole, the reader can’t help but move quickly through the pages as this tale gets "curioser and curioser."

Sample of prose: "Amy’s foot, Patrick noticed, was drawing small circles on the rug as she spoke, moving slowly, a silent counterpoint to the fractured rhythms of her voice. The foot, he fancied, was determined to see this through, and, with surprising speed, she found a way back, beyond her marriage and the more recent events that she’d claimed were her purpose in visiting him. . . She was speaking on waves of her breath, depositing the past, and though it was clear to him that she’d said the words often before, there was a fear in her voice that her story might never really be heard."

Author reminds me of: William Faulkner, for her compelling word pictures.

Best reason to read: Satisfaction is skillfully constructed and captivating. There are no wasted words among its wealth of descriptive phrases, outlining the strangely intertwined and tragic lives of its characters.

- Verna Noel Jones

Walk On, Bright Boy

By Charles Davis (The Permanent Press, 144 pages, $26).

Author’s background: In addition to writing, Davis spends a lot of his time walking. According to his bio, he researches walking guides, "after spending the better part of his 20s traveling in exotic and colorful places and catching exotic and colorful diseases." His walking experiences strongly flavor this novel.

Plot in a nutshell: Set in Inquisition-era Spain, a powerful, condemned prelate looks back on the critical incident of his youth, when he betrayed his best friend, a Moor. The Moor (his only name in the book) is a holdover from pre-Christian Spain, tolerated because he knows the intricacies of the irrigation system on which the livelihood of the community depends. But as a heathen, he is viewed with suspicion. The Factor, a traveling merchant who buys and sells the community’s goods, describes him: "He’s a witch. He’s killed children. He eats babies."

The Inquisitor, the authoritative hand of the Spanish Inquisition, arrives to exploit these religious superstitions of the mountain populace, enlisting their latent tribalism against the Moor who has kept their community alive with his expertise. By condeming the Moor as a heathen, the Inquisition hopes to strengthen its political hold over the barely civilized regions of newly Christianized Spain.

Sample of prose: "Even though they were now largely invisible, the Moor pointed to each village, hamlet, and finca within sight of our eyrie, and named every one of them as he pointed. When he had finished his litany, he asked if I knew the meanings of those names, and I had to admit I did not.

" ‘That is understandable,’ he said. ‘They are all Arabic names... your people have not renamed them... Why should this be, do you think?’

"Again, ignorance was all I had to offer, but not wishing to disappoint him, I suggested in my childish way that it was because my people were too busy surviving to be naming things and that in time these places would be called by Christian words.

" ‘Perhaps they will,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you and your children or your grandchildren will find words for your world. But I think not. Listen. When you name a place you make it your own. For near a dozen generations my people lived here, learned to live with this landscape and make it their own. That is why I am here. I was chosen because I speak your language. But I was kept here because I know this place and it is mine.’"

Author reminds me of: Hardly anybody reads Montaigne anymore, but Davis’s lyrical language and pacing remind me of Montaigne’s engaging, anecdotal essays.

Best reason to read: There are many pleasures to be found in this book: the pace and rhythm of the language; the vibrant and sympathetic characters; the tense, crisply advancing plot line. And Davis’s philosophical excursions into life, place, differences and death are well worth the price of admission.

- Dan Whipple

American Youth

By Phil La Marche (Random House, 240 pages, $21.95).

Author's background: La Marche was as a writing fellow in the Syracuse University Graduate Creative Writing Program and was awarded the Ivan Klima Fellowship in Fiction in Prague. He has also taught creative writing workshops at Colgate and Syracuse in New York.

Plot in a nutshell: The fatal shooting of a school friend at a young teen's home was an accident. The "boy," as the author refers to him throughout much of the book, didn't pull the trigger. However, he did load the gun while showing it off to his friends and then failed to unload it before leaving the room.

The judgment and blame that follows quickly causes his life to spiral out of control. Along with this crisis, the novel explores the dynamics of town residents who become conflicted as a new generation of outsiders moves in, changing the lives of those who previously felt they had ownership of the rural neighborhood.

Ultimately, it's the animal-like territorial behavior among a group of righteous youth seeking to "side" with the boy that threatens to bring him down.

Sample of prose: "The boy knew it was dangerous, driving with a drunk. He'd seen the commercials. He'd been subject to the campaigns in school. But to care about your physical well-being, you have to care about your physical well-being. The boy's drunk mind fantasized about crashing full speed into one of the broad pines on the side of the road — his body flying into the dashboard, through the windshield, headlong into the trees and small saplings. Pain was what his body craved. It pleaded to be burned and scalded and dashed to pieces. It longed for relief."

Author reminds me of: Ernest Hemingway, for his ability to build an electrifying story through simple, carefully chosen, yet powerful words.

Best reason to read: This novel is rich with quietly riveting characters. Through images that will haunt you, it shows how small missteps can turn a youth's life around in ways he cannot imagine.

- Verna Noel Jones

The Archivist’s Story

By Travis Holland (The Dial Press, 256 pages, $23).

Author’s background: Holland, who holds an MFA from the University of Michigan, has written stories for several literary journals, including Ploughshares and Glimmer Train. He’s received two Hopwood Awards, a scholarship program at the University of Michigan for promising writers.

Plot in a nutshell: Pavel Dubrov works in the basement at Moscow’s Lubyanka Prison immediately before the onset of WWII. His job is cataloging the work of Russian writers, which is to be used as evidence against them.

But the young archivist is a former teacher of literature, and a lover of many of the poems and stories he now must destroy. As his friends and acquaintances fall under suspicion of the secret police and some are arrested, he realizes that he is slated for arrest himself after he completes this unwelcome task. So Pavel is faced with a decision that requires all of his courage: whether to stand up, probably fruitlessly, for the sanctity of literature and freedom of expression against the indifferent power of the state; or to retreat into a reduced and cowardly life.

Sample of prose: "And here he is, the master himself. Babel. A single box, twenty-seven green folders. Pavel sets the heavy cardboard box onto the concrete floor. In the topmost folder lies Babel’s unsigned, unfinished, beautiful story. Kneeling under a bare light bulb in its wire cage, he reads it straight through. Afterward, when he returns to his desk, Pavel is almost surprised to discover that he is still holding the story in his hands. After that, what follows is surprisingly simple. The story, a mere eleven pages long, folded and tucked tightly under his belt, brushes the small of his back. His shirt and coat conceal the tiny bulge entirely. Upstairs, the guard posted at the main entrance of Lubyanka barely glances at his identification card.

Author reminds me of: Alan Furst, in subject matter, spareness of prose and evocation of pre-war atmosphere.

Best reason to read: The plot moves along briskly, the tension building to the last. The characters are fully realized, so that you genuinely care about the fates of all of them.

— Dan Whipple

Astrid and Veronika

By Linda Olsson (Penguin, 272 pages, $14).

Author's background: Olsson graduated from the University of Stockholm and now lives in New Zealand, having also lived in Kenya, Singapore and Japan.

Plot in a nutshell: This quietly emotional novel explores the nature of friendship through two characters: Veronika, a young New Zealand writer who rents a house near a small Swedish village, and her only neighbor, Astrid, an older reclusive woman. A tentative friendship gradually builds as the two women share their secrets — all founded on loss. Emotional security soon enables them to venture away from their secure setting into the village.

Sample of prose: "I allowed life to slip away while I nurtured my hatred inside this house. Now I realize I made it my prison. I told myself I was safe here. Now I can see that all these years I have waited to be released, when all the time, the only bonds were those I made myself."

Author reminds me of: Debra Dean (Madonnas of Leningrad) in her spare yet evocative style and Jennifer Chiaverini in her depiction of female friendships.

Best reason to read: For its carefully crafted prose, elegant in its simplicity. The slowly unfolding friendship between the two women suffering from their losses make this a poignant treasure.

- Joan Hinkemeyer

The Dead Fathers Club

By Matt Haig (Viking, 314 pages, $23.95).

Author's background: Haig is a young British writer from Leeds, England whose previous work has been primarily journalism for UK and Australian outlets.

Plot in a nutshell: This is a British hip-hop retelling of Hamlet, an effort you may not have realized you needed until you see it. Philip Noble's father is killed by his own brother, who wants to absorb the dead man's kingdom, which consists of an alluring wife and a modestly thriving pub, the Castle and Falcon. Dads Ghost appears to the boy to reveal the murder plot, urging Philip to kill his uncle so that Dads Ghost can be revenged and spared an eternity facing The Terrors. It's Hamlet, so there aren't too many surprises in the plot. It's largely a question of style.

Sample of prose: "I saw him on the field. He was behind all the running boys and I didnt move I was just a statue holding the ball looking at Dads Ghost. And someone grabbed my legs and I was run over by about ten boys and they were all on top of me and it was black and I felt my bones squeezing. Rugby is weird because it lets people hurt you and jump on you on the field and if they did it 30 minutes before at break theyd get told off but in Rugby you are meant to do it."

Author reminds me of: Dave Eggers.

Best reason to read: If he weren't so literary, Haig could have a future in the gothic world. His scenes with Dads Ghost are genuinely frightening — and they're interspersed with funny and poignant insights of adolescent love and loss.

Dan Whipple

Fresh

By Mark McNay (McAdam/Cage, 276 pages, $23 hardcover; $13 trade paperback).

Author's background: McNay was brought up in a mining village in central Scotland. After a failed electrical engineering course and 15 years doing odd jobs, McNay graduated from a creative writing course at a Scottish university and began his writing career. He lives in Norwich.

Plot in a nutshell: Sean works in a chicken factory, waiting for the birds to come down his line where he will hoist them high into the sky and send them off. The story takes place in one day, with plenty of flashbacks, dreams and fantastical imaginings.

Sean has a big problem to solve. His brother Archie, a hardened, drug-dealing criminal, is coming home from jail early. Prior to jail, Archie left a large amount of money with his little brother for safekeeping, and Sean, expecting Archie to be in for awhile, spent a good bit of it. Archie is the violent sort and is expecting the total when he gets home.

Sean desperately begins a search to get the money together and runs into some hooligans and the like in doing so. But nothing compares to the violence or fear that Archie is about to bring down on his little brother's household.

Sample of prose: "It was scary waitin in the car. Ah heard a window breakin and things crashin and every time a car passed on the main road Ah thought is was the polis. Eventually Archie and Sammy appeared from the side of the house carryin a bed sheet between them. They ran to the back of the car and Ah felt the suspension go down with the weight of it. The boot slammed and they were in the car. They were giggling like wee lasies. Archie drove with no lights till we got on the main road. Then he was off like Jackie Stewart again... Everybody was smoking and drinkin and talking. Ah couldnay understand them coz of their accents."

Author reminds me of: Nick Hornby, for his original Scottish sense of voice and language, and his mix of the macabre with humor.

Best reason to read: The story is told in first person, alternating with third person, somewhat in the vein of the popular television show The Office. The language difference from the UK makes it even more enjoyable. As the author uses local dialect, we recognize the word, but realize that McNay has given it multiple meanings. While the language can be rough and there are a few R-rated scenes, this is a compelling, fun read.

- Justin Matott

Friends & Mothers

By Louise Limerick (Thomas Dunne Books, 272 pages, $24.95).

Author's background: Limerick is an Australian novelist and mother of three.

Plot in a nutshell: Evelyn is in the psychiatric hospital. She's not talking, and her baby daughter Amy is missing. As her four friends meet daily over coffee to try to sort out what happened, bits and pieces of their own problematic lives emerge. The author intertwines their unique stories and secrets as the mystery of the missing child deepens, and Evelyn struggles to make sense of how her mother's early death impacted her life.

Sample of prose: "Do you think I am mad? They say I am ill, that it is because of the baby that I talk to the spider. They are wrong. I have always talked to the spider. I talked to the spider before I met Steve, before I had William, before Amy too. You are surprised? You are surprised that I can say her name now? I can always say her name when I am small. I can say her name because, when I am small, I cannot hurt her and I know she is safe and far away from the web that I bind myself to. Yes, I talked to the spider before Amy. But after Amy, something changed. After Amy, I heard the spider talking back."

Author reminds me of: Limerick writes in her own, unique style and voice.

Best reason to read: From page one, you'll feel as if you're a part of this cache of mothers and friends and want desperately to be let in on their secrets and their theories about what has happened to Amy.

- Verna Noel Jones

The Hindi-Bindi Club

By Monica Pradhan (Bantam Dell, 432 pages, $12).

Author's background: Pradhan is the daughter of parents who immigrated to the U.S. from Mumbai, India in the 1960s. Born in Pittsburgh, she grew up outside of Washington, D.C. and now lives in Minnesota and Toronto with her husband.

Plot in a nutshell: Kiran Deshpande, now a physician, returns home to Maryland after five years away to reconnect with her Indian-born parents, who had long ago emigrated to the United States to give their daughter a life she couldn't have had in their native India. Yet they hadn't anticipated how this exceedingly different culture would turn her into someone they couldn't recognize; someone who would rebel against what they thought was best for her.

Kiran reconnects with the girlfriends of her past while her mother, Meenal, looks for guidance through frequent meetings with her own Indian-born friends, whom the American-born daughters jokingly refer to as the Hindi-Bindi Club. Through an eye-opening and detailed account of the customs, travails, and even long-treasured recipes (included in the book) of the people of India, the author reveals the fragile bonds, secrets, and generational issues that haunt these immigrant mothers and their daughters.

Sample of prose: "She feels different somehow, I can't pinpoint why, but she smells the same. Of clove shampoo and Johnson's baby powder. Of warm cooking spices and sandalwood incense. Of her. Of home. And just like that, I remember every childhood injury she nursed, every boo-boo she kissed, every time she was there for me when I needed her. Blocking out the times she wasn't, I close my eyes and hug her back. She loves me, even if it doesn't feel like it most of the time, even if I don't live up to her unrelenting expectations. My mother loves me, and I love her. Whatever else happens, I must not forget this moment. Just because people don't love you the way you want, doesn't mean they don't love you the best they can."

Author reminds me of: Jhumpa Lahiri, whose tale of generational and cultural struggles in The Namesake is the male counterpart of this book.

Best reason to read: Everything you wanted to know about India, its culture and its people combine here to make a fascinating read.

- Verna Noel Jones

Landsman

By Peter Charles Melman (Counterpoint, 320 pages, $26).

Author’s background: Melman teaches English at Hunter College High School in New York City. He was raised in Louisiana, the chief setting of the novel, and earned a doctorate in creative writing from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Plot in a nutshell: Elias Abrams, a New Orleans Jew on the run from the police and his former fellow gangster lowlifes, joins the Confederate Army to put some distance between him and his troubles. He’s befriended by an older soldier, John Lee Carlson, a book-loving college professor who improbably tells stories from Ovid in the calm places on the edges of the Civil War’s carnage.

Abrams begins a slow, painful journey of redemption when his commanding officer gives him a letter to be delivered to any Jewish Confederate soldier from a Nora Bloom, considerably above Elias in station. With Carlson’s help, Elias begins an epistolary romance in which he eventually discovers love, honor and his religious roots — although not in ways that the reader originally expects.

Sample of prose: "Carlson soon returns. ‘Pack up your kit,’ he insists, kicking Abrams in the boots. When a surprised Abrams does not budge, he kicks him again. ‘Let’s go, get moving.’

"‘Now hold on there —’

"This is the spark of contention Carlson was hoping for. ‘No, Elias,’ he snaps, ‘you hold on. See, I’m not asking about last night, because when you finally get around to opening your goddammed mouth, I’m sure I’ll have story enough for years. But here’s what I won’t brook: I won’t brook watching you run off into the woods to get yourself hanged for desertion. Not after what I went through, no sir.’"

Author reminds me of: Comparisons to Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain are inevitable, given the setting, but I actually thought Landsman was a more unusual and gripping read.

Best reason to read: Melman’s Abrams is far from lovable, but his determination in the face of challenges sets you rooting for him. The battle scenes are gripping, and the sex scenes are sexy.

- Dan Whipple

Portrait of an Unknown Woman

By Vanora Bennett (Harper, 432 pages, $24.95).

Author’s background: Bennett, an award-winning journalist who writes for The Times in London and Times On-line, lives in London.

Plot in a nutshell: History and fiction blend gracefully in this 16th century novel narrated by Meg, the adopted daughter of Sir Thomas More, as the family copes with the tumult created by More’s search for heretics and his opposition to Henry VIII’s decision to re-marry. In this family filled with secrets, the German artist Hans Holbein appears and shrewdly creates portraits revealing the complex family dynamics and duplicities, while also offering Meg a breath of sanity and a hint of uncomplicated love.

Sample of prose: (More speaking): "It’s one thing to be gentle with a crook who’ll chip away at the rules a bit if you don’t show him you’re watching. But it’s quite another to stand meekly by and let the kind of evil take hold that will sweep away all the rules and laws we live by. I can’t make little jokes with heretics and bind them over. They are the darkness."

Author reminds me of: Tracy Chevalier whose Girl With a Pearl Earring also breathes human life into history.

Best reason to read: This absorbing novel is rich in colorful historical detail and probes the mysteries and depths of the human heart, as well as showing the universality of human dreams, passions and politics.

— Joan Hinkemeyer

Skylark Farm

By Antonia Arslan (Alfred A. Knopf, 288 pages, $23.95).

Author’s background: Arslan, who lives in Italy, has a degree in archaeology, teaches at the University of Padua and has drawn on the story of her own family for her novel.

Plot in a nutshell: The human faces of genocide leap poignantly from the pages of this gripping story as Arslan writes of Turkey’s systematic attempt to exterminate all Armenians in 1915. The story follows the gentle pharmacist Sempad, as well as his wife and children, from the days of their placid life in an Armenian community through the rumors and suspicions about political alliances to their final days when all males were savagely butchered and females abused and sent to desert exile.

Sample of prose: "The night is over, and no trace of the men. None of these families will see them again. Many years later, with the Armenian passion and the world war both at an end, the fate of the men will be discovered: forced in the night to leave the Walt Warehouse, where they were killed one after the other in Falls Valley, where their unburied corpses were left staring at the sky, their eye sockets empty, naked and stripped of everything, even the majesty of death."

Author reminds me of: Micheline Marcom, whose Three Apples Fell From Heaven is another story of the Aremian tragedy told in similar spare, but evocative prose.

Best reason to read: This soul-wrenching novel about man’s inhumanity to man is all the more powerful because of Geoffrey Brock’s sensitive translation of Arslan’s tightly controlled, vivid prose.

— Joan Hinkemeyer

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2007 first-time novelists

Published September 13, 2007 at midnight

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