Fiction: New voices

The Waitress Was New

In a rain-splattered Parisian diner, customers come and go, the city spins on and Pierre, a 54-year-old veteran bartender, wonders if life hasn't passed him by. Dominique Fabre's book reads like the literary equivalent of the film "Diner": an elegant meditation on the murky undertow of routine and the odd bedfellows it creates for us.

His Illegal Self

Novelists re-created the druggy tumult of the '60s in fiction. They have remembered the political turmoil. But leave it to Peter Carey, Australia's two-time Booker Prize winning novelist, to capture the hangover of this era through the eyes of a child. Che, the 9-year-old human hot potato at the heart of this tale, lights for the bush with his guardian and runs into an unglamorous truth about the decade of free love: Someone had to raise the children.

Plague of Doves

In Louise Erdrich's new novel, the past isn't dead, to borrow William Faulkner's phrase: It isn't even past. The book revolves around the unsolved murder of a white family and subsequent lynching of a young Indian boy in retribution. Drawing on her enormous storytelling gifts, Erdrich traces the reverberations of these crimes through three generations, as whites and Ojibwe mingle, intermarry and try to make sense of their collective memory.

A Better Angel: Stories

The heroes of Chris Adrian's tales have a clanging weight about their necks. They are alive, or well, and someone they love is not. Adrian, a divinity student and a doctor, has a beautiful instinct for finding the deepest chords within his characters.

2666

Divided into five sections that straddle eight decades, this massive novel by the late Chilean Roberto Bolano is a hulking, horrifying, hugely ambitious crime story with more diversions than a Miles Davis track. At the heart of it all: the murder and mutilation of female factory workers in an imaginary border town.

Unaccustomed Earth

Like Alice Munro, William Trevor and Mavis Gallant, Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri has found a way to compress entire lives into short tales. This book is dense with familial lore. Ranging in setting from Seattle to Boston, from Rome to the streets of Calcutta, Lahiri's cast of mostly Bengali characters struggle to grow accustomed to their new homes, their new families created by loss sustained in faraway places.

Senselessness

The feverish poet who narrates Horacio Moya's devastating novel has one task: to edit the oral histories of torture victims in an unnamed Latin American country. Only he can't do it. His mind snags on story after story; they sink into his core like depth charges. The more he looks at the report, the less sense that victims' testimonies make. All around him, the disregard of his friends feels like insanity.

A Most Wanted Man

Seven years into the so-called war on terror, John Le Carré has done for our age what he did during the Cold War: seen through the rhetoric and given us a story of human portions. The man in the title is a Chechen immigrant to Germany. His checkered past attracts the attention of several espionage agencies, and keeps this thriller on a knife's edge of a question: Can a man be judged by what governments say he is?

The Girl of His Dreams

Book by book, expatriate American writer Donna Leon has been telling a secret history of Venice. Her 17th Commissario Guido Bruneti book, not surprisingly, is bookended by funerals. In between she delves into crimes against the Romany, political correctness and the comforts of family in times of loss in a story so perfectly balanced that it feels as though it glides on a dark, still, silent waterway.

Netherland

This wholly unexpected novel turns the city once known as New Amsterdam inside out with the tale of a Dutch banker clinging to his crumbling marriage and family in the aftermath of Sept. 11. It is a fabulous, deeply enjoyable New York story about the fantasies that prop up daily reality -- in other words, a deeply New York novel about that deeply American penchant: new beginnings.