THE STORY SISTERS

Alice Hoffman (Shaye Areheart Books, 325 pages, $25)

The latest of Alice Hoffman's illuminations on the randomness and fragility of life opens on a happy note. On a bright spring morning, three pretty sisters hang out the window of their posh suite at New York City's Plaza Hotel. Elv is 15, Meg is a year younger and Claire is 12. They have traveled with their mother from their home on Long Island to attend the 50th wedding celebration of their grandparents. The Story sisters, who so far have apparently avoided the minefields of adolescence, share a secret, imaginative life and a fairy-tale language. The joyful day turns disastrous when Claire steals a Central Park horse and buggy. Hoffman's depiction of the girl's terror during the perilously speedy, out-of-control traverse across the park and through city traffic is riveting, and Claire is seriously injured in the process. Coming-of-age is most challenging, however, for Elv, who makes life-altering mistakes, particularly in her choice of a partner. Throughout, the girls maintain a close relationship with their French grandparents, and the scenes set in Paris are highlights in this engaging novel.

AFTER YOU'VE GONE

Jeffrey Lent (Atlantic Monthly Press, 246 pages, $24)

Jeffrey Lent's fourth novel opens on a summer evening in 1891 in Elmira, a college town in New York. Simultaneously he introduces his protagonist, Henry Dorn, and the novel's motif, the cello, as young Henry and his new wife, Olivia, are walking home from a concert. Henry had noted the "ample virtuosity" of violins and bass, but "what flowed out to him that evening was the affecting dulcet balance ... of the cello." Through a skillful time/place shift we next find Henry, now 55, in Amsterdam in 1922, lugging a cello in its canvas case across the square on his way to a lesson with the exiled impresario Morozov. Lent's use of time-shifts is brilliant -- between the Nova Scotia fishing village where Henry spent his boyhood; Elmira, the setting for his working life and his idyllic marriage, and Amsterdam, the city in which he at last achieves a measure of self-knowledge. Equally remarkable is the book's plot - a tale that hinges on the deaths of Olivia and their adult son, Robbie, in an auto accident. One year after the tragedy, attempting to assuage his loneliness and depression, he boards a ship for Amsterdam, and to his amazement and our shock, he finds love. Lent writes, "There were beautiful things in the world, and there were beautiful periods or times -- usually not known until they had passed." This splendid book should inspire readers to "carpe diem."

THE LACE MAKERS OF GLENMARA

Heather Barbieri (Harper Collins, 268 pages, $24.99)

To keep sorrow at bay following three harsh blows -- the death of her mother, the failure of her fashion-design business and the breakup of a relationship -- Kate Robinson flees her hometown of Seattle and travels to the hamlet of Glenmara on Ireland's west coast. Author Heather Barbieri examines with searching intelligence Kate's personal resilience and her quest for creative fulfillment. We learn that Ethan ran off with a model, "a girl with black hair and pale skin and aquamarine eyes and a sizable trust fund." Barbieri endows Kate, too, with beauty, describing her wavy chestnut hair and sparkling green eyes, "the sort of eyes that revealed every emotion. ... " Immediately, Kate becomes a welcome member of Glenmara's lacemaking society. The group's devotion to its craft inspires her to create a line of uniquely Irish lingerie exquisitely stitched with Celtic flowers, nymphs and saints. Barbieri's rendering of the details of lacemaking seems impressively authentic. The novel features insights into human entanglements both current and from the past.

IN THE KITCHEN

Monica Ali (Scribner, 436 pages, $26)

In her much-acclaimed earlier novel "Brick Lane," Monica Ali explored London's Bengali community. "In the Kitchen" depicts with equal success the world of London -- restaurant kitchens and the immigrants from countless countries who work in them. The novel's central character, chef Gabriel Lightfoot, wants to own a restaurant. Although he finds financial backers, they insist that he prove himself first by managing a hotel kitchen for a year. He takes a job at the once prominent London Imperial Hotel, where his kitchen staff consists of bickering workers with fragile egos. Lightfoot's career takes a blow when the hotel's Ukrainian night porter is found dead in the basement. When management implies that the suspicious death is somehow Lightfoot's responsibility because it occurred on his "territory," Lightfoot searches for answers. Ali underpins her suspenseful plot with an authentic portrayal of the social changes that have befallen Britain in recent years.

FAR BRIGHT STAR

Robert Olmstead (Algonquin Books, 207 pages, $23.95)

In this tale, 200 pages of spare but lyrical prose, Robert Olmstead has achieved a masterpiece. Not only is his story vivid and suspenseful, but his characterization of the novel's protagonist, Napoleon Childs, is outstanding. Set in 1916 in the mountains of Mexico, the novel depicts Childs, an aging U.S. cavalryman, leading a battery of untrained soldiers. The group's mission is to hunt down and capture the formidable Mexican revolutionist Pancho Villa. The expedition fails, and his men are slaughtered. Olmstead has endowed Childs with a man-of-iron courage, a strength of mind expressed in thoughts identical to those Shakespeare's Julius Caesar entertained as he faced death. "It wasn't that [Childs] was brave or smart or stupid," writes Olmstead, "it was just it wasn't worth a damn to be scared. Being scared killed you again and again before you died from what finally killed you." Olmstead's realistic dialogue is just one more tour de force in this accomplished novel.

THE LITTLE STRANGER

Sarah Waters (Riverhead Books, 463 pages, $26.95)

Set in rural England just after World War II, "The Little Stranger" features a 40-year-old physician named Faraday as its narrator. With its chilling aura of psychological suspense, the novel at its core is a haunted house tale, which at one time was one of mystery literature's most frequently used backdrops. The tale's premise is that a house can indeed manifest a sinister presence from the past. The house, in this case, is Hundreds Hall, a once-grand Warwickshire residence more than two centuries old. Now, with broken windows, crumbling masonry and weed-infested grounds, the estate is in decline. Summoned to the hall to treat an ailing employee, Faraday is eager to see once again the home where his mother once worked as a parlor maid. He soon becomes infatuated with its owners -- the ever-gracious, aging Mrs. Ayres, her son Roderick and daughter Caroline. Caroline, "a sturdy and untidy young woman," is never without her constant companion, a black Labrador called Gyp. After Gyp attacks a little girl, more malevolent and violent events begin occurring -- a fire and a suicide, to mention just two. Waters proves particularly talented in her depiction of Faraday's ambivalent feelings toward the Ayres family. While taking tea with them, he experiences "the faintest stirrings of a dark dislike." Their attitude of class privilege assails him, yet at the same time he becomes increasingly involved with them. Without a doubt, the novel is one of the summer's more compelling page-turners.

THE LAST SECRET

Mary McGarry Morris (Shaye Areheart Books, 274 pages, $25)

The plot of "The Last Secret" hinges on a sordid occurrence in the main character's past. When Nora Hammond was 17, she ran away with a man named Eddie Hawkins. When the couple ran out of money, a savage crime involving sex and murder took place. As the novel opens in a New England town, we meet Nora 20 years later, a woman who appears to have everything: a loving, successful husband, Ken; two intelligent teenagers; a satisfying career in Ken's family's newspaper-publishing business, and a meaningful role at a charity for abused women. When Ken reveals that for the past four years he has been involved in a "relationship" -- the word "affair," he says, makes the connection sound too shallow -- with one of Nora's closest friends, Nora's life implodes. While dealing with this revelation, she finds out that Eddie has come to town looking for her, thus giving her a second intolerable burden. On the surface Ken is apologetic, telling her in tentative tones that he does not want a divorce. But can she trust him? As for Eddie, he has become a frightening sociopath with more than one grisly murder in his past, and he is convinced that Nora owes him. If this book sounds like nothing more than an absorbing soap opera, it is Morris' brilliant characterization of the morally complex Nora that raises it to a high level of literary fiction. And Morris' treatment of secrecy and betrayal within a family is powerful.

GIFTS OF WAR

Mackensie Ford (Nan A. Talese, 350 pages, $24.95)

In "Gifts of War," Mackensie Ford (the pen name of a well-known British historian) vividly depicts, from an English point of view, the tragedy of World War I. Ford combines the intrigue and tension of military intelligence with an affecting portrayal of a challenging love affair. Lamentably, deception underpins the romantic relationship, and throughout the book Ford sprinkles oblique hints that the duplicity will come to light. While fighting in the trenches of France, the novel's narrator, Hal Montgomery, promises a German soldier that if he ever gets back to England he will find the soldier's English girlfriend and assure her that her fiancé is still alive and loves her. After Hal is discharged from the army, he eventually travels to Stratford-on-Avon to train for a British war-intelligence agency and to seek out the woman and give her the message. Hal, however, falls in love with her himself. Ford's novel succeeds on many levels, even offering delightful discussions on Shakespeare.