Motherland

William Nicholson's novel may start by treating love as it is generally treated in books and movies — as an impulse or a stroke of lightning — but as the sprawling tale proceeds love takes on aspects more complicated and fraught. The story contains a brilliant set-piece on the failed British landing in Dieppe in 1942 and plenty of historical color from India and Jamaica. The characters struggle through traumas, thwarted desires, and loss, and do not shrink from addressing moral and religious dilemmas directly. This, as in Nicholson's earlier Sussex novels, is a breath of fresh air in a world of literary fiction that can be obtuse and petulantly ironic.

Savage Messiah

H.S. Ede's biography of artist Henri Gaudier is told mostly in the form of letters from Gaudier to his beloved companion, Sophie Brzeska. The letters make clear the difference between a true artist, who works tirelessly at his craft, and a false one like Brzeska whose literary efforts were ingrown and ultimately unfinished. It is a testament to Gaudier's character that, even in the throes of poverty, he would offer his sculptures to admirers for free. Gaudier was killed in World War I at the age of 23.

My Father's Fortune

It is a strange book that a reader finds detestable at page 70 and endearing at the finish, but that is Michael Frayn's memoir. The negative reaction is caused by Frayn's habit at the outset of describing perfectly ordinary people (and events) as if they were superhuman (or supernatural). One relative is "exotic" because she is a typist. But when the Second World War rolls around, the book offers a detailed and sensitive picture of life under threat of instant death. And after Frayn's mother's death at the close of the war, the family portrait is splashed with brighter colors.

The Last Friend

In a repressive society, friendship can be more lifeline than trifle. That is the case in this Tahar Ben Jelloun novel set in Morocco starting in the 1950s. When school chums Ali and Mamed are thrown into a military re-education camp for some harmless dissident activity, a 30-year friendship is born. The story is told from both sides and from a third party. Jelloun manages to illuminate the specific (political and social life in Morocco) and the universal (the foundations of friendship, or love).

The Wilt Alternative

Henry Wilt, the anti-hero of Tom Sharpe's Wilt, is back with quadruplet daughters, a bigger house, and the same vexing wife, Eva. The wild plot includes genital mutilation and a terrorist siege. But there are also a few detours into more serious matters. As Sharpe puts it near the end of this comic novel, referring to Wilt but really to everyone, "No one ever understood him: no one ever would. He was a creature of infinite incomprehensibility and the world was filled with idiots, himself included."

Bomb Power

Gary Wills's 2010 examination of the imperial U.S. presidency and ballooning national security state could not be more timely. He traces the growth of secrecy and the state of constant war-in-peacetime to the atom bomb, which was developed in secret and exploded on presidential command. The need to secure bases, and nations, from which to launch these new weapons, combined with the Soviet threat, led to the growth of a military and espionage apparatus largely outside the control of Congress and therefore in violation of the Constitution. Only a slumbrous, ignorant public could have acquiesced for so long to the idea that "the president knows best."

Evil Eye

This book of Joyce Carol Oates stories, subtitled "Four Novellas of Love Gone Wrong," reveals a dark and frightening side of human relations. One tale, "The Execution," is a flat-out cribbing of a true story featured on television crime shows about a college student who takes an axe to his parents, with an ending twist. The eerie and stark stories show that love, even deformed, wants to triumph.

Leaving Tangier

An exile can leave his country, but he can never escape himself. Moroccan novelist Tahar Ben Jelloun tells the story of a brother and sister who seek a better life in Spain, just eight miles across the sea from Tangier, but who are thwarted (or debased) at nearly every turn. Leaving Tangier is, like Manhattan Transfer, an argument for the idea that novels are as good a way to learn about the world as histories.

Black Water

Joyce Carol Oates puts her clean, idiosyncratic prose (many of the sentences are fragments and the punctuation isn't standard, but readability and rhythm don't suffer) to work retelling the incident when Ted Kennedy drove off a bridge and a young woman died. In some ways this short novel is a horror story, as it describes the black water rising and the woman furiously trying to escape the submerged car. Where it expands into the woman's memories and hopes, it becomes pitilessly sad.