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No man is an island, says poet John Donne. Man hands on misery to man, says poet Phillip Larkin. Presumably they can’t both be right; either our society is a benefit or a detriment to our individual existence. Simon Heywood, the binding agent in Elliot Perlman’s new masterwork, Seven Types of Ambiguity, would spend days ruminating over that sort of conundrum. At once an intellectual, a dreamer, a sad case and a likeable guy, Simon is obsessed with Anna, the college love who left him a decade ago. His fixation leads him, in a rare moment of action coinciding with a hyper-manic rationale, to kidnap Anna’s son in an effort to rekindle the flame.

Not every writer could keep this premise from descending into melodrama. Perlman, Australian author of the critically acclaimed novel Three Dollars, artfully turns the circumstance into social commentary worthy of Dickens or Doctorow, generating an intellectual and moral heft as impressive as the physical bulk of the book. The novel’s seven chapters are each told in a different character’s voice. In fact, we don’t hear directly from Simon until the fifth chapter, and he inhabits the page impressively. From his vivid description of solitary confinement, to a breathtaking two-page riff where he simultaneously apologizes for his actions, pleads for his life and implores his former lover to save her child, Simon claims the moral high ground in a very unexpected way.

Playing Boswell to Simon’s Johnson is psychiatrist Alex Kilma, whose journal outlines the dilemma he seemingly has contracted from his patient: Fundamentalism, be it of the religious or market variety, is everywhere and everywhere there is a reaction to complexity, an attempt to ignore the contradictions and conundrums of our existence . . . any blurring, any ambiguity, is viewed with hostility. Although Perlman and his characters are Australian, the themes of Seven Types of Ambiguity could be, are being, played out in upper-middle-class America. This 672-page tome might be difficult to pick up, but it’s almost impossible to put down. Thane Tierney is a record executive in Los Angeles.

Considering its relatively slim profile, there’s an awful lot packed into Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon’s latest novel, The Final Solution: A Story of Detection. Though on the surface it’s a lighthearted, old-fashioned mystery, the thrill of solving puzzles is the least of its many themes. There’s also the importance and the difficulty of navigating old age with grace and dignity. There’s the courageous spirit with which people not only endure but progress during wartime. And there are the dark shadows of the Holocaust and the horror of casual racism creeping in from the periphery. Perhaps most striking about the novel, though, is the author’s pure, exuberant delight in language. The story begins in 1940s England, where an 89-year-old man who is never named but is clearly English literature’s most famous detective, Sherlock Holmes, has now retired and devoted himself to beekeeping. The passages in which the old man battles his own increasing decrepitude are among the book’s most poignant, his narrative voice suffused with knowing humor and strength but laced with an inevitable edge of fear. Still, when he spies through his window a nine-year-old boy with a German-speaking African gray parrot on his shoulder, the old man springs to his feet with alacrity. The boy turns out to be a Jewish refugee, apparently mute, who is both a puzzle and the primary clue to the book’s ever-deepening mystery. He lives at a nearby boarding house, with the parrot as his only friend and constant companion. When another guest at the boarding house is found dead with his head bashed in, and the boy’s parrot vanishes at the same time, local police are stumped. They try to recruit the old man, but he refuses to help solve the murder, which he deems unremarkable. Instead, he puts his brilliant but admittedly rusty powers of deduction to work tracking down the boy’s missing parrot. Though finding a little boy’s pet bird seems a simple enough case for the world’s greatest detective, there are elements of this mystery that remain well beyond the grasp of the old man. To solve them would be to understand the nature of evil, which is asking a lot, even of Sherlock Holmes. Still, though the novel is tinged with the sadness that shaped the 20th century, the real mystery is how Chabon managed to fit so much hope and humanity into such a brief tale. Becky Ohlsen writes from Portland, Oregon.

Still reeling from his mother’s death in a freak car accident, Mark Smart loses his college scholarship and his job, and becomes estranged from his indifferent father. Scraping by as a janitor, reeling from the sudden, brutal unraveling of his life, he contemplates suicide until one night his car breaks down outside a coffee shop. Inside, Macy Wood is locking up, but lets Mark in to call a mechanic. Their lives intersect just when each needs it most: Macy is searching for the sister she lost when both were adopted out of a troubled home, and Mark finds himself drawn to this woman whose life is as fragmented as his own.

Though the setup may sound just this side of maudlin, don’t be fooled: With Finding Noel, Richard Paul Evans, author of the holiday bestseller The Christmas Box, offers a sweet, simple story that is ultimately an uplifting reflection on chance encounters and what it means to truly forgive.