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In his satirical new work, It’s All True: A Novel of Hollywood, screenwriter and author David Freeman continues his artful use of fiction to reveal truths about Hollywood. Since leaving New York for the West Coast in the 1970s, Freeman has picked apart the movie industry in his literary efforts even as he has made a living writing films. His latest vivisection is a wry look at movie people plying their trade while at their cunning, narcissistic best. The aptly named Henry Wearie is a middle-aged screenwriter whose once-promising career fizzled years ago. His battered green Jaguar is the lone artifact of both his early successes and his marriage, and after 30 years of chasing fame, he is contemplating giving up and heading back to New York and his laconic father, Felix. But before he surrenders, Henry has one more script to pitch about a man, an alien spaceship and a beam of light. He knows the idea is insipid, unoriginal and insultingly unintelligent in other words, a winner. He is correct, to a degree, and with his name back in the Rolodexes of power, he is again in demand. Freeman, the author of two previous novels and various other works, including the acclaimed short story collection A Hollywood Education, bares a world in which the illusion of success is more important than achievement itself. Henry hasn’t survived a generation in Southern California without learning to talk the talk, but he has somehow retained a smidgen too much substance and integrity to be an unqualified success in a world where glad-handing and spurious friendships are the rule, rather than the exception. Following Henry through his present and past and present again, you’ll cheer his victories and empathize with his failures. But as the portrait of a lost, sad Everyman seduced by a town of chimeras becomes clear, you’ll realize that above all, you feel lucky not to be him. Ian Schwartz is a writer in New York City.

British writer Michael Frayn is best known to American audiences as a playwright (Copenhagen, Noises Off), but he has written nine novels, including the Booker Prize finalist Headlong. Frayn’s latest work of fiction is a small gem. A puzzle of a tale, Spies is about the distorted perceptions of childhood and the lasting reverberations they can cause.

The story unfolds from the 60-year-old reflections of Stephen Wheatley. When the scent of privet sparks a shadowy boyhood memory, Stephen returns to the suburban London street where he lived during the Second World War. There he reassembles the extraordinary events of one wartime summer, and an episode set in motion when his friend Keith Hayward made the dangerous, if thrilling claim: “My mother is a German spy.” Stephen, who worships the mean-spirited Keith with the misguided reverence of a boy with little self-confidence, readily agrees to help his friend spy on the mother. The boys collect circumstantial evidence that suggests that Mrs. Hayward is up to something illicit. She quite often disappears for short periods, sometimes heading off with her shopping basket when the shops are closed. She seems to make an inordinate number of trips to the corner mailbox to post letters. When the boys follow her to an old railway tunnel, they discover someone hiding there, and presume it is German soldier on the run, or perhaps Mrs. Hayward’s lover, or both.

Events make a quick about-face when Keith’s mother realizes the boys are watching her. She approaches Stephen for help, and his desire to please muddles his resolve. Yet, even as he goes along with her requests, he doesn’t fully grasp what is actually going on.

Is Mrs. Hayward a spy? Or are these just the fanciful imaginings of two boys swept up in intrigue? A master of the literary sleight of hand, Frayn tricks the reader into looking past the clearly laid out clues, just as Stephen overlooks what he inherently knows to be true. Yet Spies is far more than a simple tale of suspense. At its core, this compelling novel is about moral choices, the insidious pressures of an endemic class system and the ageless truth that no one can ever know what goes on behind closed doors. Robert Weibezahl lives and writes in Southern California.

Faced with a choice of fight or flight, Jerry Battle, the narrator of Aloft, has always opted for the latter. For years, the upper-middle-class widower and father of two has escaped the world in a two-seater propeller plane, soaring a few thousand feet over the neighborhoods and villages of his native Long Island, New York. Rising above it all in his “private box seat in the world and completely outside of it, too,” Jerry, on the verge of turning 60, has emotionally disengaged from the death of his wife, the end of his relationship with a live-in lover of 20 years, and two adult children who love him yet keep their distance. After Native Speakerand A Gesture Life, two critically acclaimed novels centering on the immigrant experience, Hunter College creative writing professor Chang-rae Lee dissects the American dream from the inside out, through the eyes of a white suburbanite who has lived his entire life in the United States. Retired from Battle Brothers, the family landscaping business started by his father, Jerry has a life that glides along calmly, until daughter Theresa and her fiancŽ Paul arrive from Oregon with good and bad news; Theresa is pregnant, and she has cancer. Meanwhile, Jerry’s son Jack is mismanaging Battle Brothers, and Jerry’s Italian-American father grouses incessantly about the assisted-living facility in which his son has placed him. Casting further darkness on this cluster of crises are Jerry’s haunting memories of his wife Korean-American Daisy Han who drowned in the family pool two decades earlier.

In his hideaway in the sky, Jerry seeks solace from his shortcomings as a father, husband, lover and son. As events of the novel unfold, he realizes he can no longer wing it alone. “No matter how much I wished to disappear sometimes, to fly off and away,” says Jerry, “I really couldn’t, and maybe never did.” In rich, riveting, radiant prose, Aloft explores a man’s lifelong struggle to navigate life’s tricky emotional terrain. It is a graceful commentary on the contemporary American soul. Allison Block reviews from Solana Beach, California.

<B>A murderer’s tale of redemption</B> Though published in the year of Haiti’s bicentennial, Edwidge Danticat’s <B>The Dew Breaker</B> is certainly not a celebratory book. The novel is structured as interconnected stories and centers on a dew breaker or, in Haitian Creole, a <I>shoukt laroze</I> the name for a torturer during the brutal regimes of Franois "Papa Doc" and Jean Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier.

Danticat’s fictional dew breaker left Haiti for the U.S. after the regime’s fall, and he now has a wife and adult daughter. His years of concealing his terrible work included keeping Ka, the daughter, in the dark about her father’s past. Ka and Anne, his wife, are the dew breaker’s "good angels." The reader first sees the dew breaker through Ka’s eyes, both before his mask is removed and after, when she learns her father was a torturer rather than a prisoner, as she had always believed. The following chapters move back and forth through time, giving the reader glimpses of the torturer from the points of view of those closest to him: his family, his neighbors and his prey. Danticat does a masterful job of creating sympathetic moments for the reformed murderer and examining the nature of forgiveness even in the face of unspeakable acts. <B>The Dew Breaker</B> is similar in form to <I>Krik? Krak!</I>, an earlier Danticat story collection that gave voice to characters in Haiti and the United States. As in that collection, Danticat shows her skill here for interweaving different voices and bringing them to life. <B>The Dew Breaker’s</B> focus on the torturer, however, is what unites the narrative and gives the novel its structure. Even when the dew breaker does not appear in a chapter, the dread of his attack or discovery hangs over the characters. Danticat’s challenging novel draws readers deep into Haiti’s dark past, causing us to question our notions of good and evil and the limits of redemption. <I>Bernadette Adams Davis is a playwright and reviewer in Florida.</I>