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Every so often, a novel comes along so electrically charged with atmosphere and eroticism that the reader has to consume it in small morsels, stopping from time to time to digest what has been read. Marguerite Duras’ The Lover was one; Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country was another. Robert Stone’s latest, Bay of Souls, is such a novel. Professor Michael Ahearn teaches literature at a rural Midwestern college. His life is predictable, composed and about to change drastically. When called upon to share mentoring duties with a new faculty member, a dark-skinned beauty from the Caribbean, Ahearn becomes rather more smitten with her than might be considered prudent for a happily married man. Lara is seductive, edgy and perhaps a little bit unbalanced: she claims her soul has been taken hostage by a malevolent voodoo spirit. Ahearn’s white-bread reserve proves no match for Lara’s piquant Creole mŽlange, and the two quickly find themselves embroiled in a steamy affair. Meanwhile, things are heating up in Lara’s home island of St. Trinity. A military coup is underway, and Lara is summoned home; Ahearn, obsessed, follows. Superstition and intrigue run rampant through the island. Soon Ahearn and Lara face duplicity and betrayal beyond the places their imaginations can carry them.

Robert Stone, well known for his best-selling Dog Soldiers and Damascus Gate, is no stranger to the novel of the Third World. Perhaps more than any other modern-day writer, he captures the machinations and corruption in developing nations. That said, the true story of Bay of Souls lies in the tormented relationship of Ahearn and Lara. When the senses become untrustworthy, when the questions far outnumber the answers, when the truth is found to be lies (to crib shamelessly from the Jefferson Airplane), only then is love put to its most onerous test. Thought-provoking and disquieting, Bay of Souls stays with the reader well after the last page is turned.

David Amsden’s debut novel is an absorbing and often funny fictional account that at times borrows liberally from the author’s own experience. But it is also a daring narrative that resonates with the heartbreaking emotion that lurks between Amsden’s sharply written lines. The story, a series of vignettes charting the “anti-coming-of-age” of the nameless narrator in Rockville, Maryland, is simple and without any real turning point; the payoff here is in Amsden’s keen storytelling ability.

At 19, David Amsden had a lucrative but unrewarding career writing short stories for New York magazine about a world he did not know. Then one day a friend suggested to Amsden that he write down a few of his own, more interesting anecdotes instead. These stories eventually became the novel Important Things That Don’t Matter. With a voice that could only belong to someone raised in the 1980s and 1990s, when “divorce became the norm rather than a phenomenon,” Amsden tells the story of a child of divorced parents growing up in the stable environment of his mother’s home. The boy is obviously affected by intimacy issues which he acquires from his father. Passages in which the narrator, at age seven, hangs out at a dive bar on a weekend visit with his father and those that feature his father’s dubious friends are disturbingly effective. As chapters pass, we witness a series of events that shape the young man’s life; the story ends when the narrator is only 20. Amsden himself, a 23-year-old whose childhood was colored by bits of television fluff like Beverly Hills 90210 and Nancy Reagan’s hackneyed “just say no” anti-drug campaign, is a new breed of writer: one whose coming was ushered in by the poster child for his generation, Dave Eggers. But unlike Eggers, Amsden does not rely on cute literary embellishments to tell his story. Instead, his tale unfolds with stark honesty, allowing us to get inside the author’s mind in a way that at times may be too close for comfort but is all the more riveting because of it. Thomas A. Grasso lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.

In the latest book from the author of the acclaimed Schindler’s List, we meet protagonist Frank Darragh, a young priest in the suburbs of Sydney, Australia in 1941. Darragh has a penchant for raising the ire of his superiors at every turn while acting as his parish’s most popular confessor. In the midst of reports that the war is going badly in the Pacific and daily rumors of a Japanese invasion, Father Darragh is confronted with issues of a much more immediate and spiritually challenging nature, embodied in two seemingly separate events whose confluence will shake the foundations of his faith and place him in extreme jeopardy, ecclesiastically and physically. First there is his infatuation with a beautiful young woman whose husband is a prisoner of war in North Africa. She confides a potential indiscretion, and under the auspices of saving her soul, but questioning his motives, Frank is drawn into a deeper relationship. At the same time, he is asked by an American MP, a sometime benefactor of the parish church, to intervene and help bring in a black catholic soldier gone AWOL and found habitating with a white Australian woman. Both these endeavors are far outside the purview of a simple parish priest, and the embarrassment they cause the church, as they become public, places Father Darragh deep in the monsignor’s doghouse.

But things really plunge off the scale when the young woman is discovered strangled to death and letters from the priest are found among her possessions. They are but invitations to discuss the matters of her concern, but they are enough to place Frank under the shadow of suspicion and, without any evidence other than guilt by association, he is shipped off to a monastery in the bush for a meditative retreat. His retreat director is a wise and compassionate veteran of the first war, and offers Frank his first real taste of the true religious life, in opposition to the mindless repetition and politics of his daily priestly life. Carefully, articulately and lovingly crafted, the various threads of the story are pulled together in an inevitable but never obvious knot, as Frank returns to his parish and learns the American MP also had a connection to the young woman. Questions of faith, morality, temptation and duty are ultimately answered, but a heavy price for this elucidation is extracted from Frank Darragh. Drawing on his own experience in studying for the priesthood, Thomas Keneally paints a compelling and painfully realistic picture of a young man determined to do the right thing as he sees it spoken by the often conflicting worlds of church and secular society. Office of Innocence is a wonderful book that speaks to any time, to all who seek the truth. Sam Harrison is a novelist who is studying for ordination in the Methodist Church.

An outsider might surmise that Rachel Jensen’s life is eye-rollingly perfect. She has a good marriage, a golden child of a daughter, a big house in the suburbs. But in Family History, author Dani Shapiro examines what becomes apparent on closer inspection: small fissures in this seemingly flawless family portrait that, if ignored, can become gaping cracks.

When Rachel discovers she is pregnant after dating Ned for a year, the two decide to exchange the craziness of New York City for marriage and a fixer-upper in suburban Massachusetts. They move away from more than just the hectic city life, though. Rachel is anxious to put some distance between herself and her overbearing mother. Ned backs away from a frustrating, stalled career as an artist.

They settle into their new lives easily. Ned teaches at the local private school while Rachel raises their daughter Kate, who has blossomed into a star athlete and gifted student. But the things they were so enthusiastic to put behind them have a way of resurfacing: Rachel’s perpetually disapproving mother continues to insert herself into their lives at the most inopportune times, and Ned feels a growing resentment at having abandoned his art. Still, these disturbances are slapped away like pesky insects.

It’s no surprise, then, that when Kate begins showing increasingly disturbing signs of something more than just surly teen angst, her parents do what they always do with problems: put them out of their minds. But in one moment, Kate’s actions put the entire family and their outwardly idyllic life in jeopardy. Shapiro, author of the best-selling memoir Slow Motion as well as three previous novels, creates a forceful story filled with all-too-human characters. She presents each person fully and without judgment: there are reasons Rachel’s mother clings the way she does, just as there are reasons for Ned and Rachel’s willful ignorance of their difficulties.

Family History is a powerful look at the should-haves and what-ifs that persist after the damage is done. “Turn one corner, and everything lines up differently,” says Rachel. “Everything we do matters. Every single blessed thing.”