When faced with an interminably long airport delay, which is all too common these days, the traveler has several options. He could spend the endless layover drinking at T.G.I. Friday's. He could reread The Da Vinci Code or some other book found at the airport newsstand, or spend as much time as possible interacting with his cell phone rather than his fellow travelers. Or, if he were Bennie Ford, the hero, if you can call him that, of Jonathan Miles' first novel, Dear American Airlines, he could write a book-length letter of protest to the airline that grounded him and blamed the weather when there's not a storm in sight.

Bennie has reason to be angry. He was on his way from New York to Los Angeles to attend his daughter's wedding. There's more anger surrounding the fact that he hasn't seen his daughter since she was a baby and that he never really tried to clean up his life so that he could be part of hers.

The letter reads like a sort of deathbed confession, a tale of the sins he has committed and the wrongs done to him, the story of a man who grew up with a schizophrenic mother who was always half-heartedly attempting suicide and an immigrant father who survived the concentration camps only to become an exterminator himself. A formerly somewhat famous poet who struggled for years with alcoholism, Bennie is now a translator, and his letter also shares the story of the book he is working on – the tale of a World War II soldier mistakenly sent to the wrong town, who wonders what would happen if he never got back on the train to his old hometown.

This gritty, hilarious, heartbreaking novel illustrates a life gone awry, the regret of years lived without notice and the hope of finally being able to make a change. Readers will root for Bennie to get on his plane and start making up for the lost years when he gets off. A perfect read for summer airport delays, Dear American Airlines just might get readers thinking differently about that idle time.

Sarah E. White writes from Arkansas and still hates flight delays.

When the legendary newsman Edward R. Murrow was having difficulty figuring out this new thing called television, his producer, Fred Friendly, gave him some invaluable advice: Look for the little picture. Chris Cleave, in his breathtaking debut novel Incendiary, has taken Friendly's advice and used it to devastating effect.

The story takes the form of a series of letters from a British woman to Osama bin Laden, who is presumed to have been the mastermind behind the soccer stadium bomb that killed her husband and son. Speaking in a stream-of-consciousness style, Cleave's protagonist is by turns serious, frightened, amused, betrayed, angry, hopeful and overwhelmed. 

"I'm going to write so you can look into my empty life and see what a human boy is from the shape of the hole he leaves behind. I want you to feel that hole in your heart and stroke it with your hands and cut your fingers on its sharp edges," she says. Her life, a lower-middle-class melange of imperfection and dreams, has literally been blown apart by the terrorist act, and she tries desperately to hold the pieces together. Cleave's writing is masterful in its understatement: the horror comes not from the vision of a jet careening into a skyscraper, but from the realization that a black stain on your child's stuffed rabbit is his scorched blood. By focusing on the little picture, Incendiary imparts a message both personal and political, timely and timeless, passionate and poignant. This quick read leaves a profound mark.

In rugby, if the game is unresolved at the end of regulation play, it concludes in sudden death overtime. In Peter Pouncey's multilayered debut novel, Rules For Old Men Waiting, it's clear from the opening that regulation play for retired professor and former rugby player Robert MacIver ended when his beloved wife, Margaret, died.

Having found himself alone in life's overtime, MacIver initially concedes defeat. Then the Scots warrior gene that served him so well during his college rugby career kicks in, and MacIver sets himself a new path. It consists of 10 rules—Commandments, he calls them—to keep himself alive and to make the best use of his remaining time. Barricaded by winter in a Cape Cod home decaying in concert with his aging body, MacIver wills himself to stay active. "Work to consist of telling a story to the end, not just shards, but the whole pot." In pursuit of that goal he begins a fictional account of a World War I platoon, and he finds himself fighting a battle on two fronts: in Europe against the Germans and in Cape Cod against his failing health.

Pouncey's academic past brings a certain veracity to the text (he was dean at Columbia College and is president emeritus of Amherst). He skillfully shifts the narrative, alternating scenes from MacIver's life and from his novel, giving us a compelling portrait of a complex man. As with many of his countrymen, the dour Scot is not nearly as crusty as his outward face suggests, and MacIver's aching for his deceased wife is rendered with poetic grace: "She was the Muse who tamed the wild boar on Parnassus, the unicorn in the gardens of Aquitaine."

The bittersweet juxtaposition of love and loss, of a life fiercely lived that is now slinking away, makes for a deeply moving, elegantly told story.

Thane Tierney is a record executive in Los Angeles.

Best known for his nonfiction work (including Cod and Salt), writer Mark Kurlansky tries his hand at fiction in this debut novel, a tale that teems with life from the first page. Boogaloo on 2nd Avenue: A Novel of Pastry, Guilt, and Music brings readers to New York's Lower East Side in 1988, when gentrification of this multiethnic neighborhood was just beginning.

Kurlansky plops the reader right into the heart of the 'hood, trotting out a cast of vividly drawn characters including protagonist Nathan Seltzer, the rather hapless owner of the Meshugaloo Copy Center who is heading right into a midlife crisis (or, as his precocious three-year-old daughter Sarah puts it, midwife crisis ). Agonize along with the claustrophobic Nathan, a nebbishy Jew married to the Mexican-Jewish Sonia, as he ponders an affair with pastry-maker Karoline, who just might have Nazi roots. At the same time, Nathan's father Harry is working with Chow Mein Vega, the creator of 1960s dance sensation The Yiddish Boogaloo (an irresistible ditty including such lyrics as Go to the deli, and you will find, corned beef, pastales, and pastrami on rye ), to stage a comeback of the dusty hit. And with a Summer of Sam-like twist, Kurlansky also works in a murderous drug addict who is haunting the area.

Among Boogaloo's original touches are a series of roughly drawn illustrations of neighborhood scenes and a section titled Twelve Recipes from the Neighborhood. Here you get humor-infused recipes for culinary treats named for characters, including Bernhardt Moellen's Ischler Krapferln, Mrs. Rodriguez's Nuyorican Cream Pasteles, Karoline's Kugelhopf and Sal A's Caponata. Kurlansky's writing is vivid and crackling with wit, and although a few of his characters are insufferable, he draws them with humorous affection. Hopefully this is not his last foray into the realm of fiction.

Rebecca K. Stropoli writes from New York City.

Dave King's ambitious and original first novel, The Ha-Ha, is about a man unable to speak, write or read, who suddenly finds himself thrust into the role of father figure to a troubled young boy. Wounded by shrapnel early in his tour in Vietnam, Howard Kapostash returns home with a horrific head injury which he is not only unable to hide, but which has also pretty much eviscerated from his mind all he'd taken for granted his first 18 years.

More than 20 years later, Howard is treading water, working as a landscaper and living with three housemates in the home he grew up in. Although most of his old ties have been severed, one remains: beyond all evidence to the contrary, Howard is still hoping to rekindle his pre-Vietnam romance with Sylvia, the first and only real love of his life.

So when Sylvia asks him to watch her nine-year-old son Ryan while she takes a breather in rehab, Howard jumps at the chance. As their days together become weeks and then months, Howard and Ryan bond, slowly drawing each other from their respective shells, sometimes with damaging results. The addition of Ryan to the household also forces Howard to build more of a relationship with his roommates: the beautiful Laurel, a young Vietnamese woman, and two feckless young men. King's painstaking story tugs at the heart. Howard is an exasperating creation who gives the impression that even if he were able to speak, he would still have trouble communicating. Unable to act out his emotions through normal channels, he has suppressed them to a level that has left him nearly subhuman. It takes Ryan to make Howard take chances with his life. It could not have been easy for King who in his first book climbs out on a precarious limb to write about drug abuse, war and life as a damaged man to fashion a character as diffident toward existence as Howard, and so ponderously, with nearly as many steps backward as forward, to return him to life. Ian Schwartz writes from New York City.

Accomplished British journalist Carole Cadwalladr takes on a wide variety of weighty issues in her debut novel, The Family Tree, including the difficulties of family relationships, the plight of the English middle class, the aftermath of the women's liberation movement, the effects of pop culture on everyday life, and last but not least the argument of nature versus nurture. Yet the gravity of Cadwalladr's subject matter is brilliantly balanced by her light touch and sharp sense of humor, making the book a pleasure to read.

The premise of The Family Tree is refreshingly unique: the book itself is the thesis project of its engaging main character, Rebecca Monroe a discourse on how '70s pop culture has both affected and been influenced by the lives of women (complete with graph, charts, maps and hilarious footnotes explaining the significance of Love Story and Dallas ). To illustrate her point, Rebecca follows her own complicated family history, reaching back to her grandmother's thwarted romance with a Jamaican man and subsequent loveless marriage to a first cousin, through her parents' unhappy union and her mother's suicide and to the potential collapse of her own marriage. As the wife of a prominent scientist whose belief in genetic disposition encompasses characteristics ranging from mental illness to fidelity, Rebecca struggles with the idea that life as she knows it could be merely the result of mixings in her (slightly smaller than usual) gene pool. Despite having a family history that would stand up against the plot of any daytime TV drama, she constantly grasps at twists that would make the branches of her family tree even more tangled.

Cadwalladr writes with humor and intelligence, effectively tying together complicated plot lines that could in the hands of a less skilled author fall into the maudlin. The Family Tree is that rare book: a compelling and funny tale with underlying themes that will haunt the reader long after the cover is closed.

Emily Zibart writes from New York City.