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.

Kalisha Buckhanon, a protégé of acclaimed author Sapphire, has written a vivid but—be warned—surpassingly sad debut novel. Upstate explores the myriad trials that afflict the poor, especially the African-American poor: fatherlessness, abuse, drugs, homelessness and the appalling rate of incarceration of its young men ("upstate" is where most of the prisons are in New York). On top of this, there's the universal sadness of a young love that's doomed even though its young lovers, thankfully, aren't.

They are Antonio and Natasha, two teenagers from Harlem, New York, and Buckhanon wastes no time getting them in trouble. This epistolary novel opens with Antonio's first letter to Natasha from prison, which asks if she really believes he killed his father. She swears to be faithful to him, even though he faces 10 years in prison for the murder. Their exchanges are so passionate, so filled with declarations of steadfastness, that the reader almost believes they can pull this off.

In prose that vibrantly captures the way real kids from Harlem speak, Buckhanon reveals not only the lovers' Romeo and Juliet-like ardor, basic decency and innocence, but also their intelligence and ambition, especially Natasha's. She's a young teenager when Antonio is arrested, and her devotion to him begins to wane when she visits France on a student exchange program: the world opens up for Natasha at the same time it closes down for Antonio.

Buckhanon's depiction of prison as a system whose goal isn't rehabilitation but a stripping away of an inmate's humanity are brilliantly grim. But it's the promise of Natasha's love that allows Antonio to hold on to a fragment of his dignity while he's inside, even as he feels that love slipping away. "Your love made me feel like a human being in my darkest hours," he writes her when he's out and they're both grown up. Upstate, for all its sorrow, is a book worth reading.

Arlene McKanic writes from Jamaica, New York.

Marriage is often confusing. Sometimes, to find out if it is worth saving, you must crack it open like a Christmas chestnut and inspect it minutely. Or more often, a cure can be something as simple as struggling spouses getting away together. In Scott Landers' debut novel, Coswell's Guide to Tambralinga, Conrad and Lucy Shermer go the latter route, and embark on a lengthy journey through the politically unstable, exotically violent and depressingly tropical regions of Southeast Asia.

While salvaging their love and spending time together is the ostensible plan, the couple soon find that they are far more interested in striking out on their own. And they do so with a vengeance, exploring their dangerous and sensual new surroundings and the uncharted territory within themselves. Like the man going out for the proverbial pack of cigarettes, Conrad leaves a note and melts into the fringes of the Third World in a tiny fictional country named Tambralinga. Pretty sure that Lucy has cheated on him, he is half looking for a little adventure himself. But a life of American repression makes him little more than a comic bumbler in all sexual regards.

Lucy, the type of woman who underlines passages in guide books and makes copious lists, wishes only to follow her itinerary to the letter. But when she meets a younger female traveler who fuels her competitive nature, she finds herself in compromising situations beyond the pages of her books and notes.

This original, notably worthy debut ably toggles between farce, intrigue and tragedy while capturing the disconnection inherent to westerners in unfamiliar stretches of the planet. But it is Lucy's and Conrad's repeated boorish behavior that keeps this fine novel from soaring. As we're guided through Tambralinga by this selfish, dull and shallow pair, the reader can't help but hope the duo stay together . . . if only to avoid exposing others to their toxicity.

Denny Roman, the protagonist in Rachel Cline's honest, heartwarming debut novel, may seem like any other preteen in suburban Ohio, preoccupied with boys, bras and a part in the school play. But trouble lurks beneath the girl's bubbly exterior, as she struggles to communicate with her divorced mother Lily, a brilliant neuroscientist utterly devoid of maternal inclinations.

Presented in three distinct parts, What to Keep is a smart, wry commentary on "how easy it is to screw things up with the people you love." While Lily may be her biological mother, Denny's world revolves around a quirky agoraphobic named Maureen, the eye in the hurricane of her daily teenage life in the wake of her parents' separation. Fourteen years go by, and Denny, now an aspiring actress in Hollywood, returns to her childhood home to decide "what to keep" before her mother and new stepfather relocate to New York. Unearthing old memories fills Denny with both nostalgia and dread. "She pictures the denuded living room floor. . . . Though she learned to crawl, walk, skip, dance, and God knows what else in that very room, it will soon look like she was never there."

A decade later, Denny has moved to Manhattan, where she's taken to writing plays rather than auditioning for them. Days from the opening of her first production on Broadway, she receives news that Maureen has died. When Maureen's 12-year-old son, Luke, appears at her door, Denny ponders the possibility of adopting the young man to honor the memory of the most pivotal person in her life.

Writers are often instructed to write what they know; Rachel Cline has followed that lesson to the letter. Born to a brainy, distracted mother, she herself did time in the trenches of Hollywood before returning to New York on what she calls "the dark side of thirty-five." Her brisk, refreshingly candid novel will ring true to anyone whose family doesn't quite fit the mold.

The sprawling, multigenerational debut novel by Ingrid Hill deftly arcs back and forth between past and present to explore the hidden connections in our lives and the fragility of human life. When two-year-old Ursula Wong falls into an abandoned mine shaft, a community is galvanized in a dangerous rescue effort that has far greater significance than anyone present can possibly imagine.

As the only child of a woman of Finnish descent and her Chinese-American husband, Ursula is the modern-day culmination of the dreams and struggles of two disparate lineages. Ursula's birth was nothing short of a miracle, given the crippling pelvic injuries her mother sustained in a childhood accident. But in one horrible instant, the gift of Ursula's life is almost extinguished as arbitrarily as it was granted. While Ursula's fate hangs in the balance, we travel back in time to trace the extraordinary lives of her ancestors, many of whom also came into being against incredible odds. We encounter a Chinese alchemist in second-century B.C. who fathers a child at age 79, a 16th-century Finnish widow who bravely escapes a leper colony to go in search of her orphaned son, and a host of immigrants struggling for a better life in America, including Ursula's great-grandfather, who dies in a mining accident eerily presaging her own fall. Each of these links in the chain of Ursula's genetic lineage is bound together by countless little twists of fate to which her own existence is tied.

The great beauty of this novel lies in the hauntingly resonant voices of Ursula's ancestors and the author's skillful weaving of their individual stories into an integrated family history spanning 2,000 years. This vast and prismatic narrative technique shows us that life, indeed, is a miracle, and that history is alive, embodied in the individual triumphs and tragedies that make up the collective human experience. A powerful meditation on origins, Ursula, Under poetically demonstrates how centuries-old connections can reverberate into the present.