The story of Noah and the flood is so entrenched in our culture that most people at least know the basics: God visits a pious old man and instructs him to build a huge boat that will withstand the storm to end all storms. While you're at it, He says, fill it up with every type of animal you can get your hands on. And then be prepared to be adrift at sea with only your family for company for the foreseeable future. When the floods recede, it will be your duty to repopulate the planet.

The power of this tale is why David Maine's outstanding first novel, The Preservationist, a fantastically original take on the classic Old Testament story, is a treat both for believers and those who consider themselves devout only when it comes to discovering good books. Much as Anita Diamant's best-selling The Red Tent did for the biblical story of Jacob and his wives, The Preservationist breathes new life into ancient characters while illuminating the tremendous faith they had in their families and their god.

The 600-year-old Noah brings together his wife, sons and daughters-in-law to build the ark and collect the animals. Onlookers gather to jeer as the mammoth hull takes shape, but Noah never waivers in his conviction that this is God's plan. His family is another story they are by turns exasperated and awed by the old man's steadfast determination. Each member of the group takes a turn narrating events, giving readers a vast range of perspectives on this unusual quest, and on the nature of faith.

According to the Old Testament, God brought about the storm to wash the earth clean of rampant sin that had become unbearable. Maine paints a vivid picture of a world run amok, of a culture of violence, greed and lust. Perhaps The Preservationist is so compelling because of its hard-to-ignore parallels to modern times of violence and an increasingly sensational popular culture. It's impossible to miss the similarities between the ancient place Maine describes and the present-day experience, and this book conjures very relevant questions about how traditional notions of God's plan fit in modern society.

Then again, you can ignore all that mess and enjoy the book simply for its rich retelling of an epic battle of man versus nature. This is not a book aimed solely or even mostly at Christians. It's just a great story, told remarkably well.

John Dalton's debut novel, Heaven Lake, is an ambitious compilation of a coming-of-age tale, a travelogue, and a probe into the role of fate in individual destiny.

Recent college graduate Vincent Saunders leaves his small Illinois town to serve as a missionary in Taiwan. He manages to convert one of his rooming house boarders, but strikes out with the other, a Scot with a fondness for both smuggling and smoking hashish. Vincent's troubles begin when he moves to his own rent-free ministry house in the small town of Toulio. For extra cash, he teaches English to small groups, including a class of high school girls; his brief, guilt-ridden affair with one student leads to his brutal beating, and the need for his immediate departure. Consequently, Vincent takes up the offer of the wealthy Mr. Gwa to travel to the mainland, marry Kai-Ling, the young girl he covets, return with her to Taiwan, and then divorce her, leaving Gwa free to marry her himself. Travel restrictions prevent Gwa from carrying out his dream, and he is willing to pay Vincent $10,000 to do it for him.

Vincent sets out on a half-year odyssey to the northwest corner of China a journey proving to be as personally fulfilling as it is culturally and geographically edifying. He endures countless delays and endless train rides, but gradually realizes this adventure might actually become "the one exceptional undertaking of his life." He begins to soak in every detail, from the vast tenements of Lanzhou to the indescribable beauty of Heaven Lake, in the mountains near the home of his bride-to-be. He deals with corrupt ticket-hawkers, thieves, and eventually the duplicitous Kai-Ling, who can't seem to decide whether to marry Vincent or not.

Like Vincent, Dalton spent several years in Taiwan, where he gained insight into the Chinese habits and mores he perceptively infuses into his vivid characters. After adding his ruminations on marriage, commitment, and self-enlightenment, the end result is this auspicious and compelling first novel. Deborah Donovan writes from Cincinnati and La Veta, Colorado.

Janis Hallowell's mystical and emotionally charged debut novel is both an unusual coming of age story and a modern-day parable about the seductive powers of belief. Chester, a homeless schizophrenic, envisions 14-year-old Francesca Dunn as the Virgin Mary incarnate, thus igniting a religious frenzy that engulfs many in its powerful wake. Through the use of four narrators who embody distinctly different views on belief, we see how faith can take various forms, all of which can be damaging in their extremes. The multiple narrative voices allow us to observe events from many perspectives as they swirl around the easily suggestible Francesca, who resides in the eye of the storm.

After a purported healing seems to substantiate Chester's vision, Francesca is besieged by legions of followers searching for salvation and desperate to believe in the miraculous over the mundane. As they make her the unwitting repository for all of their needs and desires, she becomes dangerously convinced of her own divine powers. The inattentions of her preoccupied, recently divorced parents and the self-centered opportunism of the people charged with protecting her succeed in fanning the flames to a fever pitch. When the tide begins to turn against Francesca, the passion of her followers turns murderous, and events unfold that force her to face her own very human limitations.

In Francesca and Chester respectively, Hallowell perfectly captures the fragile vulnerability of adolescence and the precarious divide between the delusional and the visionary. Her inventive hands create a world of clever ambiguity that casts a hypnotic spell on the reader, mesmerizing us with its delicate, delicious dance between the possible and the improbable.

Beautifully written and brimming with strong, appealingly eccentric characters, this magical and modern twist on the story of the Virgin's Annunciation raises intriguing questions about the nature of contemporary faith and religion.

Joni Rendon writes from Hoboken, New Jersey.

It sounds like a familiar story: twin sisters, different as night and day, start relationships with the same man that end in disaster. But Jincy Willett’s first novel, Winner of the National Book Award, is anything but predictable. This darkly comic tale, set in a small Rhode Island town, opens on the eve of a storm. As librarian Dorcas Mather reluctantly reads the just-published “true” story of her sister Abigail’s murder of her husband, Conrad Lowe, she compares the written account with her own version of events. Abigail’s preoccupation with the physical stands in stark contrast to Dorcas’ cerebral world, and the two sisters have opposite responses to Lowe’s charm. Lowe is equally fascinated by Abigail’s capacity for self-abasement and Dorcas’ inviolate honor, and turns the images the sisters have of themselves—and of each other—upside down.

Willett is a favorite of David Sedaris, and her sly, humorous writing style is reminiscent of his more serious pieces. But it’s hard to draw comparisons for such an original work of fiction.

Following on the heels of Helen Dunmore's acclaimed novel, The Siege (2002), one might expect that another book focusing on the Nazi blockade of Leningrad during World War II would have a hard time attracting attention. Happily enough, though, Elise Blackwell's debut novel, Hunger, carves out its own niche. Hunger focuses on efforts by a group of scientists to preserve a collection of seed specimens, even at the price of starvation. It's a remarkable, fact-based story of heroism and self-sacrifice under the harshest of war's privations. It is also a story of the desperate will to survive. Blackwell has employed an unnamed, rather mysterious narrator to tell her story of survival. He's a scientist, and apparently a participant in the work of his colleagues to preserve seeds; his insider's view of the siege is refracted through the prism of distance and old age.

Through this narrator, readers get a feel not only for the countless horrors which occurred, especially during Leningrad's "hunger winter"(ranging from offers of bodies and souls in exchange for food, to self-amputation of limbs, murder and cannibalism); an appraising light is also thrown, for example, on the misguided idealism of the scientists' leader, or petty complaints over an orchestra's performance.

The narrator's perspective is more tender regarding the stoicism of his wife, Alena, also a scientist, who dies protecting the seeds. Unlike his wife, however, the narrator has no interest in martyrdom.

The prose of Hunger is terse, stripped to essentials, but it produces a lilting, nearly poetic quality. The detail is exacting and freshly presented. Blackwell's most notable achievement, however, is a compelling exploration of the moral chasm that war can create.

Harold Parker writes from Gallatin, Tennessee.

With his first novel, a story of dislocation and yearning for both the old and the new, David Bezmozgis fulfills the promise he displayed in his 2005 collection, Natasha and Other Stories, and joins the growing list of talented young writers like Gary Shteyngart and Lara Vapynar portraying the experience of Jewish emigration from the former Soviet Union.

Set in 1978, just as the first wave of departures was about to crest, The Free World tells the story of five months in the lives of three generations of the Krasnanskys, of Riga, Latvia, as they await their relocation from Rome to a new permanent home. The patriarch, Samuil, is an imperious former bureaucrat and World War II veteran of the Red Army who resents the circumstances that brought about the family’s departure, while his sons, Karl and Alec, quickly adapt themselves to the vagaries of Western capitalism, sometimes in less than savory ways. Despite their Jewish heritage, none of the Krasnanskys is motivated by a passion for their religion or its culture, and the notion of settling in Israel is unthinkable to them.

What Bezmozgis, himself a Latvian emigrant to Canada at age six, captures best is the sense of rootlessness that afflicts the Krasnanskys, each in unique ways. Samuil dwells on memories of his brother, killed in the war, while Alec’s wife Polina carries on a moving correspondence with her sister, who has remained behind. In Rome, they and the rest of the family join the mass of immigrants passing interminable hours in overheated waiting rooms at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, or waiting for their turn at the pay phone to call North American relatives they hope will extend the invitation that will pave the way for an early departure from their Italian limbo.

Though one of his characters dismisses the Krasnanskys’ lot as the search to find “a happier miserable,” Bezmozgis understands that the yearning for freedom is a universal human desire. In his portrayal of one unremarkable, but decidedly sympathetic family, he’s produced an appealing portrait of that longing.

Fiona was in her 30s when she fell in love with her university department chairman, a powerful and married older man. Now, nine years later, she's suddenly aware of Sigmund's wispy gray arm hairs and sagging muscles. When he confesses he has no plan to back her upcoming promotion, fondness departs.

Lynn Miller describes Fiona's next weeks in a witty first novel that is part academic satire, part middle-aged coming-of-age story. The Fool's Journey, set in Austin at a school obviously meant to be the University of Texas, shows how the foolish protagonist makes her way to self-knowledge. Her guides: other women professors, a reader of tarot cards, some gay friends and the writer Edith Wharton.

What makes the novel fun are the people Fiona knows. Miller creates excellent outlandish academics. Fiona's buxom friend, Bettina, who teaches seminars about Virginia Woolf, exudes Eros to such a degree that she attracts women as well as men. Her husband, Martin, a quiet former botany professor, provides contrast. Various slick deans and department chairmen appear, occasionally in romantic roles. (One seduces both Bettina and Fiona, though not at the same time.) The Fool's Journey kills any notion that life in the ivory tower is primarily intellectual or, as Daphne, the tarot card reader, tells Fiona, "Much of your conflict is bound up in the academy, an edifice supposedly built on ideas but powered by emotion the quest for recognition, greed for accolades, the envy of others' success." Miller has a fine, understated wit that allows her to skewer even what she seems to revere. For example, at the end of Fiona's tarot card session, she's thinking to herself that knowledge is priceless when Daphne says, "That will be seventy-five dollars. If you prefer, I accept all credit cards. Except Discover." The novel is like a visit to Austin. Fiona takes off for a holiday at Port Aransas, submerges herself in the frigid water of Barton Springs and attends parties in Hyde Park. You wonder why Miller calls the school Austin University instead of UT. Could it be because she teaches performance studies at UT and wants some distance? Anne Morris writes from Austin, Texas.

Americans love frontiers. Unexpectedly, one emerged in Eastern Europe when the Berlin wall fell in 1989. The Gen X crowd went in droves to Prague and Moscow, and in smaller trickles to Budapest, Hungary, the setting for Arthur Phillips' ironically named first novel, Prague.

The time is 1990, and the gold rush is on for that eminently desirable thing called experience. The action revolves around a group of four Americans who socialize with each other in a select circuit of bars and cafes. In the case of Mark Payton, the American label is a mistake: Mark is actually Canadian. A graduate student, he wants to turn his dissertation about the culture and architecture of nostalgia into a book. For Scott Price, Budapest is a way station on a prolonged therapeutic escape from his family and history, which he blames for all his problems. Much to Scott's displeasure, his younger brother John has followed him to Budapest. John, whose point of view dominates the novel, is 24, an anomalous virgin with the habit common to his generation of turning his personal contradictions into easy ironies. During the course of the novel, while pursuing his obsession with Emily Oliver, an attaché to the American ambassador, John will lose his virginity to Nicki, an in-your-face artist with a shaved head.

John's sensitivity to Hungarian culture doesn't prevent him from being instrumental in ripping it off as part of a scheme cooked up by Charles Gabor, another member of the group. A native of Michigan, Charles actually speaks Hungarian, a linguistic gift he owes to his parents, refugees from the unsuccessful 1956 revolt against the Russians.

Although the beginning of the book is a bit bumpy with stage-setting, once we have a sense of Phillips' characters, their trajectories are moving, funny and above all, interesting. They never quite find the experience they're searching for, but in the process they turn a concrete, historically autonomous place like Budapest into a crossroads of peculiarly American schemes and dreams.

Roger Gathman is a freelance writer based in Austin.

In her first novel, Sharon Wyse skillfully creates the diary of Lou Ann Campbell, an 11-year-old growing up on a wheat farm in northern Texas during the summer of 1960. Beginning when the yellow-green wheat is almost ripe and continuing through the harvest and preparation for the next season's planting, Lou Ann writes poignantly about her coming-of-age summer, during which she makes the painful transition from dolls and imaginary play to adolescent concerns such as sexuality and the status of her family in the outside world.

Isolated on a farm a few miles from the Oklahoma border, Lou Ann's only outside contacts are a friend at church, visitors on the Fourth of July and the wheaties who come each year to harvest the wheat. Her friends and confidantes are five tiny dolls she keeps hidden in a box, each representing one of her mother's five stillborn children. Lou Ann has to write in secret and hide her diary carefully each day so her mother won't find it. Clearly, isolation, grief and the unrelenting hard work of the farm have affected Loretta Campbell's abilities as a wife and mother. In a metaphor that describes her family, Lou Ann explains that when termites attack a house, the outside wood can look fine while the inside is being destroyed.

Despite her isolation and her dysfunctional family, Lou Ann possesses a remarkable spark of wisdom and inner strength. She marvels at the smell that comes before a rain and knows that she wants to remember it forever. She savors the nights when there are so many stars in the sky she could never count them all.

Eventually, the young girl comes to the crucial realization that the past is all we have to prepare ourselves for the future. Most importantly, in this memorable summer, Lou Ann learns what she needs to survive.

Alice Pelland came of age in Texas in the 1960s and writes from Hillsborough, North Carolina.

How much of an artist's life can be seen in an artist's work? Catherine Cantrell, asks that question in the first paragraph of her debut novel, Constance, then goes on to play with the idea for a couple of hundred pages.

Told from the point of view of the editor at a New York publishing house who discovers Constance's poetry, the novel introduces the reader bit by bit to this beautiful young literary artist. Whether or not you value the poetry as highly as does Morgan, the editor, you will be intrigued by Constance Chamberlain. She is dedicated to pure art and feels a kinship with Emily Dickinson, but also manages a secret relationship with Lou, a powerful older married man who was once her professor in business school.

Her professor where? That's right, in business school at Columbia. Don't all poets get an MBA? The editor's voice as she tells this tale is nonetheless convincing. A lonely young widow, Morgan becomes fascinated by Constance. She finds the young poet refreshing after meeting so many writers who pursue money first, and art, second.

Ever tempting the reader to see parallels between herself and Constance, the author gives the protagonist the same double-C initials as her own and a similar background, in upper class Lake Forest, Illinois. Both dedicate their first book simply, To My Mother. And for both, it's a novel that includes original poems.

Brought to the attention of Random House by writer William Styron, Catherine Cantrell seems likely to capture others' attention, too, with this haunting debut. Though the final pages, with their return to Constance's girlhood home, raise many questions, you come away with an answer to the big one. Yes, some artists do put very much of themselves into their art.

Anne Morris is a writer in Austin.

At the opening of The Color Midnight Made, Andrew Winer's moving and funny first novel, 10-year-old Conrad Clay is diagnosed as colorblind by his school doctor. The news distresses our young hero, yet in one sense it is his greatest asset. As one of the few white students at Jack London Primary School in a hardscrabble corner of Alameda, California, Conrad has no trouble blending in with his African-American peers, such as his best friend, Loop.

"Loop said I musta been black in a past life," Conrad says, "so it was cool I was hangin' wid the bruthas in this one, since I had prior experience and did not be coming at it on the honky-ass tip."

But Conrad faces difficulties that go far beyond imperfect vision. His father loses his shipbuilding job at the Alameda Naval Base, his parents' marriage is crumbling, his beloved grandmother is dying, and his family is facing eviction from their home. Even Loop, drawn to an older boy, seems to be turning against him.

Thus everyday life becomes a tremendous challenge for Conrad, and his attempts to negotiate his troubled world are depicted in scenes by turns hysterical and heart-rending. Luckily, when things look darkest and loneliest, a few allies emerge. B.L.T., an ostracized overweight classmate, turns out to be an inspiration in skateboarding, Conrad's favorite pastime. And Conrad is bolstered by the gritty wisdom of Loop's brother Midnight, a blind oracular figure who makes up for his inability to see by internally supplying color for everything, from people and trees to his own emotions.

Winer's ear for slang is pitch perfect, and his warm comic way with dialogue is a delight. Here is Bobby, the boyfriend of Loop's mother, chastising a friend for being too romantically aggressive with a woman: "You got to slow your roll, bro . . . you got no shame to your game." Conrad's use of street diction in sharing his thoughts and emotions is striking, but Winer never gets carried away with his own poeticism. The narrative remains tight throughout, with nary a wasted word.

Race relations, the destructive effects of working class job flight on family structure, and the persistence of certain communities even in the worst of circumstances are some of the serious themes this novel takes on. But most importantly, it is impossible not to be drawn into Conrad's plight, and readers will root for him to somehow find a way to emerge intact from his brutal environment. Conrad's circumstances may break a few hearts, but his resilience, charm and brio will undoubtedly win them over in the end.

Mark Tarallo, a journalist based in Washington, D.C., is at work on his first novel.

When you kill off your narrator in the first 10 pages of a novel and tell readers who the killer is you'd better have one compelling story up your sleeve. Alice Sebold does.

"I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973," Susie Salmon tells us in the second sentence of The Lovely Bones. She shows us who did it—a neighbor everyone thinks is weird—and describes the horrible scene, a brutal assault and dismemberment in an underground hideout in a bleak winter cornfield. Sebold's triumph is in making Susie's voice so immediately compelling that we don't want to let her go, even after she's dead. We want to know what happens next. So does Susie.

From up in what she calls "my heaven," Susie watches the repercussions of her death among her friends and family. She sees her broken parents crumble away from each other, her younger sister harden her heart, her classmates cling to each other for comfort. She watches her murderer in the calm aftermath of his awful deed. She longs for the one boy she's ever kissed, knowing she'll never touch him again. She misses her dog. She aches for her parents and siblings, yearning to comfort them but unable to interfere. In her heaven, she's granted all her simplest desires—she has friends and a mother-figure—and she delights in her ability to see everything and everyone in the world. Observing her sister one Christmas, she says, "Lindsey had a cute boy in the kitchen. . . I was suddenly privy to everything. She never would have told me any of this stuff. . . She kissed him; it was glorious. I was almost alive again."

But watching the world without being among the living isn't enough for Susie. She's 14 forever, and the pain of her unfulfilled promise infuses her voice as she watches her younger brother and sister growing into roles she'll never play. Still, Susie's no wispy, thinly drawn ghost; like nearly every other character in the book, she's a remarkable, complex person who has as much humor and kindness as grief.

In the end, what Sebold has accomplished is to find her own inventive way of expressing the universal alienation and powerlessness we all feel, trapped in our own small worlds apart from each other. More than that, she has convinced us that, through love and hope and generosity, these things can be overcome.

Becky Ohlsen is a writer in Portland, Oregon.

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Read an interview with Alice Sebold.