Our Fathers is a dense, literate novel set in Scotland. This comes as no surprise since its author, Andrew O’Hagan, is himself a Scotsman and was named Scottish Writer of the Year in 1998.

James Bawn is the narrator, a 35-year-old man traveling from Liverpool to see his dying grandfather in Ayrshire county. Though his father was an angry, abusive alcoholic, his father’s father was a successful socialist politician whose grand vision and equally grand speaking voice made high-rise apartment buildings a postwar seaside reality. Granda was a priest of steel decking and concrete. But now the buildings are being demolished, and the old man also suffers decline. He rails at everyone who will listen, and often on the balcony to those who don’t. Granda always wanted the world to hear him. This book gives voice to Granda, towering over his son and grandson, as the buildings he saw erected towered over the village’s past.

James credits his current life to having had a childhood which was dotted with lucky islands, chief among them being his mother, his books, and his grandparents.

Of his mother, he writes of meeting her frequently after her morning shift in the bakery to share fresh baked buns, a respite from anger in the house.

James retreated into books, only to be told by his screaming father that books were only good for boring bastards who don’t know how to enjoy themselves. His grandparents, to whom he fled when he could no longer endure his father’s alcoholic rages, gave him room to live. They also gave him stories of the family’s past, including that of his grandfather’s mother, who led rent-strikers during World War I in a battle against slumlords.

O’Hagan is a lyrical writer, whose poetic turn of phrase creates an unforgettable image with a minimum of words.

Our fathers were made for grief. And all our lives we waited for sadness to happen . . . We had only the prospect of living in their wake . . . O’Hagan speaks for many of us as he concludes, Maybe there is no such thing as an ordinary trip home. ¦ George Cowmeadow Bauman is the co-owner of Acorn Books in Columbus, Ohio.

ÊThe story at the core of Lost is simple: Parents who lost a child during the Russian invasion of Germany believe they have found him, years later, living in an orphanage. They undertake to reclaim him, only to be frustrated by a hopelessly bureaucratic process meant to determine whether their link to the boy is biological or imagined.

What makes the novel remarkable is the narrator’s perspective. The narrator is the second son of the questing parents, and as he tells the story his voice is strained alternately by jealousy, anger, isolation, and wonder. He never knew his brother as anything other than a photograph, and was therefore able to turn him into an ideal and a marker of uniqueness: none of his friends had dead brothers, after all; no one else he knew carried around a phantom double in his head. But when his parents reveal that the brother he thought was dead is not only alive but living a few towns over, and when they tell him that they are going to try to reclaim him, the narrator feels his self-made world begin to disintegrate. He constantly recalculates his jealousy quotient, trying to interpret the hereditary information his parents obtain through countless studies. He sees the results of these tests as mounting proof that the orphan in question is not his brother. His parents, of course, draw the opposite conclusion.

The book has an extremely dense, almost obsessed atmosphere. It evokes the stifling experience of a child dragged into an adult’s world where he is alien and also, by virtue of his alienation, wiser than the adults he suffers. Striking as it is in Treichel’s rendering, this obsessed voice would be too oppressive if it weren’t occasionally overwhelmed by the narrator’s wonder at some of the strangeness of his world. Ê Fortunately, Treichel delivers wonder as palpably as he does brooding. There is an especially vivid scene of the boy’s experience in the hands of a neo-phrenologist, a pseudoscientist who palpates the skull looking for hereditary information. The narrator’s first sight of his father’s naked feet is also striking, and it’s Treichel’s way of taking such a mundane moment and eking emotional significance out of it that provides the greatest rewards of this satisfying debut. ¦ George Weld is a writer in New York City.

Readers will remember Socrates Fortlow, the hero of Walter Mosley’s riveting new book Walkin’ the Dog, from the author’s acclaimed short story collection Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned. Although he has been out of prison for nine years at the start of Mosley’s new book, the ex-convict-murderer turned boxboy is still a man dominated by his violent past. Socrates lives on the margins of society, in two abandoned rooms in a Watts alley. He cooks on a butane stove and wears leather sandals rescued out of a trash can. He is constantly aware of his own capacity for anger and violence, unable to shake the fists out of his hands. Yet, like the philosopher whose name he shares, Socrates is a wise and thoughtful man, and he has made many friends since leaving prison. He has become a surrogate father to a young boy named Darryl, helping to keep him in school and out of trouble. His boss at the Bounty Supermarket wants to promote him to produce manager. He has a girlfriend and even a pet, a friendly, two-legged dog named Killer. Slowly but surely, Socrates is working his way toward a more mainstream life.

In the process, however, he must confront both his own beliefs about himself and society’s expectations of him. His struggles provide a forum for Mosley to explore complex racial issues and examine the effects of prejudice and inequality in our society. Over the course of the book, which falls somewhere between a novel and a collection of thematically connected short stories, Socrates comes to define himself and to win a figurative freedom that matches his literal one. It’s not what would you do for men like us. It’s what will you do, Socrates tells a fellow ex-convict. We got to see past being guilty what’s done is done. You still responsible, you cain’t never make it up, but you got to try. Through realistic dialogue and excellent use of detail, Mosley animates the burly ex-con, as well as fascinating supporting characters like Lavant Hall, a soprano-voiced rebel with a pencil-thin mustache and a fondness for perfume. Readers will leave this provocative book hoping that Socrates Fortlow is still out there somewhere, teaching us all what it means to be a free and responsible man. ¦ Beth Duris works for the Nature Conservancy in Arlington, Virginia.

Southern literature is filled with characters like the ones who inhabit Crazy in Alabama. Anyone who has ever lived in the South has encountered one or two of the real-life prototypes at one time or another. Anyone born in the South automatically thinks that writers are describing his or her friends and family.

Everyone knows who they are: the reluctant hero (especially in the area of race relations); the young boy or girl with the old soul who helps lead the way to goodness and redemption; the pot-bellied, redneck villain; the family matriarch; and last, but certainly not least, the beautiful heroine, who, despite being somewhat crazy (and maybe a little evil, although Lord don’t you know she only did evil things because she was forced into it by an alcoholic man), manages to win the reader’s love and admiration.

Mark Childress’s Crazy in Alabama has all those characters — and plenty more to spare. Peejoe Bullis is the 12-year-old narrator of the story (set in 1965), who hears more than he wants to hear about marital relations from his Aunt Lucille, who has fed her husband rat poison and severed his head because he wouldn’t allow her to audition for a part in the Beverly Hillbillies. (Look, she says, yanking his head out of a large Tupperware container, it’s your Uncle Chester.)

When Aunt Lucille takes off for Hollywood, carrying her husband’s head with her as a good luck charm, Peejoe and his older brother Wiley are sent packing to live with Lucille’s brother, Uncle Dove, a mortician who also serves as the county coroner.

As Lucille heads west in a stolen Cadillac, a fully loaded pistol in her purse, Peejoe becomes embroiled in a civil rights demonstration that ultimately brings Martin Luther King Jr. and Alabama Governor George Wallace to town. As Peejoe sides with the civil rights demonstrators, Aunt Lucille gets her big break on the Beverly Hillbillies.

Crazy in Alabama has been made into a motion picture that will be released in early October. It co-stars Melanie Griffith, who seems absolutely perfect for the role of the dizzy-but-lovable Lucille. The screenplay was written by the author (a rarity in Hollywood), so it almost certainly will remain true to the book.

Alabama-born Mark Childress has written a flawless novel. It is almost impossible to find a misstep anywhere in the 434-page book. His sparse prose has the energy and punch of a Crimson Tide running back.

Equally impressive is the author’s technique of merging the Southern literary tradition with the sensibilities of a nonfiction expose. His use of actual historical figures and events gives the story a real sense of believability.

Originally published in 1993, Crazy in Alabama has just been re-issued as a paperback to coincide with the release of the movie. This reviewer somehow missed the book the first time around, but is grateful he was given a second chance to read it.

Is it possible to laugh at murder?

You’d better read this book before you answer that question.

Mississippi-born James L. Dickerson’s most recent book is Last Suppers: If the World Ended Tomorrow, What Would Be Your Last Meal? (Lebhar-Friedman Books).

Lord Berners the name can hardly be uttered without a sniff and a smirk. The author’s full name says it all: Sir Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson, Baronet, 14th Baron Berners. This peer of England, the last of his line, lived during the period (1883-1950) when the privileges of the aristocracy fell rapidly into anachronism and absurdity. The stories and short novels collected in this edition can be read as fables of this decline, a haunting mixture of hilarity and melancholy that could only have come from the pen of a man called by his own biographer The Last Eccentric. Lord Berners’s writing tends to be funny in a way that only a very small number of brilliant English writers have the levitating capacity to be, and he ought to be read only when uninhibited laughter is an option. Take the scene in the novella The Camel, in which Mr. Scrimgeour, the church organist, bungles the vicar’s entry on Sunday morning with a disastrous performance.

Lord Berners’s prose is at all times beautiful, as clean as an English lawn, just as sharply cut, and with just as many surprising felicities to the senses. It would perhaps be nearest the mark to call his writing musical, especially since this self-same Sir Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson was also an outstanding musician, whom Igor Stravinsky considered the best mid-century English composer. Music features centrally in the 1941 novel Count Omega, whose composer-hero succumbs to his own ambition. It is a comic twist on the Faust legend, a striking forerunner to Thomas Mann’s tragic musical novel Doctor Faustus, which appeared only a few years later.

In First Childhood, the first of his two splendid and equally funny autobiographies (both published last year by Turtle Point Press), Lord Berners describes a portrait of his Victorian grandmother which hung in the dining-room at her estate. It showed her dressed in a rather elaborate evening gown of the period, smiling benevolently in complete disregard of a terrific thunderstorm that was approaching her in the background. He goes on to remark that the picture might, in fact, have stood for an allegory of the later Victorian period. In Lord Berners’s own time, the storm had broken. The fact that he continued to smile benevolently through his wonderful stories is both a touch of his class and his class’s last hurrah.

Michael Alec Rose is a music professor at Vanderbilt University.

Will Self likes taking risks. His last novel, Great Apes, followed the stressed-out life of a psychologist who awakened one morning as a chimpanzee. In his essays Self has stalked prime ministers and fought British rock stars. His work breeds controversy, and his method welcomes experiment. Needless to say anything new by him is noteworthy.

In Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys, Self mixes the plausible with the absurd. Within this collection of short stories you will find a rock of crack cocaine as large as a hotel and meet a lexicographer who has learned to communicate with insects. These new stories turn a fun house mirror on modern circumstance. Their humor is grotesque, ticklish, and daft.

Take A Story for Europe for example. Here, Self plays on the fears and troubles of new parents. Worried that their toddler’s linguistic skills aren’t developing, Miriam and Daniel Green take their two-year-old to the doctor. A bewildered child development specialist informs the anxiety-taxed couple that their son is not only fine but also fully fluent in business German.

Elsewhere, in the poetically titled Design Faults in the Volvo 760 Turbo: A Manual, Self takes us into the mind of a panicky adulterer. Nervous to the point of trauma, Self’s protagonist hallucinates that he is 60 feet tall. Incapable of hiding from his spouse because of his size, the guilty giant pleads with his wife for forgiveness, telling her that the palm-sized woman he has been caught with is nothing but a toy. No, these are not bad jokes or out-takes from The Twilight Zone, these are quintessential Will Self creations. For all their outrageousness, these tales radiate a narrative charm. For every goofy plot turn you’ll find an equally well plotted character or adroitly spun metaphor. Whether dealing with nerdy parents or hardened drug addicts, Self nails his subjects with an exacting, invigorating stylistic temper like that of the truly great satirists. Surely Self is one of them if that’s not too immodest a proposal.

Julian Barnes’s concern with the ways we reconstruct, or even invent, the past has been a rich theme in several of his books (Flaubert’s Parrot, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters). But in England, England his first novel in six years that theme has its strongest vehicle to date. Whether the past belongs to the lifetime of a single individual or to the historical annals of Barnes’s native England, it is a slippery proposition. How do you distinguish the authentic from the phony, truth from embroidery? Barnes’s answer is: much of the time, you can’t.

England, England’s other themes relate to the nature of nationhood, the excesses of a free-market economy, the fraudulence of the tourism industry, the search for love, and the possibility of personal salvation. Yet, being a novel by Julian Barnes, it is not ponderous; it is masterfully plotted, stylish, vivacious, and devilishly funny. Barnes, who loves French literature, has the withering wit, and frequently the moral stance, of Moliere.

Like a Moliere protagonist, the novel’s central character bears the corporate title Appointed Cynic. Her name is Martha Cochrane, and the corporation she serves is Pitco, a multinational kingdom ruled by the megalomaniacal Sir Jack Pitman. We are a few decades into the next millennium, when Sir Jack, a kind of Rupert Murdoch/Donald Trump with Rabelaisian overtones, decides to crown his career by creating the ultimate theme park. Occupying the entire geography of the Isle of Wight, this leisure world encapsulates all of England’s best-known landmarks and offers recreations of as many incidents from British history as the average Joe has ever heard of. The island with its replicas of Stonehenge, Westminster Abbey, Anne Hathaway’s Cottage, and Buckingham Palace in time becomes more English than the mainland; it is therefore christened England, England. The old country, robbed of its vital tourist revenue and its standing in the European Union, gradually regresses into a near-feudal state. Even the royal family moves to the island, where their duties are minimal waving to crowds of tourists and their salaries large.

Julian Barnes is philosophical, like Iris Murdoch; narratively innovative, like John Fowles; satirical, like David Lodge; funny, like Tom Sharpe; erudite, like A. S. Byatt. Yet he is altogether, fascinatingly himself as any reader of England, England will gratefully discover.

Randall Curb is an essayist and reviewer in Greensboro, Alabama.