It wasn't enough for Wesley Stace to be a successful musician and a devastatingly handsome guy; he had to go and write a novel as well. And it's not just any novel. Stace—aka folk singer John Wesley Harding—makes his fiction debut with a rollicking adventure told in classic bawdy-romance style. Considering that Stace leads something of a double life himself, it makes sense for his fiction debut to be built upon secret identities, parallels and opposites and the things that bind them together.

 Stace—aka folk singer John Wesley Harding—makes his fiction debut with a rollicking adventure told in classic bawdy-romance style.

In a nice example of one persona feeding off another, the inspiration for Stace's novel came from a Harding song, "The Ballad of Miss Fortune." Harding recorded the song, in which a rich English lord rescues an abandoned baby boy and raises him as a girl, in 1997, but found that his alter ego wasn't quite finished with the story. In Misfortune, Rose is that abandoned baby. For mysterious reasons he's rushed from a house in the slums of 1820s London and carried into the forest by a dimwitted child called Pharaoh. Easily distracted, Pharaoh sets down the bundle he's meant to dispose of, and Rose is found by the Young Lord Geoffroy Loveall.

The eccentric Young Lord still (after two decades) mourns his baby sister, Dolores. He's also under pressure from his overbearing mother to produce an heir. The foundling solves both problems at once. Except, of course, that this baby is not a new Dolores, but a boy. Geoffroy's on the brink of mental collapse, though, so the household goes along with his charade to save his sanity. This makes Rose's adolescence even more awkward than the usual.

By making Rose's search for identity a literal one, Stace sets the stage for a meditation on deciding exactly who you want to be. The book gets a little more florid than necessary toward the end, particularly because by then Stace has set out a number of mysteries you can't help wishing he would speed toward their solutions. But it's good fun to follow Rose on the journey to discover him/herself.

Becky Ohlsen is a freelance writer in Portland, Oregon.

Elizabeth Gaffney, a contributing editor to The Paris Review, has written an immigrant's song of a first novel. Metropolis is a paean to the city of New York, a bygone era and the perseverance of the human spirit.

Set in the turbulent years following the Civil War, this ambitious historical novel tells the story of a young German immigrant with a checkered past and the streetwise Irish girl with whom he falls in love. Framed for a stable fire at P.T. Barnum's famous show, Georg (one of just several names he goes by in the book) begins a steep descent into the far-reaching New York underworld. He is first noticed by Beatrice O'Gamhna, a wild, Dickensian street urchin who is no better than she has to be, and often worse. Almost comically, she mistakes Georg for a master criminal and duly tells her gang leader about him.

Beatrice's sociopathic boss is Dandy Johnny, the nominal leader of the Whyos (quite unbeknownst to the rest of the gang, Johnny's mother is the real brains behind the gang's success). Johnny decides to help Georg in exchange for the use of the immigrant's supposed criminal expertise. Hunted by the police and another local criminal, the mysterious Undertoe, Georg makes a Faustian pact with Johnny that links their destinies forever.

Set amid the bustle of a city just starting to shrug off the shadow of corruption and become the capital of the world, Gaffney's book is filled with unique and memorably bold characters. At its core, this is a love story of a man and a woman who believe that a better life exists despite all evidence to the contrary. It's an absorbing read. Commendably, Gaffney has created characters with enough style and grandeur not to be upstaged by her admirably painstaking recreation of an untamed New York, which apparently was much wilder than the renowned West of the same era.

Ian Schwartz writes from New York City.

Set in the isolated and fictitious town of Minerva, Minnesota, in the 1920s, Sharratt's luminous second novel captivates the reader from the first page with an intriguing tale of three strong women who struggle against the choking repression of both the town and the times in which they live.

The relationship between 15-year-old Penny and her mother Barbara, who is only 30, has been deteriorating since Penny became aware of Barbara's "dirty" affair with her employer Laurence Hamilton, for whom she cooks and cleans. Hamilton's wife has been in a coma-like state, a victim of the Spanish flu epidemic, for four years and lives in a nursing home in the neighboring town. Though her mother seems oblivious to the local gossip, Penny feels the town's condemnation wherever she goes; she retaliates by answering an ad for a hired hand placed by Cora Egan, a mysterious, pregnant newcomer to Minerva. Penny fortuitously arrives on the day that Cora's daughter Phoebe is born, and the lives of these three immediately become inextricably woven.

Home-schooled by Cora, Penny gains knowledge of science and literature, even identifying with Penelope of the Odyssey, who demonstrates the same determined individuality that Penny so admires in Cora. Gradually, Penny learns more and more details of Cora's past as a debutante and wife of a surgeon, and discovers why she now takes such pains to disguise her femininity by cutting her hair and dressing like a man. Tensions begin to build as both Cora's and Barbara's hidden lives seem destined to be explosively revealed, threatening both the strong bonds the women have created and the stable lives toward which they've been working.

Sharratt perceptively portrays the simultaneous freedom and repression of the 1920s, and poetically imbues even the most mundane chores with significance. As she did in her well-received first novel, Summit Avenue, Sharratt has again drawn on her Minnesota roots to bring a small, seemingly placid town to unpredictable life.

Deborah Donovan writes from Cincinnati and La Veta, Colorado.

Phil Fitch has reached a crossroads in his post-'Nam existence: he can play out a string of low-wage, brain-numbing jobs, or take a crack at two hundred large and retire in comfort. The only hitch is, he's not gambling on slots in Vegas. He's hijacking a plane. In the unlikely event he isn't killed by cops or a faulty parachute, he'll be on the lam forever. After being laid off from his janitorial gig and losing his wife, that doesn't seem like such a bad option.

Roscoe Arbuckle is tired of being called "Fatty." He's exhausted from riding the celebrity roller coaster from obscurity to renown and back again (with some breathtaking peaks and valleys in between). He wiles away the days hooked on morphine carefully administered by his valet, the only remnant of his fame. Like a trained seal, he performs his final trick: telling his life story in doses as carefully measured as the drug.

Phil and Roscoe are people you've heard of, but don't know. The former is infamous plane hijacker D.B. Cooper's alternate identity in Elwood Reid's tautly strung novel, D.

B. (Doubleday, $23.95, 288 pages, ISBN 0385497385). The latter is best known as "Fatty" Arbuckle, film comedy megastar of the 1920s, rendered vividly in Jerry Stahl's highly entertaining I, Fatty. Both Reid (author of If I Don't Six and Midnight Sun) and Stahl (whose Permanent Midnight became a Ben Stiller movie) prove themselves capable practitioners of what might be called fauxography, the part-biography, part-fiction trend that has grown out of the '70s "new journalism" movement. Authors have long been putting words in their characters' mouths, but imagining the life of a real person has its pitfalls. Though weaving fact and fiction can often make for a truer, more revealing portrait of a person than bare fact alone, other people's memories are just waiting out there to indict and contradict one's work. (Just ask Pulitzer prize-winning biographer Edwin Morris, author of Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan.) Fortunately for Reid and Stahl, the subjects of their novels are either little known or little remembered. Each author has breathed the second and third dimensions into these real-life figures, allowing them to emerge from the page into our consciousness.

Fitch/Cooper, a shadowy figure at best, only gained fame as "D.

B." Cooper due to a reporter's error. The known facts are that a man calling himself Dan Cooper hijacked a Northwest Orient Boeing 727 on Thanksgiving eve in 1971, parachuting out with his $200,000 ransom over Washington state. Reid speculates that Mexico would be the logical place for a man with a large cache of purloined cash and a "wanted" poster. As Cooper immerses himself into the easy life south of the border, his former FBI nemesis attempts a more conventional retirement. When circumstances dictate Cooper's return, Reid expertly renders their pas de deux, ratcheting up the tension to a surprising conclusion.

Roscoe Arbuckle, on the other hand, was, in his day, about as high-profile as they come. Meticulously researched by Stahl, I, Fatty traces Arbuckle's life from unwanted child to silent film superstar to unwitting fall guy for a movie industry demonized by the era's moralists. Told in the first person, it's the kind of celebrity "autobiography" one could only dream of in this era of gatekeeper publicists and spin control. Stahl unravels the film legend's life with a clear-eyed and unsentimental perspective. In one passage, he's asked by a nurse if he is Roscoe Arbuckle. "Well," he replies, "I'd hate to look like this and not be Roscoe Arbuckle." How could you not be charmed by that? Arbuckle's charisma overshadows the fact that he looks like a sideshow freak, is physically and psychically dysfunctional, and spends the last third of the book enduring the effects of two murder trials. He is eventually found innocent of the charges, but this particular phoenix arose from the ashes with both wings charred. Spinning the last of his tale, he wistfully accepts his fate: "I ask you again, what was anything a fat man accomplished? A pile of leaves waiting for a wind." Cooper may still be at large, or he may be among his own pile of leaves somewhere in a Washington forest. It's uncertain whether either he or Arbuckle lived out their days as their fauxographers would have it. But both of these highly engaging novels allow the reader to suspend disbelief and make one wish it were so.

Simply put, The Hamilton Case by Sri Lankan author Michelle de Kretser is one of the most extraordinary novels I have ever read. Set in 1930s Sri Lanka—then called Ceylon and a colony of Britain—de Krester's second novel is captivating, intelligent, erudite and devilishly funny. It is not in the poetic style of fellow Sri Lankan Michael Ondaatje. Nor, despite the claim on the book's back cover, does it resemble Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, which displays more sweep but less virtuosity. De Kretser wastes not a word, and her wit is rapier sharp.

The novel's title would suggest that it is a detective story, and it is, in part, as details come to light about the murder scandal that haunts the once wealthy and influential Obeysekere family. But the novel focuses largely on the evolution of that family. Sam, the lawyer son. Maud, the dissolute mother. Claudia, sister to Sam and wife of Sam's main adversary, Jaya. In later life, Jaya takes up the dubious cause of reserving Sri Lanka for the Sinhalese against the recently arrived Tamils. The author compares such tactics to the divide et impera program of the British Empire.

Sri Lanka is a melting pot due to its role in trade between Europe and the Far East. Sam even suggests that "there's not a Ceylonese without mongrel blood in his veins." But the island is fraught with ethnic tension. Like the case in Forster's A Passage to India, the Hamilton case is complicated by issues of racial inequality. Meanwhile the novel's native characters are generally more English than the English.

One of the novel's more pleasing diversions is the waging of what Martin Amis has called "the war against cliché." Both Maud and a Tamil named Shivanathan are guilty of composing hackneyed phrases and images. De Kretser spears them mercilessly, while displaying her skill in producing fresh analogies ("he had the air of an aggrieved rodent"). Indeed, perhaps the most impressive thing about The Hamilton Case is simply how beautifully it makes the English language sing.

Kenneth Champeon writes from Thailand.

This may be a first novel, but Jenna Blum certainly knows how to hook a reader. The opening chapter of Those Who Save Us ends with a woman shunned by her nice Minnesota neighbors following the funeral of her husband, Jack. What did Anna do to deserve this? And why is her daughter Trudy not more surprised? Trudy was only three when Anna married an American soldier at the end of World War II, and he brought them home to his Minnesota farm. Neither Jack nor Anna ever told Trudy about her real father; there was a wall of silence "she could neither penetrate or scale." Trudy grows up to be a professor of German history and becomes immersed in a project taking testimony from German Minnesotans about the war. These scenes provide context for the wartime story of Anna and Trudy. Blum's juggling of scenes as she goes back and forth in time interrupts the action and paces dramatic revelations. She uses well-chosen, unexpected details to flesh out characters and events and to make it all real. For example, readers learn that the Nazi officer whose mistress Anna became had certain sexual preoccupations. But we're also told that he was the son of a woman who left her husband to run off with a traveling salesman of wigs.

A larger question what exactly did ordinary German women such as Anna do during the Holocaust? lies behind the personal ones. As the daughter of a German mother and a Jewish father, Blum finds herself drawn to such issues. She spent four years interviewing Holocaust survivors for Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation. A teacher at Boston University, Blum's first fiction success dates to 1986, when she won a Seventeen magazine writing contest.

Dealing as it does with ill-fated romance, Nazi cruelty and mother/daughter guilt, Those Who Save Us could have been a terribly melodramatic book. Instead, it's sensitive and artful. In the end, this historically specific novel tells a universal story of guilt, forgiveness and love. Anne Morris is a writer in Austin, Texas.

The punishing winds of a New Zealand winter greet Joseph Blackstone, his bride Harriet, and his mother Lilian as they settle in at Cob House, their new home fashioned out of mud and straw. The year is 1864, and the three have left England to make their fortune in this bold, wild land.

Rose Tremain’s enthralling ninth novel, The Colour, is set against the background of the New Zealand gold rush, for “the colour” is what these prospectors called gold. Fans of Tremain’s earlier historical novels know well her skill at luring the reader into a faraway world. With sensual images and telling details about the region, she practices a high form of literary escapism. Before you know it, you are ensnared by different strands of story and the fates of diverse characters. Like many immigrants before and after him, Joseph sought to escape his past. Tremain states simply that “in England, he had done a disgraceful thing.” The shadow of it haunts him all through the book only to be revealed near the end.

She creates a worthy heroine in Harriet, the tall, former governess who “carries herself well.” Harriet proves an excellent settler for this new land, as eager to adapt as her mother-in-law Lilian is reluctant. An early scene at Cob House shows Joseph’s mother meticulously mending her English china, broken on the voyage. Joseph saw then that “he had failed her, just as he had always and always failed her . . . he couldn’t remember any single day when he had pleased her enough.”

Joseph’s story turns into a fevered search for gold in a setting filled with desperate men. Harriet’s is something else again. No true villains exist in The Colour—just flawed human beings following their dreams in a natural world that seems bent on squashing them.