Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca is one of the best loved, most widely read novels of the 20th century. The book has remained in print continuously since its publication in 1938, and the film adaptation, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, won an Oscar for best picture.

Rebecca is the story of a beautiful, enigmatic woman who married a wealthy man, Maxim de Winter, and died under mysterious circumstances, leaving behind memories that haunted the lives of everyone who knew her. The novel is narrated by the second Mrs. de Winter, a character who plays second fiddle to the memory of Rebecca, and all we know of Rebecca’s story is told through her.

Rebecca’s Tale, a new sequel by Sally Beauman, takes up the story 20 years after the death of Rebecca de Winter and tells it through the words of four characters, not the least of whom is Rebecca herself. The book is divided into four chapters, each one giving voice to a person who holds a piece of the puzzle: Colonel Julyan, a gentleman now old and feeble but still devoted to Rebecca’s memory; Terence Gray, a likeable young man with his own secret agenda and connections to the de Winter legend; Rebecca, who appears from beyond the grave to speak for herself when her secret journals come to light; and Ellie, Colonel Julyan’s daughter, whose young dreams must coexist with her aging father’s obsession with Manderley and the de Winters.

Each of these characters stands out as an individual, yet their narratives are remarkably true to the tone of the original novel, a seamless extension of a story that begs to be continued. This sequel stands strongly on its own and though its publication will likely prompt a renewed interest in the original novel, having read the first book is not a prerequisite for enjoying the sequel.

There’s also a delicious irony in the authorship of Rebecca’s Tale. Sally Beauman, a respected novelist, was handpicked by the du Maurier estate to write the book after she wrote a 1993 New Yorker article blasting the quality of a previous, unauthorized sequel. The estate made a wise choice. Beauman has produced a supremely stylish mystery that offers ingenious solutions to the enigmas posed by the original novel and a beautifully crafted sequel that is magical in its own right as well as by association.

Mary Garrett reads and writes in Middle Tennessee.

In an increasingly interconnected world, the mixing of cultures should no longer come as a surprise. So it is refreshing when an author comes along who can showcase an intriguing new combination. Writer Marsha Mehran escaped the religious revolution in Iran as a child and traveled with her family to Argentina, Florida and Australia before following her heart to New York and Ireland. She underpinned this dizzying array of cultural experiences with a love of her native Persian cuisine. The first literary result of her wanderings is an enchanting tale of three sisters struggling to make a new life for themselves in the Emerald Isle.

Pomegranate Soup is a wonderful treat, a flavorful, rich little dish that does not weigh one down. Touches of magical realism abound: people exude scents of cinnamon and rosewater, onions cook in tightly clenched fists and drops of blood bloom into full-blown roses. Mehran has an unerring eye for detail, and she applies it well to her description of the three sisters: Marjan, the eldest, nurturing and responsible; Bahar, the middle sister, nervous and tortured with memories of the past; and Layla, the youngest, a luminously beautiful teenager who transcends the narrow confines of both cultures. Fortune lands them in the village of Ballinacroagh which, sheltered in the lea of a holy mountain regularly visited by pious pilgrims, is unprepared for the exotic aromas wafting out of the newly opened Babylon CafŽ. But the villagers’ initial mistrust is soon overcome; the vicious gossip, if not silenced, is ignored; and the sisters find allies among the town’s colorful residents. Their success, however, is soon threatened by a shadow from the past and a threat from the present, driving them to desperation. Cruelty and greed do not recognize national borders. But luckily, neither does love.

As a beguiling extra, recipes for such delicacies as lavash bread, chelow rice, and fesenjoon, a chicken dish made with walnuts and pomegranate paste, are scattered throughout the book, tempting the adventurous to try their hand. Even non-cooks, though, will be beguiled by Pomegranate Soup‘s zest for life. Jehanne Moharram grew up in the Middle East and now writes from Virginia.

Though not a sequel, Diane Johnson’s witty comedy of manners, L’Affaire, continues in the vein of her previous best-selling novels, Le Divorce and Le Mariage, and offers up an engaging story of Americans abroad and the cultural mayhem that follows in their wake.

In L’Affaire, an inharmonious contingent of French, British and American family members are brought together at a glamorous French ski resort in the aftermath of a devastating avalanche that leaves the family’s patriarch comatose. With an inheritance hanging in the balance, each faction jockeys for position with Machiavellian savoir faire. Alliances are forged and then broken, romances are ignited and extinguished, and a chain of events is set in motion by the well-meaning but misguided actions of the unwitting young American heroine, Amy Hawkins.

Amy is a charmingly na•ve former dot-com executive who has come to France to embark on a program of cultural self-improvement. Her attempt at benevolence backfires and lands her in the eye of the storm over the inheritance. As tempers flare among the group, the thin veneer of politesse is stripped away and replaced with a divisive provincialism fueled by the quirky conventions of each nationality.

Johnson’s trademark ability to deliver insightful observations on cultural stereotypes makes the novel delightfully entertaining. This fresh and sophisticated satire brings each character’s motivations and prejudices sharply into focus, making the reader aware that perhaps we are all more alike than we care to think. Joni Rendon works in publishing in New York City.

Mary Kay Andrews spoofs the secrets and lies of suburbia Mary Kay Andrews lived the research for Little Bitty Lies, her delicious new comic novel about divorce. The newspaper reporter-turned-novelist spent the last 20 years in a close-knit Atlanta suburb very much like the fictional Fair Oaks of her book. And lately like most of us she has seen several seemingly secure marriages fall apart.

Sitting on a glider outside her restored Atlanta bungalow during a recent telephone interview, Andrews describes how she got the idea for the book she first called Split City.

One Fourth of July she was hosting a potluck get-together before the fireworks, when a neighbor came over with a sad little covered dish and without his wife. “She’s announced she doesn’t love me any more, and she’s involved with someone else,” he told Andrews.

“Now eventually they coped and did fine, but I was just so floored by this,” Andrews recalls, “that the next day when I was returning the dish, I backed into a telephone pole.” Their problem had become her problem and would stay with her until she used it as a starter for her latest book.

In Little Bitty Lies, protagonist Mary Bliss McGowan marvels at how many people around her are getting divorced. Then her husband Parker empties all their bank accounts and disappears, leaving her with a mortgage, a crotchety mother-in-law and a cute teenage daughter whose private school tuition is due. Desperate, and egged on by her daring buddy Kate, Mary Bliss fakes Parker’s drowning death in Cozumel to collect his life insurance. She would have opted for murder if she hadn’t feared being raped by girl gangs in prison. (“That’s the only thing that keeps civilized people in line,” Andrews half-jokes. “Fear of retribution.”) Mary Bliss survives it all betrayal, poverty, fixing 100 pounds of chicken salad and ends up richer for her experiences.

The book jacket suggests Little Bitty Lies is the author’s second novel after Savannah Blues, a mystery involving an antique picker named Weezy but in fact it’s her 12th. Under her real name, Kathy Hogan Trocheck, Andrews wrote eight mysteries starring amateur sleuth Callahan Garrity and two mysteries featuring retired Florida reporter Truman Kicklighter.

It was not until 2002 that she published a book under the pen name Mary Kay Andrews (after her daughter, Mary Kathleen 21, and son, Andy, 16). As Andrews, she enjoyed a blank slate. “Mystery fans are so brand conscious,” she says with a sigh. “When I wrote the first Truman book, my Callahan fans got angry with me because they thought I was basically abandoning Callahan. This [writing under a new name] was a big gamble. It worked amazingly well. Savannah Blues outsold any Callahan.” If Andrews sounds proud of herself, she is, but she still sees herself as an ordinary suburban wife and mother. “I don’t think I’m really unlike a lot of women of my time. I drive carpool, bake cakes, but I write about death and divorce and infidelity.” Ever hospitable, she had hosted a riotous chick sleepover for her book club and friends the night before our interview. “We concluded that no group of men would ever come together like this if there wasn’t a sport or beer involved.” Andrews herself once rode shotgun in a car driven by a female friend who followed her wandering, unsuspecting husband to his girlfriend’s house. “I was more like the buddy than the heroine,” Andrews said, laughing, “the unindicted co-conspirator.” Rather than weigh readers down with the domestic trouble she’s witnessed, the 48-year-old reformed journalist exploits the comedic aspects of the situation in Little Bitty Lies. Her eye for social satire and ear for colorful speech turn every novel into an entertainment. Andrews started writing fiction in the 1980s, after spending 14 years as a newspaper reporter and ending up at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution covering the Savannah trial at the heart of John Berendt’s mega-bestseller Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. She never expected to be anything but a reporter.

“Newspapers changed in the ’80s,” Andrews says. A new emphasis on shorter stories that fit the USA Today format left her cold. She likes a long story in which a reporter can examine why things happen.

With fiction, she is free to make up the why. Andrews has always loved fiction, from the time she was a child in St. Petersburg, Florida, and her mother read to her. (Her mother ran a restaurant in a residential hotel similar to Truman Kicklighter’s.) “My mother had five kids in six years,” she says, matter-of-factly. “One day she turned to my older sister and said, here, you read to her. I’ve got to change these diapers. So, my older sister got tired of reading to me and said sit up, I’ll show you how to read. So I was reading before I got to first grade, and never stopped.” Buying books was too expensive, but their mother took them faithfully to the Bookmobile. “We all five trooped in. I’m sure the tires went up when we filed out.” Andrews remembers the books she checked out: Nancy Drew, Victoria Holt, Mary Stuart and on, in a Gothic vein.

Today the office where she works a little hut left over from the Atlanta Olympics which her husband fixed up for her has the magnifying glass from the Nancy Drew series as the light to her door.

“I’m living my dream,” says Andrews, who has a luscious long-term goal for her fiction: “I want to write a big, juicy overripe peach of a book, and I want my readers to like it and to feel the juice running down their chin and want more, more, more.” This summer Andrews is writing another Southern novel, Hissy Fit, in which interior designer Keeley Murdock catches her fiancŽ cavorting with her maid of honor. Eventually, Andrews hopes to return to Weezie for another book. As to Mary Bliss, who knows? “I do hope she’ll tell me another story,” Andrews says. Anne Morris is a writer in Austin, Texas.

Adriana Trigiani’s enchanting new novel will find a warm welcome from every reader who has encountered a fork in the road to love and taken the more perilous path.

Lucia Sartori is a dynamic young Italian-American woman living in Greenwich Village in the early 1950s. She loves her close-knit family, her church and her job as apprentice to a designer on the fast track at B. Altman’s department store. For Lucia, her work as a seamstress is more than a job: it’s her passion.

Lucia is engaged to Dante DeMartino, a devoted, if unexciting, young man who bears a strong resemblance to her favorite movie star, Don Ameche. She has overlooked many of Dante’s faults until she is challenged one night by Dante’s old-fashioned, controlling mother, who insists that her prospective daughter-in-law give up her beloved career as a seamstress and stay at home after the wedding. Shouldn’t her life revolve around her new husband? Isn’t this the existence every Italian girl aspires to? For Lucia, the answer is a resounding "No, never!" She ends the engagement and sees her life take an irrevocable turn with the arrival of the mysterious, devastatingly attractive John Talbot. The shift from a secure, surefooted lifestyle to one in which Lucia must constantly cope with shifting sands heralds the beginning of a journey that ultimately reveals what will truly bring her happiness.

Trigiani, a television writer who first came to the attention of readers with her popular Big Stone Gap series, has created in Lucia a strong-willed, yet vulnerable heroine whose innocence, determination and optimism charm everyone who crosses her path. While the story ostensibly focuses on Lucia’s romantic hijinks, it is, even more, a testament to the power of familial love and friendship. Readers may find the decidedly wholesome backdrop to the story surprising (remember, we’re back in the 1950s). Perhaps that is Trigiani’s greatest gift to her reader: the recognition that devotion, loyalty and forgiveness will ultimately win the day.

Claire Gerus writes from Norwich, Connecticut.

Dorothea Benton Frank focuses on the funny side of life As a young girl growing up on remote Sullivan’s Island in the South Carolina Lowcountry, Dorothea Benton Frank’s lifeline to the world came in the unlikely guise of a clattering old bookmobile.

Impatient by nature, Dot Frank wasn’t much of a student, but she was a voracious reader. When that mobile library pulled up in front of her mother’s house, she would run to check out her three-book limit, read them all in one day, then fuss and stew until the old clunker returned two weeks later.

Frank’s considerable kinetic energy, if not her study habits, eventually carried her through the Fashion Institute of America in Atlanta and into a globetrotting career as a fashion buyer and representative. She lived in San Francisco, traveled frequently to Europe and Asia, and worked for a decade on Seventh Avenue in New York’s Garment District.

She wasn’t writing a novel, she was living one.

But when her mother died in 1993, Frank was devastated.

“There wasn’t any real way for me to deal with my grief because I was in New Jersey without any family members,” she recalls by phone from her home in Montclair, New Jersey. “My sister and brother live in South Carolina and two of my other brothers live in Texas and Boston. So I began writing to try to put all my feelings down on paper.” A friend stopped over, inquired about the growing monolith of typed pages next to Frank’s word processor, and encouraged her to take a creative writing course at nearby Bloomfield College. Before long, the Lowcountry had a new literary phenom, a Pat Conroy-lite, a princess of tides.

Frank can’t quite believe her good fortune as she prepares to plunge into hardbound fiction with her third novel, Isle of Palms, after hitting the New York Times bestseller list with her first two paperbacks, Sullivan’s Island (2000) and Plantation (2001).

“I’m terrified!” she gasps. “It’s pretty safe when you’re just writing mass market paperbacks, but when you go into hardcovers, you get reviewed. Oh my God, please don’t review me! Because you know it’s not going to be good. I hope I’m dead for a thousand years before [Times critic] Michiko Kakutani knows that I ever drew a breath. Did you ever read her reviews? Oh, God help me!” Frank’s apprehension is understandable. Lowcountry literature, even in the hands of a Conroy or Anne Rivers Siddons, has always fared better with readers than critics, who tend to dismiss it, justly or not, as melodramatic and maudlin. Isle of Palms (the real one is situated just across a causeway from Sullivan’s Island) concerns the midlife flowering of Anna Lutz Abbot, an independent-minded salon owner who has learned how to hold her tongue over a teasing comb to keep her clientele coming back. When she was 10, Anna lost her mother. Her domineering grandmother forced Anna’s father, Douglas, to sell their beloved family home on Isle of Palms and move to Charleston. Come summer, after years of living with her father, Anna is finally ready to return to Isle of Palms and open her own salon.

But the island holds plenty of housewarming surprises for Anna: her daughter Emily returns from college as a rebellious, tattooed teen; her new best friend Lucy begins dating Douglas; her gay ex-husband Jim has outrageous plans for the salon, and her new main squeeze Arthur (a Yankee!) has commitment phobia. Overseeing all the comings and goings in true Southern neighborly fashion are Miss Angel and Miss Mavis, “ladies of a certain age” whose running commentary on Anna’s life rings hilariously true.

Beneath the Fannie Flagg-style jocularity and small-town anecdotes lies a more serious subject: loneliness. This unlikely cast of characters forms an ad hoc family to fill the void left by less-than-perfect biological ones.

“There are a lot of divorced people who also need a way to connect: a Sunday dinner they can count on or, when they get sick, somebody to be at their side, or when they’re worried about something they have someone to call. There are a lot of people who don’t have anyone,” says Frank.

“I get e-mail from people who say, I read seven or eight books a week,’ and I think, my God, what’s going on with your life? I think we have become a society of people who are never going to live up to that mythology of families and children and everybody staying in the same place and going to Grandmama’s on Sunday. That’s just not how life is anymore and so people have had to make changes. This book sort of tells them that this is OK.” Frank’s life has eerie parallels to that of her friend and neighbor Conroy: they both hail from large Irish Catholic families, suffered intense personal traumas growing up (Conroy’s father was The Great Santini; Frank’s died in front of her eyes of a heart attack when she was 4) and have ties to the Citadel (Conroy and her father’s alma mater). Coincidentally, they even own matching pairs of Cavalier King Charles spaniels.

“I’m sort of like his evil sister,” she chuckles. “Switched at birth or something.” But unlike Conroy, who overtly battles his innermost demons in his work, Frank intentionally keeps things light for those who want to visit the Lowcountry without tears.

“I understand that my first job as a writer is to entertain. You have to write a story that people are going to want to keep turning the pages,” she says. “If you look deeper, there are other themes in Isle of Palms. If I’ve entertained you, I’ve done a good job. If I’ve entertained you and given you something to talk about with somebody else, I’ve done a better job. If I’ve entertained you and given you something to talk about, and at the end of the day you have changed yourself a little bit, I’ve done a very good job.” Jay MacDonald lives and writes in Mississippi.