In a small seaside town in Croatia in 1964, a little boy and little girl meet. They are stunned by the sight of each other; the boy, Luka, faints, and the girl, Dora, wakes him with a kiss. This scenario might touch your heart, but maybe you’ll roll your eyes. I did, especially since Dora is only two. But soon you will be convinced. Arrested. Intoxicated. Natasa Dragnic’s debut, Every Day, Every Hour, is a beautiful, intense little book.

Dora and Luka become inseparable despite their three-year age difference. They spend every minute they can together, often on their special beachside rock while Luka paints the sea. Their first heartache comes when she is six and he is nine: Dora’s family moves away to Paris. Their connection and this separation are life-shaping events, and while they each pursue their passions—Luka’s art, Dora’s acting—the feeling that something is missing is palpable. Their chance reunion comes when Luka exhibits his work in Paris, and the beginning of their love as adults is nothing short of wondrous.

But fate has other ideas: When Luka goes home to see his family, there is his old girlfriend, whose acquaintance he had recently made again, before Paris. She is pregnant.

So begins more than two decades of stubbornly obtained and refused love, yearning and loss. Dora’s star rises in Paris while Luka’s talents languish in a hotel desk job supporting his wife and child. He does not love the wife at all, and his choices and weaknesses are nearly as frustrating for the reader as they are for Dora. But the pair never lose their need for each other. It permeates them, and that’s a potent spell. The tenderness with which Dragnic paints her characters in both happiness and pain leaves one breathless, even in tears. (I cried. A lot.) Her words have a hooking rhythm, and the novel’s structure is like a song, with verses and repeating choruses: events repeat, entire passages resurface with small changes, and it is reassuring, entrancing, even as it makes you ache.

“Who has ever loved as we do?” Luka quotes Pablo Neruda. Indeed. Hopeless romantics will love this book. It deserves a chance from others, too. Pick it up; let it work its magic.

A central metaphor lies at the heart of this debut novel: a lioness, against all empirically derived expectation, guarding a young gazelle in the savanna for a period of days as tense as a knife's edge, protecting the fawn and yet holding it hostage. Our protagonist Jonas, the young war-afflicted refugee (or alternately: displaced person) of an unnamed conflict in an unnamed Muslim land, has come to the United States under the auspices of a humanitarian relief organization. American might destroys his family and village; American conscience gives him new opportunity.

Jonas subsequently struggles to find a foothold in his new home, with the secrets of those black days between the attack and his rescue haunting each waking moment and often carrying him into some deaf and speechless chasm. "Where does your mind go?" repeats his counselor Paul, who specializes in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, urging Jonas to shed light on these memories, to unburden his story. But in the end, as with each of the relationships in this novel, their dynamic slides from protector/protected into mutual threat as the truth of the past becomes menacingly clear.

Dau's prose is crisp and fluid and never wavers, but neither does it take many risks. His characters' stories are digestible even in their isolation and horror, his themes clear—for this Dau deserves praise as a scrivener and wordsmith. However, those characters never quite rise in relief from their journalistic counterparts (Dau spent a decade in post-war reconstruction and development and presumably drew from lived experience rather than headlines, though not with differentiable results), and the reader is left watching a shadow play instead of peering into the diorama the author seems to have intended.

Many people think of the Rwandan genocide as a single, inexplicable eruption of violence that came out of nowhere, and ended with close to a million people being slaughtered within a matter of weeks. Most of the victims were from an ethnic group called the Tutsi. They were butchered, often at close range, by neighbors, former friends and even family members. Why? Because.

In Running the Rift, Naomi Benaron demonstrates that the genocide came slowly, over years, through the eyes of a young Tutsi man named Jean Patrick Nkuba. All Jean Patrick wants to do is run in the Olympics. He doesn’t want to start cutting people up with a panga because of some ideology no one understands. After all, the Belgians imposed the Tutsi and Hutu designation on the Rwandan people, many years before. Now they can only be told apart by ethnicity cards that everyone must carry.

Benaron’s focus on this one young man is part of the book’s brilliance. Our fear for Jean Patrick begins early and builds as we identify with him more and more. Had Benaron concentrated on too many people, the reader’s dread would have been too diffuse. Even as he’s roughed up, discriminated against and forced to pass as a Hutu just to fulfill his passion for running, Jean Patrick still refuses to believe that his country will descend into madness. Of course not—none of us would. What will happen in Rwanda, whose beauty Benaron rapturously describes, is incomprehensible in a society that thinks of itself as even a little bit civilized. The harassment will pass, Jean Patrick believes, and when he wins the Olympics and people find out he’s a Tutsi after all, the ridiculous prejudice against his people will be gone forever.

Of course, it doesn’t work out that way. But before the horror becomes inescapable, Jean Patrick lives his life. Benaron writes beautifully about the pain and exhilaration of being an Olympic-level runner (she’s a triathlete), of the friends Jean Patrick makes at school, of his savvy and taciturn coach, his loving mother and uncle and beloved brothers and sisters, the nutty white American professor he meets who insists on taking pictures of everything. Even the death of a cousin from malaria is sad, but ordinary. How can these good people know that in the months to come they’ll look back on such quotidian deaths with something like nostalgia? It’s unbearable; Benaron’s genius is that we read on despite it.

Written in 1989 and discovered among the author’s papers after his death in 2003, Roberto Bolaño’s The Third Reich is a moody, atmospheric story of obsession—obsession with love, history and the impenetrability of the human psyche.

Set in resort town on Spain’s Costa Brava, the novel is narrated by Udo Berger, returning with his girlfriend to the hotel where he had vacationed with his family as a child. Udo is a champion wargamer—absorbed in board games that recreate famous battles—and he plans to spend part of the holiday quietly playing and writing about them.

But soon he finds himself entangled in the lives of another German couple, Charly (whose disappearance while windsurfing is a mystery at the core of the novel) and Hanna, as well as those of a pair of shadowy locals known only as the Wolf and the Lamb. But the person whose presence will affect him most profoundly is El Quemado, a man disfigured by terrible burn scars who runs a pedal boat concession on the town beach. He eventually joins Udo in a game that recreates the European battles of World War Two—the game that gives the novel its title. El Quemado quickly overcomes his novice mistakes to give Udo more of a match than he’d bargained for.

Udo is also obsessed with Frau Else, the hotel manager. Her husband supposedly lies gravely ill in one of the establishment’s rooms, but Udo wonders whether the man may be implicated in some disturbing events (a rape, secret coaching of El Quemado in the game) as he engages in serious flirtation with the older woman.

Bolaño displays consummate skill in describing the pace of life in the sleepy beach town, as the pleasant days of late summer give way to the ominous fall. While the pace of the novel is languid and much of the story is told through Udo’s interior monologue, Bolaño effectively winds the tension and sustains an air of growing menace for the novel’s length. The Third Reich is unquestionably slight when compared to Bolaño masterworks like 2666, but it’s not a bad point of entry into his impressive body of work.

For the last five decades, Anita Desai has kept her focus on Indian characters coping with modern life at home and around the world. Her most recent work, The Artist of Disappearance, is a collection of three novellas set in the India of the not-too-distant past, written with Desai’s usual elegance and cool sympathy.

The first two stories are about individuals who hover at the edges of life. Offered new opportunities, they hang back or push ahead, only to be rebuffed by forces outside their control. In “The Museum of Final Journeys,” the narrator remembers his early years as a civil servant in a changing country and a private museum filled to the brim with fine art and sculpture moldering away in the middle of the woods. Though the caretakers beg him to help them with maintenance and funding, he lets the opportunity slip away. Still, his dreams are haunted by the memory. In “Translator Translated,” Prema, a lonely teacher grasps at the chance to translate a beloved regional author, who writes in the native language the teacher’s own mother spoke. But after finding moderate success, Prema begins to alter the texts she’s been assigned, betraying the trust of the author and her family.

The books title story tells of Ravi, a recluse living in isolation in the decaying ruins of his family’s estate. When the grounds are visited by a group of documentary filmmakers, they uncover an outdoor area where he has been arranging plants, rocks and leaves into elaborate patterns. Their discovery is so distressing to Ravi that he vows never to make anything again. But the urge to create is too strong, and the final image depicting the way this fiercely proud but private man continues to make art will leave the reader profoundly moved.

All three stories document a modern culture in which the indigenous is commercialized and art is made only to be sold to the widest possible audience. Whatever is unique runs the risk of being destroyed or commodified. But Desai’s characters can’t completely hide their singularity or their passion. These are not action-packed dramas, but small tales by a master storyteller wise to the powerful effects of loneliness and the human desire to leave something significant behind.

It goes without saying that the French know a thing or two about love. In his heartfelt, heartbreaking novel, translated from the French, award-winning writer David Foenkinos proves that he knows a great deal about men, women, love lost and love found.

At the beginning of Delicacy, young, beautiful Natalie appears to have it all: a high-powered job at a growing corporation, an exciting life in Paris and a great love with her husband François. François and Natalie met by chance on the streets of Paris—a romantic meeting place if there ever was one—and quickly settled into a blissful, dynamic courtship and marriage. Then the unthinkable happens: François is struck by a car and killed while out for a run, and Natalie’s whole world comes crashing down.

Of course her friends and family try to provide some comfort. Her smarmy boss, Charles, hopelessly in love with her, promises that her job will be waiting for her whenever she decides to return. And yet she simply cannot imagine a life without François. But life must go on, even for the brokenhearted, and Natalie eventually returns to work. There she discovers Markus, a co-worker she’s known peripherally for some time. He’s a Swede and a bit of an oddball, but for some reason, Natalie kisses him in her office one day, and the course of her life is forever changed.

Foenkinos writes beautifully, in simple language with many comic asides to the reader, and his portrayal of a woman in crisis is stirring. His characters—Natalie, Markus and even Charles—feel like people we know or would like to know. And the way in which his charming novel unfolds is pure reading pleasure.

It’s easy to see why this book has been adapted for the French screen, with Amélie star Audrey Tautou perfectly cast as Natalie. Reading Delicacy is like taking a vacation from one’s own world and stepping into the complicated life of another—complete with the pain of loss, the difficulty of starting over and the pure joy of falling in love.

EDITOR'S NOTE: The release date of this book has been changed by the publisher, HarperPerennial. It will be available in February 2012.

Aravind Adiga emerged as a powerful new voice in literature with his debut, The White Tiger, a tale of the terrible lengths to which one poor Indian man will go to rise above his station, which went on to win the Man Booker Prize. Adiga’s third novel, Last Man in Tower, delves into the streets of Mumbai to reveal the city through the eyes of the middle class.

It focuses on a battle between an old teacher, Masterji, who refuses to sell his apartment, and a developer, Mr. Shah, who is making an inarguably generous offer to buy the building. On the sidelines are Masterji’s 20-some neighbors from Vishram Society Tower A, depicted with precision and humor. Each member of the Society has been offered a substantial selling price for their portion of the crumbling building, but without Masterji’s signature, no one will get any money.

Masterji and Mr. Shah’s battle is ultimately over the caste system: Masterji is traditional, a believer in “the idea of being respectable and living among similar people,” while Mr. Shah has built his success on change. Each is absolute in his belief. Adiga heightens the intrigue by making neither man’s narration trustworthy, as Masterji is delusional and Mr. Shah has a builder’s reputation for unreliability.

Last Man in Tower races along with unstoppable suspense, going beyond the gaze of The White Tiger to explore even more of the rapidly changing India. The result is as compelling as it is complex.

Only someone who has actually served as a wartime diplomat in northern Afghanistan could craft a novel as heartbreaking, real and compelling as Patricia McArdle’s Farishta. Winner of Amazon’s 2010 Breakthrough Novel Award, Farishta is the story of 47-year-old American foreign service officer Angela Morgan, who 21 years earlier lost both her husband and her unborn baby when the U.S. Embassy in Beirut was bombed. Still in mourning and suffering from PTSD, Angela has reached a dead end in both her personal and professional lives. An emotional wreck, she is given a choice by her U.S. State Department superiors: retire early or accept an assignment at an isolated British Army compound in the dangerous—and devastatingly poor—Balkh province of Afghanistan, where she will be the only woman and only American.

Angela’s reluctant acceptance takes her, along with readers, to a place few see: a stark area of Afghanistan where women are imprisoned for “marriage crimes,” families burn garbage for cooking fuel and archaeologists fight as hard as soldiers to save 2,000-year-old Hellenistic treasures.

New York City native and Marine Corps brat McArdle uses her more than 30 years in the U.S. diplomatic corps to bring Angela to life. Other characters equally vivid and engaging are Rahim, the Afghan translator who in many ways becomes the child Angela never had; Nilofar, a young, fearless law student who through her own work battling for Afghan women’s rights helps Angela find a new sense of purpose; and Mark Davies, a handsome British intelligence officer who helps Angela rediscover her spirit and her heart.

In the Dari language spoken in northern Afghanistan, the name Angela means “farishta” or “angel.” For many of the Afghan women and children in this novel, Angela becomes an unexpected angel. McArdle is also a real “farishta” for Afghanistan, as she demonstrates that even though the need for international military aid is coming to an end, the need for international human aid has just begun. Farishta is a fabulous debut novel, as readable as it is relevant.

Read an interview with Patricia McArdle about Farishta.

Teju Cole’s Open City follows the peripatetic ramblings of its narrator through the streets of New York City. Julius begins to take nightly walks as solace after breaking up with a girlfriend, but the travels soon take on a momentum of their own, offering opportunity for him to process the chaos of his days as a psychiatric intern, while allowing time to reflect on the development and diversity of the city.

Julius is good company: erudite, clever, with a wide-reaching interest in almost everyone and everything. He seeks out new experiences and finds much to remark on. Exhibitions, public monuments, novels—his commentary is as constant as his wanderings. Encounters with fellow New Yorkers, many of them immigrants, give him further occasion to ponder the changes in urban life, especially those wrought by September 11. (A frequently updated website dedicated to the novel, http://op-cit.tumblr.com, features photographs, texts and links to music mentioned in the novel which enriches the reading experience even more).

An impromptu trip to Brussels offers further opportunity for contemplation, not only of his own childhood in Lagos as the son of a Nigerian father and German mother, but on the changing ethnic make-up of this most European of cities. As in New York, Julius is attuned to the diversity of his surroundings, especially when it concerns people of color. He easily connects with his fellow travelers, from the Belgian woman sitting next to him on the plane, to the Moroccan man who runs an Internet café with whom he gets into a thoughtful discussion on the Middle East.

As Open City continues, an air of sadness settles over the story. A patient dies, as does Julius’ college advisor. Once back in New York, he runs into the sister of an old friend who shares some startling information. His response—or lack thereof—is disturbing, forcing the reader to question Julius’ emotional stability. Julius, who is hypersensitive to the traces time leaves behind in an urban landscape, is less attuned to the traces time leaves behind on people, who also bear marks left by prior experiences.

In his previous book Every Day is for the Thief, Cole returned to his hometown of Lagos, seeking out places that were strange or unfamiliar. Open City provides a mirror image of this earlier plot, as Julius looks for familiarity in cities not his own. Though more overtly fictional, it also expands upon Cole’s idea that the past is always with us. Open City is an intriguing work, though perhaps more satisfying for readers who enjoy a little ambiguity in their fiction.