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THE LIFESPAN OF A FACT, by John D'Agata and Jim Fingal (Norton; paper, $17.95.) An essayist insists that his only responsibility is to truth and beauty, not factual accuracy. His fact checker begs to differ. A fiery argument ensues. BRINGING UP BEBE: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting, by Pamela Druckerman (Penguin Press, $25.95.) Why French children sleep through the night and eat like adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BERLIN STORIES By Robert Walser. New York Review Books; paper, $14. ''Let us be merry, rich, light, earnest, courteous, virtuous and well mannered,'' Walser exhorts, as if invoking a scout's oath for the well-rounded metropolitan. Add ''arch'' and ''awe-struck'' and you've mined the cheerier impulses of this troubled Swiss writer as he recorded his experiences in the Berlin of the early 1900s. These essayish ''stories,'' most appearing in English for the first time, reveal the exuberance (and, in a heart-rending coda, the defeat) of a young artist initiating himself into the glorious bustle of his adopted city. Everything is observed in language that asserts his professed posture as ''a perfumed and mincing know-it-all and write-it-all.'' To Walser, Berlin's architecture ''errs perhaps on the side of the drastic'' and theater should be ''shameless,'' since ''it must after all be reckoned among the secret pleasures of a theatergoer to be permitted to find sufficient grounds to blush.'' Having exalted the gifts of a critic friend, he mutters, ''Did you catch the undercurrent of vindictive envy?'' Not to be outdone, Walser deploys his own criticism with panache. As he derides ''the princely Homburgly nature'' of a pompous actor, you can almost hear the collection's principal translator, Susan Bernofsky, laughing into her laptop. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE BETRAYAL By Helen Dunmore. Black Cat. Paper, $14.95. Dunmore gamely returns to Soviet Russia with her follow-up to ''The Siege,'' which captured the frenzy of Leningrad ravaged by German forces in 1941. Eleven years later, the fear and distrust that poisoned relations between war-torn residents has only been amplified. Among the survivors are the members of a family pressed back into service from the earlier novel: a nursery teacher named Anna; her younger brother, Kolya; and her husband, Andrei, a pediatrician who agrees to treat the cancer-ridden son of a high-ranking secret police officer. Not a good idea. Dunmore has also written children's books and poetry, a resume that reveals itself in the economic architecture of her storytelling, which at its most effective can make manifest the bleakness of a totalitarian landscape and at its least seems to read like a starchy translation of Pushkin. But she's good at planting unobtrusive walk-on characters who step upsettingly to the forefront as Andrei's predicament careers toward its preordained crash. ''The Betrayal'' pulls readers along with the queasy allure of long-anticipated bad news. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Wouldn't it be nice, Leonard Rosen asks in his first novel, ALL CRY CHAOS (Permanent Press, $29), if the broken world we live in could be mended by the application of some universal mathematical formula? James Fenster, a Harvard professor who's in Amsterdam to deliver a paper before the World Trade Organization, has been working on that very thing. But before he can deliver his remarks on ''The Mathematical Inevitability of a One-World Economy,'' a bomb charged with rocket fuel delivers a surgical strike on his hotel room. Henri Poincare, a veteran Interpol agent, seems the ideal man to investigate the murder, since he's the great-grandson of the mathematician Jules Henri Poincare and something of a brain himself. ''So who kills a mathematician, other than another mathematician?'' his young protege wants to know. Poincare turns up some promising candidates, one of them a financier who funded some of Fenster's work in hopes of applying it to the stock market, another a brilliant economist turned political provocateur. There's even a group of religious fundamentalists intent on creating the chaos that would hasten the Second Coming. With the exception of the victim's former fiancee, whose suspicious behavior has also made her a person of interest, these suspects are all sold on the idea that ''human behavior can be modeled mathematically, just as any complex, dynamic system in nature can be modeled.'' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SISTER, by Rosamund Lupton (Crown, $24.) In Lupton's novel, which is both tear-jerking and spine-tingling, a free-spirited sister's death -- perhaps it was murder -- forces a highly conventional woman to examine the truth of their relationship. ANDES, by Michael Jacobs (Counterpoint, paper, $24.95.) Jacobs, a somewhat unlikely adventurer, describes his trek down South America's great mountain range to its icy finish in Patagonia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

ZOO CITY By Lauren Beukes. Angry Robot, paper, $7.99. Beukes's energetic noir phantasmagoria, the winner of this year's Arthur C. Clarke Award, crackles with original ideas. The title refers to a Johannesburg slum where the narrator, Zinzi December, lives among criminals shunned by decent people. Following an unexplained event, Zoo residents have acquired animal familiars and strange talents as physical manifestations of their guilt. (Beukes has fun imagining a documentary, ''The Warlord and the Penguin: The Untold Story of Dehqan Baiyat,'' in which a New York film student turned Afghan warlord begins to appear ''accompanied incongruously by an Antarctic bird in a flak jacket.'') December's familiar is a sloth, and her special power, which she has turned into a career, is her preternatural ability to find lost belongings by identifying the traits that link them to their owners: a hovering black tumor in one case, a ''halo of dandelion fluff'' in another. But the job goes bad when December reluctantly accepts a missing-person case from a powerful music producer who has demons of his own. As December finds herself in extreme danger, Beukes skillfully employs all the twists of first-rate noir. An ending that includes a giant crocodile may be more conventional than the setup, but it's still powerful indeed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

THE PALE KING: An Unfinished Novel, by David Foster Wallace (Little, Brown, $27.99.) Unfolding on an epic scale, this coherent, if uncompleted, portrayal of our age is a grand parable of ''late capitalism'' set in the innards of the Internal Revenue Service. FATE, TIME, AND LANGUAGE: An Essay on Free Will, by David Foster Wallace. Edited by Steven M. Cahn and Maureen Eckert (Columbia University, paper, $19.95.) Wallace's precocious undergraduate thesis on the philosopher Richard Taylor. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

GREAT SOUL: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India, by Joseph Lelyveld (Knopf, $28.95.) While Gandhi's tenets (a Muslim-Hindu alliance, an end to untouchability) remain largely unfulfilled, it is his role as a social reformer that most interests Lelyveld. FUNERAL FOR A DOG, by Thomas Pletzinger. Translated by Ross Benjamin (Norton, paper, $14.95.) In this German novel, a children's book and the dog of the title reflect the tragic history of a menage-a-trois. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A WIDOW'S STORY: A Memoir, by Joyce Carol Oates (Ecco/HarperCollins, $27.99.) The prolific author has assembled a book more painfully self-revelatory that anything Oates the fiction writer or critic has ever dared to produce. WIDOW: Stories, by Michelle Latiolais (Bellevue Literary Press, paper, $14.95.) While presenting a world wrapped in spiked barbed wire, this collection also contains passages of searing tenderness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

PLAYER ONE What Is to Become of Us. By Douglas Coupland. Anansi, paper, $15.95. Where will you be when the apocalypse drops? For the anguished strangers in this novel by the author of ''Generation X,'' the answer is the cocktail lounge of an airport hotel in Toronto. Karen, a lovelorn divorced mother, is here to meet a man from her online discussion group about peak oil. Rick, the bartender, is a recovering alcoholic who intends to give his life savings to a self-help guru. Luke, a pastor experiencing a crisis of faith, is on the run after stealing from his church. And Rachel, a ''cool Hitchcock blonde'' whose brain isn't wired to understand ''humor, beauty, voice inflection, musicality, irony, sarcasm and metaphor,'' is here because her father called her a robot and she wants to prove him wrong by finding a mate and having a baby. When the price of oil quickly and inexplicably rises, a public panic ensues, chemical explosions go off and the characters are cut off from the outside world. What is to become of them and humanity in general? Coupland warns that Rachel and her personality deficiencies portend our future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BARNACLE LOVE By Anthony De Sa. Algonquin, paper, $13.95. De Sa's linked stories offer a double bildungsroman. In 1954, at the age of 20, Manuel Rebelo abandons his boring job at an Azores bank in favor of the risky life of a cod fisherman and a grandiose dream of escape. Rescued from the sea off the coast of Newfoundland by a fur trapper, Manuel becomes involved with the man's daughter, is betrayed by her and then abandons her. Years later, he and the new family he has started in Toronto pay a return visit to the Azores, drawn back for the funeral of his domineering mother. Manuel seems to have freed himself from his past, but in the remainder of these stories his son, Antonio, tells how his father failed in various businesses in Canada and fell into alcoholism -- and how Antonio, his sister and their mother stuck like barnacles to a Manuel who came to resemble his hateful mother. Although the book invites psychological analysis, its originality is anthropological, presented in descriptions of a Portuguese fishing community whose commonplace customs are retained even in a North American city. Yet De Sa has no nostalgia for that fishing village; it was there, after all, that Manuel's mother felt entitled to put glass in her son's marriage bed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For centuries, the most glorified fighting -- often reserved for officers and noblemen -- was mounted combat. Michael Morpurgo's superb 1982 young adult novel War Horse (Scholastic, paper, $6.99) follows Joey, a half-Thoroughbred farm horse, as he is separated from his 15-year-old owner, Albert, and taken to France in 1914 with a British cavalry unit. Albert, who is too young to enlist, vows to follow Joey into battle. Reprinted to coincide with a hit stage adaptation in London, ''War Horse'' is now being made into a film by Steven Spielberg and will be staged at Lincoln Center in the spring. Although a first-person animal narrator asks a lot of the reader, Joey's voice -- unsentimental and brave under fire -- amplifies the emotional impact of the story. He tells of an early skirmish: ''The first terrible shells fell among us and the machine guns opened up. The bedlam of battle had begun. All around me, men cried and fell to the ground, and horses reared and screamed in an agony of fear and pain.'' Flashing swords are nothing against machine guns, and graceful Joey turns out to be of more use as a cart horse than an officer's mount. The historical details in this short book powerfully ground it in its moment, but a timeless question drives the story: Will the two friends, Joey and Albert, ever see each other again? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

THE PEOPLE WHO WATCHED HER PASS BY By Scott Bradfield. 146 pp. Two Dollar Radio. Paper, $14.50. Bradfield supplies a scant few orienting facts in the course of this challenging, original novel. At the start, a 3-year-old girl named Sal is kidnapped by the man who fixes her parents' water heater, then taken to live with him in a dingy bungalow near Los Angeles. From there it is a billowy adventure of a book, scarcely bound to the conventions of narrative, as Sal drifts through the world and meets an array of people with wildly varying motives, values and lifestyles. Nearly everybody wants something from this little girl in a ratty pink cotton dress. Some want to worship her. Others want to sexually abuse her. Still others, fueled by compassion or self-righteousness, yearn to protect her. Sal runs from all of them; when she does choose to stay with someone or other, it is because they do not want anything from her: ''The old man never told Sal what to do or think, so it wasn't like living with someone, or hiding behind somebody else's notion of who you were.'' In a book that supplies few answers, Bradfield's lavish eloquence is the presiding constant, and over time he allows brief, quenching glimpses of little Sal's character. Here, she flips through magazines in a laundromat where she is living: ''Most of the magazines contained glossy pictures of young ladies who looked the way Sal felt. Detached, slightly petulant, gloaming with fabric and conditioners, they stood in awkward poses, their heads cocked at odd angles to perceive a world beyond the one that kept perceiving them.'' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Podcast Scheduled to appear this week are Graydon Carter on Martin Amis's new novel, ''The Pregnant Widow''; Howard Bryant on his biography of the baseball great Henry Aaron; Olen Steinhauer, author of the novel ''The Nearest Exit''; and Jennifer Schuessler with best-seller news. Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of the Book Review, is the host. Paper Cuts The Book Review's blog covers books and other forms of printed matter. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

SOLAR, by Ian McEwan (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $26.95.) In McEwan's funniest novel yet, a self-deluding physicist cheats on his wives, sends an innocent man to jail and tries to cash in on another scientist's plans against global warming. VANISHING POINT: Not a Memoir, by Ander Monson (Graywolf, paper, $16.) Monson's collection, in a tradition that has been described as the ''lyric essay,'' pointillistically confronts puzzles of truth and identity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

THE COLLECTED STORIES OF DEBORAH EISENBERG 980 pp. Picador. Paper, $22 [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

THE VAGRANTS, by Yiyun Li (Random House, $15.) In Muddy River, a town 700 miles from Beijing, 80,000 people live in overcrowded shacks set among small factories. Many are illiterate, and they scheme and steal to stay alive. This novel opens in 1979 as a 28-year-old woman, a former Red Guard who repudiated her past, is about to be executed. A year later, leaflets about her case begin to circulate, and townspeople learn of a ''democratic wall'' in Beijing. Li, who was born in China, writes in English; our reviewer, Pico Iyer, praised her ''grieving and unremitting first novel.'' FRANKLY, MY DEAR: ''Gone With the Wind'' Revisited, by Molly Haskell. (Yale University, $15.) In Scarlett O'Hara, ''the post-suffragette flapper meets the post-feminist power girl,'' Haskell writes. This discursive essay on ''Gone With the Wind'' ''explores the reverberating complexities of the Margaret Mitchell franchise,'' Steve Coates wrote on the Book Review's blog, Paper Cuts. By the time ''Gone With the Wind'' was filmed, Joseph P. Kennedy had left the movie business, in which he had been a serious figure in the 1920s, the owner of several studios. Cari Beauchamp's JOSEPH P. KENNEDY PRESENTS: His Hollywood Years(Vintage, $18.95) shows him as ruthless, firing employees and cheating on his long-suffering wife. Kennedy cared about profits, not art, and he helped shift the industry's concern to short-term gains. He made a lot of money, and he also became deeply involved with Gloria Swanson. Beauchamp's smart, well-sourced book illuminates a sometimes obscure passage in Kennedy's career. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Kyle Baker's graphic novel SPECIAL FORCES (Image, paper, $16.99) reads at first like a nearly straightforward military fantasy, drawn with a peculiar hybrid of hyperrealistic precision and nutty exaggeration. Eventually, though, Baker bares his fangs: the book is the harshest, most serrated satire of the Iraq war yet published. These forces are ''special'' as in ''Mama says I'm special'' -- the unstoppable American soldier Zone is severely autistic, which is why he's so good at following orders. And the story's plot, it gradually becomes clear, proceeds from the premise that every lie the Bush administration told about the war was true. So terrorists declare, ''We hate your freedom''; felons forced into military service become brave tactical geniuses who wouldn't dream of hurting children; and Iraqi weapons of mass destruction are not only real but concealed in an oil refinery, where Americans would never think to look because of course the war wasn't about oil. The style and tone of Gabrielle Bell's comics are at the opposite end of the spectrum from Baker's -- flat, dry and understated -- but they allow her, too, to get away with just about anything. The brief title piece of her collection CECIL AND JORDAN IN NEW YORK: Stories (Drawn & Quarterly, $19.95) is narrated by a young woman who's just moved to the city with her filmmaker boyfriend; it's a clear-cut tale of impecunious 20-something artists until halfway through, when the narrator abruptly transforms herself into a chair, gets taken home by someone who finds her on the sidewalk and decides that her old life won't miss her. The engine of these mercilessly observed stories is squirminess: emotional awkwardness so intense that it can erupt into magic or just knot itself into scars. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

DOWN, DOWN, DOWN A Journey to the Bottom of the Sea. Written and illustrated by Steve Jenkins .Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $17. (Ages 4 to 8) Through a magical use of cut paper, Jenkins takes the reader on a voyage to the deepest part of the ocean. Multilayered and multicolored, bizarre creatures almost seem to move on the page: flying squid, cold-eyed mackerel and lacy, bioluminescent siphonophores (lighted up like Broadway bulbs). Helpful descriptions both inform and entertain. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A QUIET ADJUSTMENT, by Benjamin Markovits (Norton, $14.95.) ''I fear very much you will find out you have married a devil,'' Lord Byron confides to his new wife, Annabella Milbanke, at the start of their honeymoon -- and she does. This eloquent novel, the second in a proposed trilogy, is presented in a third-person narration that seems to arise from Annabella, a beautiful 19-year-old. Her perspective is conveyed with a hesitant formality reminiscent of Henry James, and ''phrase after phrase winks for readerly attention,'' our reviewer, Jay Parini, said. REBORN: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963,by Susan Sontag. Edited by David Rieff (Picador, $15.) These notebooks -- two more sets are planned -- open when Sontag is 14, and take her to the brink of success. Rieff, her son, writes in a moving preface that he would have preferred not to release this material but did so only because Sontag's papers had become public on her death in 2004. From the beginning, Sontag appears serious and dedicated to high culture, and although she is self-absorbed, events like her marriage and the birth of her son pass almost without mention. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

SOMETIMES WE'RE ALWAYS REAL SAME-SAME By Mattox Roesch. Unbridled, paper, $15.95. When Roesch's thoughtful first novel opens, Cesar Stone, a 17-year-old Los Angeles gang member whose brother is serving life for murder, is living alone with his financially struggling mother. Determined to make a better life, she moves the two of them back to her hometown -- Unalakleet, Alaska, a small fishing village where much of her quirky and eccentric family still lives. (Imagine the protagonist discovering he has a relative named ''Aunty Striptease.'') But the most colorful family member is Go-boy, a cousin a few years older and several inches taller than Cesar, whose ''black hair stood on end, messy, like a cloud of smoke.'' Largehearted and enchanted by life's mysteries, Go endeavors to make Cesar feel at home, showing him around and getting him a job. Nevertheless, Cesar, homesick, plans his escape -- until he meets Go-boy's beautiful stepsister. But when Go's enchanted ways darken into something more dangerous, it is Cesar who must help his cousin. Particularly in the middle stretch it feels as though Roesch, who started his career as a story writer, is still learning how to work the stick shift on a long-distance trip, lingering too long in second gear. But he deftly portrays Unalakleet, where ''every yard is littered with skeletons of four-wheelers and snow machines and fishing boats,'' and once he gets the hang of it, he delivers the narrative soundly to its climactic destination. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Say something nasty about a child -- even if it's true, and even if it's your own child -- and there's hell to pay. Geraldine Bretherick, a stay-at-home mom, does that very thing in Sophie Hannah's new psychological-suspense thriller, THE WRONG MOTHER (Penguin, paper, $15), and sure enough, she's dead before the story starts. Hannah also wrote persuasively about modern women who buckle under the stress of motherhood in ''Little Face,'' but characters in that novel felt compassion for the young mother who insisted that someone had switched newborns on her. Here, everyone hates Geraldine and recoils from the sentiments that come to light in her journal. ''There's a 'conspiracy of silence' about what motherhood is really like,'' she wrote, between her fierce and funny rants against manipulative children who torment their exhausted mothers. No wonder the police are easily persuaded that Geraldine killed herself after drowning her daughter. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The touchy-feely vibe of BRITTEN AND BRULIGHTLY (Metropolitan/Holt, paper, $20), an elegant graphic novel by Hannah Berry, has something to do with its format -- the tall, slim, inviting layout of a picture book -- but just as much to do with the intimate, even claustrophobic, content of its narrative. Set in London during some uneasy period when it rains without end on men in double-breasted suits and women in berets, the story tracks the metaphysical crisis of Fernandez Britten, a melancholy ''private researcher'' who has earned the nickname ''the Heartbreaker'' for confirming the suspicions of clients who hire him to spy on their cheating lovers. After a career of exposing the bestiality of human nature, Britten longs to uncover a higher truth, the kind that elevates the beast and confers nobility on his own sleazy trade. The morose P.I., whose shadow-rimmed eyes and tiny, pinched mouth convey his despondent state, thinks he's found his means of redemption when an unhappy heiress hires him to disprove the police investigation's conclusion that her fiance's death was a suicide. Instead of bringing her satisfaction or solace, Britten discovers a truth so ugly that his instinct is to suppress it. But what kind of hero would that make him? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With historical mysteries so thick on the ground, doesn't it sometimes feel like a horse race? (''Going into the backstretch, the Victorians are holding the lead, but the Medievalists are gaining, and heeeere comes the Age of Enlightenment!'') Maybe that's why Frank Tallis has surged to the front of the field riding his dark horse, Vienna in the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Opening in the Hapsburg capital at the height of the social season, FATAL LIES (Random House, paper, $15) immediately transports us back to the sophisticated world Tallis captured in ''A Death in Vienna'' and ''Vienna Blood.'' Dr. Max Liebermann (whose psychoanalytic methods give this series its peculiar fascination) and his friend Detective Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt are both at the Detectives' Ball when Rheinhardt is called away to investigate the death of a cadet at St. Florian's military academy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

If there's one book that art-comics enthusiasts would be happiest to find in their stockings this year, it's probably KRAMERS ERGOT 7 (Buenaventura, $125), except for the small matter that it's bigger than an entire hearth. This is one of the grandest English-language comics artifacts ever produced -- a mammoth hardcover anthology, 16 by 21 inches, of new stories by several dozen notable cartoonists, including Daniel Clowes, Seth, Gabrielle Bell, Kevin Huizenga, Sammy Harkham (who also edited the book) and the ''Simpsons'' creator Matt Groening. Like the early-20th-century broadsheet newspaper comics pages that inspired it, ''Kramers Ergot'' occupies its readers' entire visual field, and most of its contributors have some fun with its dimensions, cramming the page with tiny details or opening it up for apocalyptically huge vistas. The cleverest gesture comes from Chris Ware, whose two-page contribution is built around a cartoon of a sleeping baby printed at the child's actual size. Few cartoonists of the moment are weirder or more original than Yuichi Yokoyama -- his work obsessively diagrams architecture and design, and just barely clings to shreds of narrative. TRAVEL (PictureBox, paper, $19.95) is remarkably entertaining, given that it's a wordless, nearly 200-page account of an uneventful train voyage. Its first quarter concerns three travelers looking for their seats, and the rest is pretty much what they see out the window as their train passes across Japan, zooming by the disturbing geometries of nature and cities. (The human characters are expressionless glyphs, differentiated only by clothing and hairstyles.) Any individual panel from the book is likely to look almost completely abstract, and the joke of Yokoyama's endnotes is that he's struggling to interpret his own images, too: ''It seems slightly strange that they would sit so close together in an empty train car.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

THE WORLD IS WHAT IT IS: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul, by Patrick French. (Knopf, $30.) A monument truly worthy of its subject, elucidating the enduring but painfully asymmetrical love triangle at the core of Naipaul's life and work. WHAT CAN I DO WHEN EVERYTHING'S ON FIRE?, by Antonio Lobo Antunes. Translated by Gregory Rabassa. (Norton, paper, $19.95.) A novel about life as the son of a downtrodden Lisbon drag queen. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

2666, by Roberto Bolano. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, cloth and paper, $30.) The five autonomous sections of this posthumously published novel interlock to form an astonishing whole, a capstone to Bolano's vaulting ambition. FACTORY GIRLS: From Village to City in a Changing China , by Leslie T. Chang. (Spiegel & Grau, $26.) Chang's engrossing account delves deeply into the lives of young migrant workers in southern China. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This week, Claire Messud reviews Alison Light's ''Mrs. Woolf and the Servants,'' a study of Virginia Woolf's often fraught relationship with the cooks and cleaners who helped make her (and her husband's) literary work possible. Woolf said that a woman needs a room of her own in order to write fiction; does she also need someone to clean it? ''Let's put it another, even less correct, way,'' Messud, whose most recent novel is ''The Emperor's Children,'' wrote in an e-mail message. ''Everyone needs a wife. For heaven's sake, a stay-at-home mum needs a wife.'' Messud, who lives in Cambridge, Mass., with her husband, the critic James Wood, and their two children, hints at a certain level of productive chaos in her own literary household: ''The hovering domestic chores are, experience suggests, a greater burden for women than for men (it seems, somehow, that the men can more often forget about toilet paper and light bulbs); but I think it was Rebecca West who said that a house uncleaned is better than a life unlived. You've got to make choices at some point. About housecleaning and about answering e-mails or the phone, and ultimately about bigger things, too.'' Messud's review appears in this issue. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

AUGUST By Gerard Woodward. Norton, paper, $14.95. It doesn't seem possible Woodward would allow anything bad to happen to the affable members of this slightly eccentric English family, whose lives he details over the course of 15 years. That the years happen to be 1955 through 1970 offers a clue, though, that at least a few of them are going to have trouble adapting to a world where solid British manners are being tested by modernity. A good-natured art teacher named Aldous Jones looks forward each year to the month when he, his wife and children can vacation in the Welsh countryside, their arrival ''a cataloging and celebration of sameness'' that anchors them spiritually. But when his son Janus -- an aptly named piano prodigy who can't keep his creative and destructive halves in balance -- begins to fall apart, the aftershock sends another family member seeking chemical comfort, leaving Aldous to wonder whether ''the territory of madness is entered by a doorway of crystallized normality.'' Some readers may already know what becomes of the Jones family, as this novel is the first in a trilogy whose American publisher strangely saw fit to release the second and third volumes, ''I'll Go to Bed at Noon'' and ''A Curious Earth,'' before this one. No matter. What ultimately becomes of the Jones family may not be a mystery, but how it all happens is the stuff of great, if sad, suspense. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]