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A MOMENT IN THE SUN By John Sayles [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WHO OCCUPIES THIS HOUSE By Kathleen Hill [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

THE DEAD REPUBLIC By Roddy Doyle [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

THE TRUTH ABOUT LOVE By Josephine Hart. Knopf, $24. Like Olivia O'Hara, the Irish actress who narrates the final third of Hart's new novel, Hart suffered through the deaths of siblings as a teenager and as an adult emigrated to England. The novel opens in 1962 with the accidental death of Olivia's younger brother, yet her initial response is muffled by Hart's shift in perspective from the victim and his family to a middle-aged German scholar living near the O'Haras' village. Thomas Middlehoff has a history of lost loves, and as the decades pass he and Olivia become uneasy confidants, confessing truths about memory, guilt and longing. Middlehoff's wartime experiences in Germany also segue into Olivia's journalistic account of Irish sectarian atrocities. In this sophisticated literary work, Hart shows how love of family and love of country can feed from each other. But to fulfill the promise of her title and dramatize patriotism as intensely as she does the O'Haras' lifelong bonds requires a more substantial narrative, a shortfall that seems to be acknowledged by the book's two-page bibliography. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

THE HOLY CITY By Patrick McCabe [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

MAN IN THE DARK By Paul Auster [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

SHADOW COUNTRY A New Rendering of the Watson Legend. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]