Writers have long used a child’s perspective to relate fictional accounts of historical catastrophe, notably Günter Grass in The Tin Drum and Imre Kertész in Fatelessness. Bosnian-born German author Sasa Stanisic offers the latest installment in this tradition with his 2006 debut novel, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, a sensation in Germany, now skillfully translated by Anthea Bell. Through the eyes of the fourteen-year-old narrator, Aleksandar Krsmanovi, we witness a massacre perpetrated by Bosnian Serbs against their Muslim neighbors in the town of Vi¨egrad in 1992. The outlines of the plot are autobiographical: The protagonist’s escape to Germany from

With its Wild West tale of prostitutes, Indians, wagon trains, guns, silver mines, opium, and suicide, Missy, the debut novel by Scottish playwright Chris Hannan, is alternately dazzling in its historical verisimilitude and linguistic playfulness and frustrating—is it intended to entertain or to enlighten? Wrestling with this conundrum may be unavoidable for authors of any work that attempts to consider—or reconsider—the American West for what it really was: a land of lawlessness and cruelty fueled by alcohol, testosterone, and greed. Moreover, what Missy shows (and Hollywood westerns rarely do) is the reality that made manifest destiny possible: the oppression and

The Russian-literature allusions in Victor Pelevin’s novel begin right at the beginning. Not with the Lolita epigraph at the head of chapter 1—though that is anything but timid—but in the preceding “Commentary by Experts.” Here is the kind of textual apparatus that Nabokov so enjoyed, in which the voice of authority comically enhances the simulated nonfictional status of the text. And it’s not only Nabokov who classes up the joint in The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, the tenth offering from Pelevin, himself Russian (and still only in his mid-forties). The author parcels out a dense array of references to

How boring does your hometown have to be for Siberia to tickle wanderlust? The narrator of To Siberia, a melancholy novel by Per Petterson, is an interesting test case. Growing up in a Danish village in the ’30s, she and her brother retreat from their grandfather’s drunken binges and their father’s palpable aura of failure into atlases and histories, where they see nothing but escape hatches. Jesper, the unnamed narrator’s daring older brother, dreams of Morocco. His sister, however, sets her sights on Siberia: “I wanted open skies . . . where it was easy to breathe and easy to

When Ross Raisin’s debut novel, Out Backward, was published in Britain earlier this year, it created a moderate stir. The book is currently on the long list for the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the accolades he received yielded a lucrative two-book deal. Despite this acclaim, the author has kept his day job as a London waiter, demonstrating the Yorkshire modesty that permeates the world of this intimate novel.

The Indian Ocean, with its ancient patterns of trade and empire, has buoyed Amitav Ghosh’s writing for twenty years. The Shadow Lines (1988), his second novel, examines the partition of Bengal, while his anthropological travelogue In an Antique Land (1992) probes age-old ties between India and Egypt. The best-selling novel The Glass Palace (2000) is set between Burma and India circa the Second World War, and The Hungry Tide (2004) explores the mangrove forests and marginal peoples of the Sundarbans tidal plain. His sixth novel, the first in a projected trilogy, traces the global effects of a gargantuan drug-trafficking enterprise.

A Manuscript of Ashes, Antonio Muñoz Molina’s debut novel (though not his first translated into English), reads as a primer on his work. Published in the author’s native Spain in 1986, it demonstrates his early postmodernist tendencies—particularly a predilection for narratives that shift in time and for shadowy narrators who destabilize the story. It also reveals the moral and philosophical issues that appear in his later novels, including the way in which the present embodies the past.