Minot has always favored spare language, and here it is stripped to the bone. This wrenching novel is based on a horrific real-life event that occurred in 1996, when 139 girls at a Ugandan boarding school were abducted by guerrillas from the Lord’s Resistance Army. Having previously explored love, sex and fraught familial relations, Ms. Susan Minot’s literary output has been sparse - just six books in nearly three decades.

This dark, surreal novel yields no profound insights, but it’s great fun. A plane crash strands him in Dublin, where a random encounter with a former schoolmate and bully, the grotesque Desmond Hickey (with his “balaclava of facial hair”), ensnares Tristram in a dodgy development scheme that proves calamitous. sponsor, part self-help guru - he has no friends. Except for a telephone confidant known as M. Lawrence, the 13th Earl of Howth, is estranged from his family and banned from their castle. Yet in her savagely comic fourth novel, the Irish author Claire Kilroy does it with fresh energy, diving into the heady boom era known as the Celtic Tiger and its ignominious collapse. Skewering the international financial system, with its rampant corruption and irrational exuberance, is familiar literary fodder. THE DEVIL I KNOW By Claire Kilroy 361 pages. Townsend’s willingness to steep her characters in heartache without relief. What’s impressive about this first novel - apart from the startling music of its language - is Ms.

With the backdrop of segregation and its humiliations and acts of violence, the story examines an intense friendship marred by betrayals, real and perceived. Caroline, resenting Audrey’s ambition and feeling abandoned, languishes in Kentucky. At 17, Audrey, a gifted pianist, makes her way to Harlem and begins a promising career. Caroline’s father, Sonnyboy, kills her mother and is sent to prison. Audrey’s father dies in the Korean War, and she lives with her grandfather and alcoholic mother. In 1950s Appalachian Kentucky, mourning haunts the lives of two African-American girls, Audrey and Caroline. SAINT MONKEY By Jacinda Townsend 350 pages. This month, six novels explore brutality and loss, whether in wartime, friendship, family or matters of the heart.

Saint monkey by jacinda townsend