The Delivery Room by Sylvia Brownrigg

The most striking feature of Sylvia Brownrigg's thoughtful new novel may be its soundtrack: relentless murmurings and mutterings, like a Robert Altman film's. Brownrigg captures that flow of human angst by reporting, at close third person, key characters' interior monologues (some of which ponder horrific political events). As a result, "The Delivery Room" describes our own strivings. Set in London during 1998 (with a close eye on Slobodan Milosevic's reign and the tense buildup to NATO retaliation), the story centers on Mira, a psychotherapist and Serbian expatriate who is married to Peter Braverman, a translator and teacher. Read the review here.

This year's winner of Canada's top literary award The Governor General's Literary Award presented this week, The Origin of Species is Nino Ricci's fifth novel. Alex Fratarcangeli’s shabby apartment building, shambolically renovated by new owners, mirrors a culture that is being systematically deconstructed. Alex teaches English in Montreal, a city where language is war; he studies in a discipline where postmodernists have taken the field. The unfinished dissertation he carries around like a stinking albatross attempts to link narrative theory to evolutionary theory. It isn’t going well. Read the review here. 

The Northern Clemency by Phillip Hensher

Shortlisted for this year's Man Booker Prize, The Northern Clemency according to Simon Baker in the Spectator is an immense novel which sweeps through 20 epochal years, showing us that a country can move rapidly into the future but that some individuals often remain shackled to the events of the past. In 1974, when the novel starts, the new Londoners, dsiplaced from Sheffield, are treated almost as a different species, such is the fixedness of the social structure. Ten years later we hear the dying roar of the old world, in the form of the miners’ strike. Read the review here.

Nothing to be frightened of by Julian Barnes

The French critic Roland Barthes once said that middle age begins, not at any particular chronological point in life, but exactly when, early or late, we begin to feel we are going to die. The novelist Julian Barnes will have none of this. He can imagine his own death and has been doing so since he was 13 or 14, or, as he puts it in his new memoir, 'Nothing To Be Frightened Of' "for most of my sentient life." Read the review here.

Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen

In this week's Salon, Laura Miller looks at an exquisite new novel about delusions and the weather. She writes, "Last December," explains the narrator of "Atmospheric Disturbances," Rivka Galchen's droll, exquisite first novel, "a woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife." The speaker is Leo Liebenstein, a New York psychiatrist, and the wife is Rema, an Argentine considerably younger than her husband. Confronted with this ingenious impostor (she's so good he briefly contemplates the possibility that one of her feet might really be his wife's), Leo is initially nonplused. Soon, however, he formulates a plan: find the real Rema. His search spans continents, entails a possible career change and enlists the help of a patient who says he can manipulate the weather. Read the review here.

Molly Fox's Birthday by Deirdre Madden

Deirdre Madden's fiction is getting better and better. This seventh novel is, like its predecessor, Authenticity, shaped around an art form. With Authenticity, it was painting; this time it's acting. Molly Fox's profession is central to the theme of identity. The novel's three main characters are at odds with their background and upbringing, and each has managed to forge a more appropriate identity. Read the review here.

Outlaw Journalist by William McKeen

Most journalists seek to inform, says Joel Drucker in SF Gate. Consider the understated prose of John McPhee, imparting geologic data in the sensible manner of a college instructor. But Hunter S. Thompson wanted to transform, urgently seeking to create a candid and arresting prose style that would evoke the spirit of his times. If a bit too cozy with its subject, who is referred to by his first name, William McKeen's biography, "Outlaw Journalist," is an accessible look at Thompson's personal life and his eternal struggles to earn a living and leave a legacy. Read the review here.

The Others by David Guterson

Ben Naparstek writes in The Age that David Guterson's disturbed mother often warned him that people weren't who they appeared to be. Her paranoia about the identities of people contained a germ of truth, however. In his new novel, The Other, Guterson considers how people are shaped by their repressed alternate selves. The Pacific Northwest was the setting of his debut novel, Snow Falling on Cedars (1994),and after a couple of less successful novels, Guterson returns to his native landscape for The Other. Read the review here.