On the shelves this month

A
Crow Lake by Mary Lawson
These are stories familiar to all of us; 'orphaned children determined to stay together' and 'inspiring teacher aids exceptional student, allowing escape from a limited life'. What distinguishes Mary Lawson's Crow Lake is that she combines these plots with a twist. The brilliant teacher is a brother, Luke, who never gets himself an education, having chosen instead to raise his brothers and sisters. The narrator, Kate, is the little sister he inspires, who - though she becomes a university professor - can neither accept nor escape the sacrifice that was made for her. Crow Lake is in its structure, its major characters and its effect, a quite traditional novel; and in its earnest determination to make Kate and Luke and their choices credible, it is perhaps a young one. The constant hinting at what is to come can be a bit heavy-handed and the necessary solemnity of the heroine-narrator is a somewhat stifling influence. But the assurance with which Mary Lawson handles both reflection and violence makes her a writer to read and to watch. Peripheral portraits are skilfully drawn; the young child Bo with her minimal vocabulary of mostly shouted words, speaks to the heart without a scrap of sentimentality and Kate's in-laws, also professors, unusually for fictional academics are funny without being ridiculous.

B
By the Lake by John McGahern
One cannot truly appreciate By the Lake unless one realises that for every published page, there are six that John McGahern discarded. Eager as one is, it is a difficult novel to get into since one cannot immediately locate the centre of the narrative. It opens on an uneventful Sunday. 'The morning was clear. There was no wind on the lake. They had the entire world to themselves.' A man enters a house by the lake. He calls out. After a moment, someone answers. A novel follows. The place itself is what this initially demanding but ultimately rewarding novel is about. It follows a year in an unnamed village where a couple, Joe and Kate, return to live. We randomly assemble a picture of others in the community: Jamesie is the most likeable, Bill, the strangest, Johnny, the one disappointed in love. We are never quite sure when the novel's events take place and McGahern has indicated that the novel's dating is deliberately vague. Seasonal time is something else. The novel is teasingly precise about the turning moments of the year and is punctuated with lush descriptions of the countryside. The biggest event of the year is the arrival of a telephone pole. The outside world has come closer. But the lake will not change.

C
Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
It's hard to get through this book's first chapters. You keep laughing out loud, losing your place, starting again, then stopping because you're tempted to call your friends and read them long sections of Foer's assured, hilarious prose. The narrator, Alexander, is enchanted by everything American. He speaks English like someone who has taught himself by painstakingly translating a really abysmal novel aided by a badly outdated dictionary. Nevertheless, he is fluent enough to work as a translator for a travel agency that organises trips for rich foreigners. Any attempt to explain the complex narrative strategy of this book - who is saying what and when - makes it sound more complicated than it is. Actually, it's not hard to follow, since the structure reveals itself in stages, and each one of these revelations is a source of surprise and pleasure. Indeed, one of the book's attractions is its writer's high degree of faith in the reader's intelligence. In fact Foer has got his sights on higher things than mere laughs, on a whole series of themes so weighty that anyone of them would be enough for an ordinary novel. The combination of serious theme and comic description is so appealing that you hardly care when big chunks of the book start to crumble in the last 50 pages. By then, the novel has provided so much enjoyment that such lapses barely matter.

D
The Bondwoman's Narrative by Hannah Crafts.
Who was Hannah Crafts? The author of The Bondwoman's Narrative, an autobiographical novel written in the 1850s, describes herself as a 'fugitive slave' making her text a remarkable discovery. Published from a manuscript bought at auction by Henry Louis Gates, it is quite probably the first novel written by a female slave. This claim, of course, hinges on the authenticity of Crafts' manuscript, a subject all but laid to rest in Gates' long introduction to the book. Although Gates never manages to identify Hannah Crafts, who probably wrote under a pseudonym, he presents a formidable array of evidence authenticating her story. But the book need not be read for its historical importance alone. It is also an immensely entertaining and illuminating novel. Always interesting, if only intermittently well written, it uses a combination of literary styles to heighten the drama. Then it goes over the top as Hannah's adventures multiply improbably. She faces not only the evils of slavery but ghosts and great gusts of the ominous weather so typical of 19th century fiction. Nevertheless, Crafts transcends the melodrama of her fictional styles to address the complexities of the slave experience.