Shipwreck is a deceptively simple novel, and it relishes in the fact that it is telling a very familiar story. It begins with an unknown “I” sitting in a café called, self-consciously, L'Entre Deux Mondes. He is joined, at random, by the novel's protagonist and ostensible narrator, Oliver North, who then proceeds to tell him the story of the past several years of his life. North is himself a novelist enjoying great success. Praised by critics, renowned enough to be gossip-worthy and periodically rewarded with various literary prizes, North finds himself dissatisfied with his own body of work: "They all belonged to the same dreary breed of unneeded books. Novels that are not embarrassingly bad but lead you to wonder why the author had bothered."

Rendered temporarily unable to write, North has an affair with a French journalist named Léa. North has no intention of leaving his wife, Lydia: Léa is only an adventure. But North continues seeing her throughout his time in Paris, and soon is caught between the two women. He plans a course of action as only a writer can, musing, "It seemed to me, as I thought about Lydia, that I had been split in two. One half was Lydia's husband, whose limitless and unreserved love for her was like a vital organ of his body. The other was an unserious man, besotted by this girl's body and what she was willing to do with it, and, to be just, by her startling charm. Why couldn't these men co-exist, I asked myself, so long as I kept them apart?"

Of course, it is painfully clear to us that he cannot keep them apart. As the plot progresses, the characters become more archetypal and the narrator more frantic. The novel takes on a portentous tone, setting up North's inevitable decline. The intensity of North's desperation, Léa's flightiness, and Lydia's unlimited trust all lead us to expect a monumental finish, but the ending is so convoluted that it is difficult to reconcile it with the preceding buildup.

More philosophical meditation than novel, 2003 Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee's newest book, Elizabeth Costello, is a tantalizing but ultimately frustrating piece of fiction. The noted South African novelist, whose other books include Waiting for the Barbarians and Disgrace, seems to have found an alter ego in his supremely unsympathetic protagonist, an elderly, misanthropic, and much-celebrated Australian writer whose “books are, she believes, better put together than she is.”

No longer married and estranged from her two children, Elizabeth Costello is now engaged in traveling the world as a guest lecturer, and the novel is structured around eight talks she and other scholars deliver at various universities, conferences, and even a cruise ship bound for Antarctica. The novel's academic settings give Coetzee the opportunity for some rather cheap shots at feminist and post-colonial criticism, but the novel's initially intriguing structure soon leaves both Costello and the book mired in pedantry. In her lectures, Costello opines endlessly on such varied topics as Kafka, vegetarianism, the fate of Hellenism, and the meaning of religious art, at every occasion managing to offend at least one person in her audience. While these talks, and the ardent discussions that follow them, occasionally contain moments of deep insight into various issues of philosophy and morality, they are hardly enough to sustain a novel.

The entire book has something self-indulgent about it, as though perhaps Coetzee had simply packaged a few of his pet intellectual quandaries within the novel's undeveloped frame. At one point, Costello acknowledges that “writing itself…has the potential to be dangerous” but that sense of danger is curiously missing from the novel which bears her name, in which even the most burning issues are abstracted and dissected in page after page of stiff, ponderous dialogue, bearing no resemblance to actual human speech. By the time of the novel's labored conclusion, when Costello finds herself trapped in a sort of Kafkaesque purgatory, the reader has lost all patience with this unpleasant woman and her compulsive lecturing.

It's a pity, because one senses Elizabeth Costello could have been a very powerful character study. Moments of great emotional power, as when Costello visits her sister at a convent or remembers an affair with a man whom she has since come to despise, make one wish Coetzee had written a far different novel. But Costello's life remains, as she herself observes, a “story skulking, inconspicuous as a mouse in a corner,” suffocated by the dreary weight of her own intellect.

The Furies, Fernanda Eberstadt's fourth, and most ambitious, novel to date, examines the complexities of motherhood, femininity, and love, and does it beautifully. The plot seems standard enough initially: Gwendolyn Lewis is thirty, intelligent, and single in the mid-nineties, established in the Upper West Side as the director of the Lavrinsky Institute (set up to help the former Soviet Union democratize) and living without Campbell, her long-time, pedigreed, blond banker boyfriend. On a business trip to Russia, she meets Gideon Wolkowitz—a bearded, secular Jewish puppeteer with deep-seated loyalties to the underdog—and, despite monetary and political differences and the fact that he lives in a squat on the Lower East Side, the two fall madly in love. They're the poster children for opposites attracting; both are from broken homes, and find in each other that long lost something they've each been separately yearning for. When Gwen gets pregnant, Gideon is thrilled, and marriage soon follows. The next logical step would seem lawfully wedded bliss but turns out, instead, to be a subsequent downward spiral.

You saw it coming, though, and Eberstadt probably knows this. Still, her prose more than makes up for the plot's seeming predictability: it's often breathtaking, always beautiful, though the dialogue, at times, is too cloyingly witty, reading like an overly ambitious “Sex and the City” episode (“Well, blow me, it's a homegirl. I should have guessed from your Oz shoes.”). What's amazing, though, is Eberstadt's uncanny ability to portray the ordinary as sacred. In Central Park, children clinging to “Our Alice Who Art in Wonderland,” are the saved and the damned; Gwen's first impression of Gideon is of a shaggy “John the Baptist on a rusting Raleigh.” It's her perception that's so intriguing. Although Eberstadt's characters are annoying to no end (Gideon so left-swinging, so grassroots, that it's unreal, and Gwen, “superdeluxe Manhattan flotsam” that she is, acts whiny and elitist), they manage, somehow, to make you sympathize in spite of yourself. What renders the novel believable is precisely the characters' fallibility, and the simultaneous significance of their actions in spite (or perhaps, because) of this. The result is a novel nothing short of brilliant.

The literary and historical mystery of the Holy Grail has been a recurring motif in Western tradition for eight centuries. Richard Barber, Britain's leading authority of medieval texts, traces the legend surrounding the Holy Grail from its beginning with Chrtien de Troyes's The Story of the Grail, an Arthurian romance of the twelfth century. In de Troyes, the youthful knight Perceval first sees the Grail, which marks the nadir of fortune for Perceval, as well as the beginning of his redemption. Barber than analyzes the motif through Victorian enthusiasms and into twentieth century references. In de Troyes, Perceval's lack of compassion for the wounded Fisher King condemns the latter to continue living a cursed existence. T.S. Eliot's adoption of de Troyes's tale has made the Waste Land one of the twentieth century's most famous images linked to the Grail. The Waste Land is a consequence of Perceval's thoughtlessness; the wounded Fisher King cannot lead his army into battle to defend his kingdom. Barber continues to discuss twentieth century usage of the Grail with an analysis of the rising popularity of “irreverent grails” and jokes made at the expense of knightly adventure, such as in the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Here the grail appears in the castle of beautiful temptresses with a delight for spanking, to whom the knight Galahad happily resigns as a part of his holy quest.

Barber crosses the border of literature and spirituality to seek the history of the motif, its creation and subsequent evolution. After comparing the different avatars of the Holy Grail, Barber's study returns to the Grail's offer to us, the possibility of perfection. It functions to make the Grail out of the reach for those in the ordinary world; it reflects the hopes that arise from the challenges of the human spirit. This interplay between imagination and belief is the guiding force behind the Grail as we know it today.

My Life as a Fake culls its epigraph and much of its structure from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and like its inspiration it begs to be read as a parable of the risks of creation. Sarah Wode-Douglass is a London editor who becomes entangled in a mystery that will bring her eventually to Malaysia, Australia, Indonesia, and a host of other destinations she character never imagined she would visit. The impetus of all this is John Slater, somewhat renowned as a writer but more so as a socialite, who brings her largely against her will to Kuala Lumpur. There she encounters Christopher Chubb, an expatriate Australian with a history into which Slater begs her not to inquire.

Sarah, of course, does inquire, and discovers that Chubb, in younger years, penned a volume of poetry under the pseudonym Bob McCorkle. Apparently unfulfilled by this meager falsification, he creates an entire identity for the fictional McCorkle, complete with a lifetime's worth of paperwork, documentation and letters. When the poems' eventual publisher is prosecuted for indecency—the result of a gross misreading of an innocuous, if effete, literary allusion within McCorkle's work—a seven-foot-tall man, remarkably similar to Frankenstein's monster, claims to be Bob McCorkle and thus to have written the poetry.

Here, as in the corresponding moment in Frankenstein, the monster appropriates the narrative and begins to tell of his past. And, as in Frankenstein, the monster's history is persuasive. Carey, however, is not content simply to restate Shelley's moral; in fact, he adjusts it quite interestingly. Creation itself, he suggests, is never destructive, not even when what is created adopts a life of its own. Only when it forgets that it is, alas, a creature, imagining itself to be in control of its own existence, does turmoil ensue.

But Carey's evident interest here is in the tale, not in those who people it or whatever bits of philosophy might spring from them. The most obvious example of this apparent unconcern for the people in his novel is Wode-Douglass herself. She has almost no personality beyond her curiosity in the story that unfolds; as if to excuse her readerly remove from the circumstances of her own life and those of the people who forcibly surround her, she says, “I read. I have no other life.” This is a momentarily compelling confession, but its potential significance is undermined by her own narration: My Life as a Fake is not the story of one woman's destructive compulsion to read, and Carey seems to use her admission as justification for his failure to endow her with a coherent, or even noticeable, personality.

It's a sleek, unself-conscious production, replete with portent and tension but lacking in characterization or development. My Life as a Fake might have been a fascinating response to Frankenstein and a discourse on the nature of literary creation. However, My Life as a Fake lacks humanity; to the end, it feels derivative of Shelley's less finely wrought but more sympathetic work.

After winning the Booker Prize for her first and only novel The God of Small Things, Indian writer Arundhati Roy turned from fiction to tackling contemporary politics. No stranger to political dogfights —Roy's novel attracted the ire of South Indian Communists for whom the book's caricatures of leading party members warranted a lawsuit— she has worn the hats of numerous agenda. Power Politics connected Roy's involvement in the Narmada Dam dispute in India with a blistering attack on corporate globalization. Before and following the invasion of Iraq, Roy's dissenting columns became fixtures in the international press, making the writer one of the anti-war camp's most prominent voices.

In War Talk, Roy binds her disparate causes with a conviction in their fundamental interrelation. “In the twenty-first century,” she writes, “the connection between religious fundamentalism, nuclear nationalism, and the pauperization of whole populations to corporate globalization is becoming impossible to ignore.” Everything from India's Hindu chauvinist ruling party to President Bush and the American military, foot-soldiers of a corporate global Empire, receives her unflinching contempt. War Talk stands out from the growing pile of pop political-science texts on the post-9/11 world thanks to its sharp and effective prose. Roy refuses to mince words, waging war against the status quo with clipped sentences and impassioned flair. However, she seems more eager to preach to the choir than convince the unconverted. Sporadically footnoted, War Talk delicately toes the line between political argument and polemical rant. Roy trots out all the well-known leftist critiques of the Iraq War, India's domestic policy, and globalisation, but dresses unoriginal contentions in fresh language. Uninterested in disputing contemporary conservative or neo-liberal discourse, War Talk's single-minded fervour belies its situation within a teeming climate of political debate. The book's strength hinges on the fury of her language, as she attacks “the cabal of consummate wrong”, rather than the crafting of a considered case.

The premise of the title of Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves is a joke about a panda bear: after having a meal at a café, the panda fires a gun on his way out. His explanation for his actions comes from “a badly punctuated wildlife manual,” that reads, “Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.” If this joke has you rolling on the floor, this book is written for people like you. Truss prefers to call such people sticklers (as opposed to pedants) and includes herself in this category. My high school English teacher called us grammanimals. Truss describes us, unappealingly, as “unattractive know-all obsessives who get things out of proportion and are in continual peril of being disowned by our exasperated families.” This neat little book serves as much as a practical guide to punctuating as an affirmation to grammanimals everywhere that we are not alone.

A runaway success in the U.K. and highly anticipated in the United States, Eats, Shoots & Leaves takes on the “signs of ignorance and indifference” illustrated in lax punctuation everywhere from grocers' signs to movie names. Truss spends a good amount of time amusing readers with horrific examples, like “Two Weeks Notice” or the newspaper headline, “DEAD SONS PHOTO MAY BE RELEASED.” Luckily, this is not merely a volume of egregious punctuation errors for the amusement of the picky and the snobby. Truss uses these examples to explain basic (and not-so-basic) rules of punctuation with the hope that the humor of the misuses will make the grammar lessons more palatable. Judging from her UK sales, she has succeeded.

Even the non-neurotic among us can enjoy this manual, and gain from it. Truss's mission is essential because when people stop using punctuation, “language comes apart, obviously, and all the buttons fall off.” And where would our sentences be without their buttons? Most likely, naked and stammering.

Triangle, David Von Drehle's portrait of the buzzing metropolis that was turn of the century New York, describes the catastrophic 1911 fire at the Triangle shirtwaist factory as both the product of and the catalyst for rapidly changing times. From the squalid tenements of the chaotic city to the omnipotent, cheerfully corrupt Tammany Hall, Von Drehle details how the efforts of strikers and wealthy ideologues gave rise to the era of progressivism. The movement failed to find roots in the legislature, however, until the Triangle fire inspired a few hardy crusaders to carry through some of the most significant labor reforms ever effected, including fire safety regulations and the fifty-four hour working week law.

Von Drehle transforms the vision of the American melting pot into a seething forge of warring politics, money, and ethnicity, tempering the country on its rise, through the advent of mass production, to the twentieth century. After a fascinating description of New York power dynamics, he segues into a minutely detailed, intensely gripping account of the fire itself, which for ninety years was the city's worst workplace disaster. The desperate cry of workers trying to warn their colleagues before the fire rises to their floors is echoed by the fledgling labor movement trying to alert the nation to their hardships: “For God's sake, these people don't know. How can we make them know?”

The narrative is given authority through Von Drehle's impressive balance between the personal and the national. He provides contextual exposition in broad, engaging passages, and gives the bulk of the action to a specific group of fully-drawn characters. The facts of the meticulously researched account are thus firmly rooted in the interplay of personalities, and in the frequent conflicts between human emotion and necessity. Triangle is an enjoyable and compelling exploration of an influential tragedy, which was the death knell for one era even as it was the herald of another.