Novels range from poignant to hilarious

New fiction is all over the map this season, a real holiday cornucopia of novels.

Some major authors have returned this season with new novels. In his first work of fiction in over a decade, the legendary Gabriel Garcia Marquez has returned with a slim novella, “Memories of My Melancholy Whores.” Lauren Weisberger, who hit bestseller lists with 2003's "The Devil Wears Prada," is mining that same brand-name filled territory with "Everyone Worth Knowing."

Two major authors have traded the topics that made them famous for new subjects, without a lot of success. Anne Rice, who made her bones with tales of vampires and the underworld, has switched topics and has produced her first novel in a planned series about the life of Christ.  And Scott Turow, famous for his courtroom novels, moves onto the battlefield with World War II tale "Ordinary Heroes."

Words as ‘Weapons’
Readers who know hilarious British goofball Adrian Mole will be delighted to see that, at 34, he's still the same pompous, good-hearted mess he was back in 1984's "The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4." (Those who aren't familiar with old Moley should run right out and get "Secret Diary" — you'll want to start at the beginning.)

In "Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction" (Soho Press, $24) Sue Townsend's hero has few things he can count on in his life. Wife JoJo has taken his nine-year-old son, William, and returned to Nigeria, and grown son Glenn is in the British Army. Adrian's ever-nutty parents, George and Pauline, are attempting to renovate a pigsty. Although he has next to no money from his job in a bookshop, Adrian buys an apartment and manages to bury himself up to the eyeballs in debt. He can't even enjoy the apartment, thanks to a couple of über-defensive swans who violently guard their territory. Aidy's never had much luck with women, so he's easy to fool when the conniving Marigold pretends she's pregnant in order to nudge him towards marriage.

With his personal life a typical Mole disaster, the one thing on which Adrian stakes his faith is British Prime Minister Tony Blair's statement that weapons of mass destruction do exist. If fact, he'd really like Blair to confirm that for him, so he can get a refund of 57 pounds from his travel agency. As Adrian sinks ever deeper into the quicksand that is his life, British troops march off to Iraq, including his own son, Glenn. Townsend's style is sneaky but brilliant — one minute you're hooting at Adrian's bumbling, the next, a blunt battlefield letter from Glenn snaps everything back into perspective. Adrian may wear blinders when it comes to his personal life, but as ever, Townsend sees straight to the heart.     —Gael Fashingbauer Cooper

Soldier boy
News reports often speak of Africa's child soldiers, but rarely are we given more of a glimpse into who they really are. 23-year-old Uzodinma Iweala's "Beasts of No Nation" (HarperCollins, $17) is a slim volume with a heavy mission: To take readers into the thoughts of a child who is forced to become a killer.

HarperCollins

The first chapter is heavy slogging, as our narrator, Agu, is but a child and he sees things as a child would: Thoughts come to him all at once, and sentences run on and on, packed full of feelings and at times hard to read ("I am opening my eye and there is light all around me coming into the dark through hole in the roof, crossing like net above my body.") But once you become accustomed to Agu's rapidfire thought patterns, his story is at once hypnotizing and horrifying. Kidnapped from his innocent family, the boy must watch killings and kill innocents himself, or else his own life will end, on a bloody West African road far from home.

There's no question that "Beasts" is hard to read. Agu is sexually abused by his unit's commander, and the abuse is all the harder to read for it being described in the words of a child. Aside from the desperation Agu is seeing all around him, there is an equally desperate battle going on in his own head, as he fights to keep seeing himself as a good person despite being forced to commit such nighmarish crimes. After closing the book, readers are unlikely to ever flick past such blurry images on the nightly news without uttering some kind of prayer for these desperate children, more slaves than soldiers.      —G.F.C.

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