Lost Hearts in Italy --Andrea Lee [Random House]
Why not start with a knockout? Novelist Andrea Lee's sensuously unsentimental ok Lost Hearts in Italy mines the past of Miranda Ward, an American transplant to Italy who once cheated on her golden-boy husband with Zenin, an aging Italian billionaire with the inner warmth of a reptile. Years later and deep into another marriage, she still feels the pull of Zenin and Nick, her wounded ex-husband, "as we always belong forever to people who have hurt us badly, or been badly hurt by us."

When the Devil Holds the Candle [Harcourt] a psychological tour de force by Norwegian thriller writer Karin Fossum - a handsome, thuggish teenager disappears, and his tormenter is a lonely, crazed old lady whose mind sucks you in like the most Poe-ish of maelstroms.

The Brambles --Eliza Minot [Knopf]
a startling revelation—the kind that turns an extended family upside down

Playing in the Light --Zoë Wicomb [The New Press]
Marion, a travel agent in tense, post-apartheid Cape Town, knows there's something peculiar about her Afrikaner heritage; her elderly father won't tell her what it is. "Secrets, lies, and discomfiture—that was what her childhood had been wrapped in. Each day individually wrapped, lived through carefully, as only those with secrets live." Marion's close but prickly relationship with Brenda, her employee from the townships, guides her toward the liberating truth.

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