Also of interest...new offerings from old favorite

The Round House

by Louise Erdrich (Harper, $28)

“When a story comes from deep within an author, a reader knows it,” said Susan Salter Reynolds in Newsday. Louise Erdrich’s 14th novel is one of those. As we watch an Ojibwe man, aided by his 13-year-old son, work to find the man who raped his wife at the reservation’s round house, “there are so many ways” the story could unfold and yet only one. The organic structure makes the tale all the more painfully human—“complete with rage, chaos, resonance, history, uncertainty, [and] certainty.”

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Skagboys

by Irvine Welsh (Norton, $27)

Twenty years after Irvine Welsh “roared onto the British literary scene” with Trainspotting, he’s back to pick up the tale of Sick Boy, Renton, and an assorted cast of Scottish drug fiends, said Steve Almond in The New York Times. Skagboys aims high; it’s Welsh’s “attempt at a social epic worthy of Dickens.” But his story is disjointed, and worse, “confirms him as another one-hit wonder whose ambitions as a social critic are continually undone by his need to enthrall and disgust.”

Silent House

by Orhan Pamuk (Knopf, $27)

This 1983 Orhan Pamuk novel, finally translated into English, could serve as “an excellent introduction to a body of work that is worthy of its 2006 Nobel Prize,” said Mike Fischer in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Though clearly an “apprentice” effort, it offers an engaging story about Turkey on the eve of a 1980 military coup, and establishes a theme that Pamuk has explored throughout his career: How might any non-Western country “join the global village while remaining true to itself?”

Ancient Light

by John Banville (Knopf, $26)

John Banville’s 16th novel is “an unsettling and beautiful work,” said Moira Hodgson in The Wall Street Journal. The final book in a trilogy that began with 2001’s Eclipse, it returns to the tale of retired actor Alexander Cleave, focusing on his memories of a teenage affair with a much older woman. Though an “unconvincing” subplot weakens Ancient Light, “Banville’s account of the affair is so vivid, the characters so fully realized,” that it could stand alone as a small masterpiece.