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His Illegal Self

by Peter Carey (Knopf, $25)

A kidnapped 7-year-old is spirited from 1972 Manhattan to an Australian commune in Peter Carey’s daring new novel, said Mark Sarvas in The Dallas Morning News. In trying to capture the confused perspective of a child, though, the two-time Booker Prize winner merely disorients the reader. The result is a “tiresome and unpleasant” journey “redeemed only by beautiful language” and by glimmers of a nascent bond between the boy and his female abductor.

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How the Dead Dream

by Lydia Millet (Counterpoint, $24)

The satirical novelist Lydia Millet is “best when she makes startlingly odd events seem wholly real,” said Ron Charles in The Washington Post. Her latest charts the unlikely environmental awakening of a mercenary American. It opens as he’s creating protection rackets on his childhood playground and climaxes when he’s breaking into zoos to commune with endangered beasts. Both those gambits work. Where Millet stumbles is in leading readers on a number of “distracting dead ends.”

The Commoner

by John Burnham Schwartz (Doubleday, $25)

The author of Reservation Road specializes in “the transformation of melodrama into something authentic,” said Sarah Weinman in The Philadelphia Inquirer. In The Commoner, he has “lightly fictionalized” the stories of Japan’s current empress and her daughter-in-law, both commoners who married into a stifling, tradition-bound world. Though the novel’s conclusion is slightly implausible, Schwartz makes clear that the Japanese monarchy “is no place for anything resembling a happy ending.”

Day

by A.L. Kennedy (Knopf, $24)

This award-winning new novel somehow survives the double risk its author takes, said Sam Anderson in New York. Written largely in the second person, Day is the story of a young World War II veteran working as an extra in a World War II film. But neither the tired subject nor that bullying narrative trick overwhelms A.L. Kennedy’s talent. When she puts “you” inside the rear gun turret of an RAF bomber, the experience is “intense, admirably sustained, and occasionally spectacular.”

The Reserve

by Russell Banks (Harper, $25)

Russell Banks’ “cheesy, histrionic” new novel is unworthy of his considerable talents, said Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times. Set at a 1930s Adirondack retreat, it features a romance between a macho lefty artist and a pampered beauty who comes across as “a parody of the crazy femme fatale.” The author of Continental Drift and other probing blue-collar dramas apparently wanted to try something new. Yet even his prose style here feels “weirdly secondhand.”