Also of interest. . .

Homecoming

by Bernhard Schlink (Pantheon, $24)

Bernhard Schlink’s latest novel shouldn’t be as satisfying as it is, said Craig Seligman in Bloomberg.com. Grounded in a young German’s quest to learn how an unpublished war novel was supposed to end, it “goes off in a dozen directions.” Still the cultural questions it raises are riveting. “When I finished it I was ready to go back to the first page and start reading again.”

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Wolves of the Crescent Moon

by Yousef Al-Mohaimeed (Penguin, $14)

This atmospheric tale about a bus-station vagrant nearly qualifies as the first great Saudi Arabian novel, said Benjamin Lytal in The New York Sun. Populated by a host of Riyadh outcasts, the book never reconciles its hero’s gloomy fatalism with his bandit past. But its author is “an honest literary pioneer,” and Wolves teems with insights into a land cloaked by censorship.

The Painter of Battles

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte (Random House, $25)

A Balkan war veteran with a lethal grudge tracks down a former combat photographer in the latest from one of Spain’s most popular writers, said Alan Cheuse in the San Francisco Chronicle. Unfortunately, Arturo Pérez-Reverte seems intent on proving his gravitas, and he smothers the pair’s showdown with “page after page” of philosophical debate.

The Adventures of Amir Hamza

by Ghalib Lakhnavi and Abdullah Bilgrami

(Modern Library, $45)

The first complete English translation of “the most popular oral epic” of the Indo-Islamic world is cause for celebration, said William Dalrymple in The New York Times. “A great miscellany of fireside yarns and shaggy-dog stories”—most concerning an uncle of the Prophet Mohammed—The Adventures of Amir Hamza grew to the equivalent of 46,000 pages by the early 20th century. This translation, based on a single-volume 1855 Urdu edition, is “endlessly diverting.”

Yalo

by Elias Khoury (Archipelago, $25)

Turning a rapist into a sympathetic narrator is no easy task, said John Freeman in the Newark, N.J., Star-Ledger. Elias Khoury’s “mesmerizing” new novel would have been stronger had it moved beyond the clouded perspective of its title character, an ex-Lebanese soldier whom interrogators are torturing into making a series of conflicting confessions. Even so, the feeling of being trapped inside Yalo’s desperate mind is heartbreaking.