Evening Is the Whole Day by Preeta Samarasan (Houghton Mifflin)

If there is one thing that literature has taught us, from Anna Karenina to The Corrections, it's that unhappy families are as much alike as happy families are. But while happy families are bound together by congenial mealtimes, festive holidays, and shared affection, unhappy families are linked by lies, unspoken secrets, and every conceivable kind of abuse.

This is the familiar territory that forms the terrain of Preeta Samarasan's first novel. A marriage founders, the children learn that whatever love comes their way will have to come from each other, a grandmother dies, an accusation is made, and a scapegoat's life is destroyed. From the first page, the story is obscured by things untold, which seem both deeply sad and sadly ordinary when disclosed at the novel's end. Yet what raises this book above the usual dysfunctional drama, what makes it rich and textured and darkly funny, is its setting and its surrounding community.

The crowd of characters that fill these pages wouldn't be out of place in the works of Dickens, while the titles of the chapters pay clear homage to that master of English prose. And the author tells us, "It is obvious how sharply parts of this land must have reminded the old British rulers of their faraway country."

But the "grey mist, glowing green hills" and "the violent silver ropes" of rain are in Malaysia, and the people who give the story such dazzling life are Indian, Chinese, and Malay. Some of them are ghosts.

The lonely and brilliant baby of the family, six-year-old Aasha, is the only one who can see the spectres, but there are many things that only Aasha sees and only partially understands. Her adored older sister has abandoned her, in spite of all she has done to prevent this, in spite of the huge and terrible lie that she has told to keep Uma, and Uma's mysteriously removed love, at home with her. Slowly and gradually, as bits and pieces of family history fall into place, it becomes plain why Aasha's heart has "cracked and cried out in protest."

As the jigsaw of tragedy comes together, so do unforgettable, wildly original characters, who would be minor if they weren't so indelibly drawn. Kooky Rooky, the neighboring kept woman, whose origins change each time she chooses to divulge them; Mrs. Surgeon Daisy Jeganathan, the social-climbing gossip with the "late-night, bridge-party laugh"; the dimwitted Anand who "cannot quite count to twenty" but is possessed by the spirit of his dead five-year-old sister once a year and becomes a celebrity prophet who speaks in a child's voice. None of these people are likable, yet they are instantly real and weirdly lovable.

The most real and the most lovable entity is Malaysia. An avowed wanderer and expat, Preeta Samarasan evokes her homeland vividly--its odors, its streetfood, its sun "liquid as an egg yolk", its "bloody ballet" of history, its "flourishing, mixed-up, polyglot" character shaped by its various ethnicities--and without it, this book would verge upon soap-opera territory. With it, it verges on a book that Charles Dickens would envy.

The Year of Living Dangerously by Christopher J. Koch (Vintage)

There are some novels that haunt you with a single paragraph, a few well-chosen words.

As our world appears more and more unstable and unpredictable, statements of fact carry the same credibility as fortune cookies and entrails of chickens divulge as much as the pronouncements of experts. In these times, the following paragraph holds a special resonance.

"There is a definite point where a city, like a man, can be seen to have become insane...It's always difficult to believe that someone we know has crossed into that territory where no one from our side can reach him and from which messages crackle back that no longer make any sense...That's how it was with Sukarno's Jakarta..."

The Year of Living Dangerously was made into a movie that has become so iconic that its plot has been boiled down into the triangular relationship between Mel Gibson, Sigourney Weaver, and the eerily androgynous Linda Hunt. These three actors have so thoroughly claimed this novel that it is a shock to read it at last and find they are not its central characters. There is only one main character and that is the city of Jakarta, seen through the eyes of journalists who struggle to interpret it to a world that can barely find Indonesia on a map.

These are men who report what they see, hear, and have been told, retreating at the end of the day to an airconditioned hotel bar that they have claimed as their turf. A competitive and jangling community, they drink, tell stories, and cling to each other's company. Jakarta intrudes upon their little sanctuary only as far as they allow it to, and only one of them ventures far beyond it after work--Billy Kwan, the half-Chinese, half-Australian dwarf who searches for his home in the world.

A man of restless intellect, Kwan is an explorer of ideologies, of people, of places, a photographer whose images define his questions. A comic figure to his journalist colleagues, he recognizes a spirit similar to his own in a newly arrived reporter, Guy Hamilton, and offers to be Hamilton's eyes.

As Billy leads Hamilton into Jakarta, the city takes on details, but never a shape, much the same as the antagonistic policies of Indonesia's leader, Sukarno. Poverty and danger lie in Jakarta's shadows, as well as the strained tension that mounts with each of Sukarno's speeches. Confrontation is the prevailing theme, and as Sukarno becomes more and more impassioned and his enemies are found closer and closer to home, no one feels safe.

In a city filled with foreboding and menace, disaster seems to be the only possible outcome. Love dissolves into mistrust, friendship into betrayal, and why this is happening is as much a mystery as how it will all end. Physical descriptions pinned to a page with words are the only concrete truth, and those descriptions are where this novel soars.

Sukarno is deposed, half a million people are slaughtered, the journalists are sent to the next global hotspot, and Jakarta goes on living. The place that is evoked so tangibly by Christopher Koch remains, unconsumed by its year of insanity and uncertainty. Decades later, our twenty-first century world, caught in its own insane and unncertain epoch, perhaps can find comfort in Jakarta's survival.