In This Blinding Absence of Light, first-person narrator Salim displays surprising foresight when reflecting on his life-altering ordeal: an 18-year sentence for participating in a botched 1971 coup against Morocco's King Hassan II. "I will write it down or have someone else write it," he says. "Not for revenge, but to add a document to our history file." It's an interesting meta-mention by author Tahar Ben Jelloun, who connected with a real-life survivor to create this fictionalized account of one of the 20th century's most harrowing human rights cases.

After defeat at the hands of Hassan's forces, dissenting soldiers were placed in war camps throughout the country. Light follows a group trapped in a pitch-black underground dungeon in the town of Tazmamart. For nearly two decades, they battled starvation and illness, expected to survive on a putrid diet of rancid water and inedible bread. Their only exposure to sunlight came when they were temporarily freed to witness the thoughtless quicklime burials of friends.

Jelloun's writing is severe and scatological, a device that helps vividly illustrate the horrors of internment. At the same time, protagonist Salim's lucid meanderings allow the author to display a flexible knack for metaphor, a talent made explicit when this prose is juxtaposed with brazen details of mistreatment.

The prisoners' unwavering adherence to Islam is the most poignant facet of the novel. Salim uses his daily water ration to perform ritual ablutions; one of his companions recites suras from the Koran to foster unity amidst oppression. When a dead prisoner begins decomposing, the prisoners selflessly cleanse his body, ensuring he is prepared for the afterlife. Here, Jelloun offers his simplest rationale: Nothing trumps faith. This is Light at its brightest. The author's dedication to historical verity is overwhelming, but his insight into true devotion illuminates the most desolate depths of man's capacity for evil.

In her second novel, Kiran Desai introduces us to Sai, her grandfather and their cook in February 1986 during a frigid winter in the northeastern Himalayan city Kalimpong, precariously situated in West Bengal between Nepal, China and Bangladesh. Adding to the turmoil is that it is just on the eve of the riots and strikes imposed by the Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF), a Nepali insurgency that demanded an independent state. It is here, high on a hill, where 17-year-old Sai lives in relative isolation with her grandfather, a former judge, and his cook, whose son, Biju, is in New York trying to make his fortune. Tapping themes of nationalism, love of country and the idea that "old hatreds are endlessly retrievable," Desai tells the stories of at least a dozen characters. There's Sai at the convent school, barely speaking Hindi, orphaned at 9 and sent to her only relative, the judge, who was educated in London in the early 1940s and passionately hates his Indianness, reserving his love for his dog and nothing else. The judge's cook has been a servant all his life and lives for nothing but his son, but Biju is miserable in America, going from one restaurant job to another without papers, dreaming of home even though he is supposed to be able to make it in the U.S.A. There's also the Nepali math tutor, whose anger and aimlessness get him involved with the GNLF; the spinster sisters, who are ultra-anglicized; the gay European alcoholic couple; and a whole array of others. Desai is able to seamlessly weave their stories into one, which opens with the GNLF stealing ancient rifles from the crumbling estate on the hill and ends with a dog-napping and a homecoming. The distinction between personal and political in The Inheritance of Loss is no distinction at all. The line blurs until it is invisible. Through relationships among the characters and each of their relationships to their country, Desai shows the "most commonplace of" people "quite mismatched with the larger-than-life questions, caught up in the mythic battles of past vs. present, justice vs. injustice." Ordinary people are "swept up in extraordinary hatred, because extraordinary hatred was, after all, a commonplace event."

It's hard to know what to make of Tim Dorsey's The Big Bamboo, the latest in a series featuring Serge Storms, a stone-cold psychopath who insists that he's not a serial killer because he gets no joy from it.—Serge is on a mission to return the movie industry to Florida, and he's even writing a screenplay to speed along the process. His quest eventually leads him to L.A., where he winds up in the middle of a plot to kidnap an annoying starlet.

Along the way, Serge annoys some people and kills others, all of it done with alleged humor, but little purpose or direction. Dorsey also throws in several scenes where he skewers Tinseltown with some very broad and obvious digs at showbiz egos and affectations.—This off-kilter mash-up of a "happy killer" novel with a Hollywood satire can't help but leave many readers feeling uneasy. Are we supposed to laugh? Are Serge's antics supposed to be funny? Is any of this supposed to make sense? It's hard to tell.—Although Dorsey's writing is decent enough on a page-by-page basis, and the Hollywood parts of the book are occasionally funny, the book as a whole just doesn't work. The satire is too easy, the plot too meandering, the tone too off-putting and the whole point of the book just too … well, pointless.

There's something insidiously wrong with the Egans with the family itself, and in how their story is told to us. John and his parents Michael and Helen are viciously angry with one another, but hide their hostilities behind a wall of passive-aggressive behavior. But in fleshing out their hidden tale, author M.J. Hyland a darling of the New York Times Book Review following her 2004 debut How the Light Gets In collapses backwards into a vapid delivery of Frank McCourt cliches about growing up poor and miserable in Ireland. Told from 11-year-old John's perspective, we see how he deals with the troubles at home by convincing himself he can suss out lies from anybody he meets, figuring he'll get into the Guinness Book of World Records as the first human lie detector. It's not much of a premise to hang a plot on, but Hyland proceeds, unveiling cutesy details (a secret lie log called "The Gol of Seil") and humdrum scenes involving John's accelerated growth in height, the schoolyard torment he undergoes and a dashing teacher who defends him. At home, where an eccentric grandmother is letting the down-on-their-luck family temporarily live, biting dialogue exchanges and tense breakfast scenes are all we know for half of Carry Me Down, until Granny kicks the family out. This plot flip midway through proves disconcerting school issues and The Gol of Seil are all but abandoned in favor of describing a newly difficult life, now in a Dublin high-rise, which builds to a clash over drinking and infidelity and the payoff doesn't make it worthwhile. For all Hyland tries to interject details and craft a distinct voice, she never makes John a believable pre-teen as much as a composite of stereotypes. One positive aspect of his narrative voice is its inquisitive air; we learn the details of the dysfunction in step with the boy's development, and due to his tender age, the parents try to shield him for as long as they can. But in the end, tragic though it may be, those details mirror the book as a whole: superficial and unremarkable.

If you were the kind of kid who saved ants from death by magnifying glass, regularly lugged home strays of every stripe in hopes of being permitted to keep them and attempted to restore injured birds to health, this is the book for you. Written in the eloquent voice of Timothy, a tortoise wrenched from its natural Mediterranean habitat in the 18th century when self-ordained "naturalists" poked, prodded, examined, noted, catalogued, named, dissected, pinned, dried and/or stuffed the living daylights out of any and all creatures or plant life that crossed their paths, it's a lyrical and thought-provoking meditation on human behavior. Giddy with the desire to name, categorize and thus manage the seething, teeming volume of animal and insect life, real-life naturalists such as English curate Gilbert White devoted years to documenting the ebb and flow of the natural world around them. In White's case, the natural world included "Timothy," a misnamed female tortoise who barely survived the rough, dank and airless sea journey below decks, traveling from the light and airy warmth of its ancestral trundling ground to the cold, foggy, sterile English town of Ringmer, on "the shoulder of the downs." There, purchased for half a crown, she spends the next 40 years in the vicar's courtyard, one of many such "fashionable" tortoises inhabiting gardens "all across the ecclesiastical countryside," where "vicars and curates examine their reptiles the way they examine the Clergyman's Intelligencer." Her luck, such as it is, changes for the better when the vicar's nephew, White, transports the tortoise some 80 miles south, to his drier, more temperate, and poppy-strewn Selborne garden. There, she continues her shrewd, cutting and often hilarious observation of humankind. If you're among the "tottering, stilt-gaited beasts" believing themselves superior to all other animals, read this book. If you're lucky, you may just experience, as did the aging White, a "sense of wonder rising within him. Not at the beauty of nature alone. But at what it knows."

The thing about a guilty pleasure is that it's supposed to be pleasurable. Jackie Collins' latest shiny novel has all the makings of a big fat funfest: The usual characters are present, from the asshole patriarch and his three sons who all have different mothers—each with different, archetypical characteristics so that we can differentiate—to the beautiful biracial waitress who wants to be the next Alicia Keys. There's a sassy black cousin, a hip-hop mogul with dark, smoky eyes, a socialite heiress, Russian mobsters and an Italian supermodel thrown in for good measure. Of course, everyone has secrets, everyone is gorgeous and nearly everyone is wealthy. And not one of them has any depth; Collins spends the majority of her 500 pages describing clothes and furniture, not bothering to develop a single character. This is no surprise, certainly, and there is some fun in it. She is not a good writer, which is also no surprise. But it is somewhat shocking that a person whose adverb usage is heinous ("unconcernedly"; "She studiously studied the menu"), who criminally overuses italics, who writes no fewer than three dialects in one novel—badly—it is shocking that this person could have produced 23 New York Times bestsellers. All of the characters turn out to be connected in some way—like Pulp Fiction, except none of them ever says anything clever or interesting—and the "twists" are so transparent you'll know who the illegitimate daughter is by the end of Chapter 1. None of this is what makes Lovers & Players disappointing; it's that we get 475 pages of trashy, fun setup, with all the makings for a blissful, satisfying ending, but we never get the big payoff. Collins ends the book with a "One Year Later" epilogue that falls flat—and that's the letdown. There's nothing wrong with epic fluff, but for all that foreplay, we deserve an explosive climax.