Drowning Ruth
By Christina Schwarz
Doubleday, 400 pages

Like a master chef who can transform a few simple ingredients into a delectable meal, first-time novelist Christina Schwarz starts with some basic, not to say old-fashioned, fictional elements. She begins with two sisters, one vivacious, pretty and married, and the other overshadowed and single; an isolated lakefront community in rural Wisconsin during the early 20th century; a mysterious baby; a bitter winter night that ends with one sister drowned. Then she follows the family until, years later, the love, renunciation and envy that shape this story rumble to their final resolution.

The result is an absorbing tale in which, remarkably, the suspense comes from the unfolding of its characters -- people as complex and surprising as anyone you might actually know. Schwarz keeps her reader guessing without resorting to cheap tricks. Mattie Starkey is captivating and bold as she wins the heart of Carl -- a meatpacker who doesn't take easily to working Mattie's father's farm and so enlists to fight in World War I, leaving his wife behind with a small child, Ruth. But in her recklessness and insensitivity to her hardworking sister, Amanda, Mattie also shows the blithe narcissism of the innately charming. Amanda -- possessive, tart, diligent -- fumes inwardly to see her beloved sister taken away by a man she dismisses as "nothing special." With her crabbed spirit and her occasional bouts of mental illness, is she capable of serious wrong? If not, then how did she acquire the bite-shaped scar on her hand the night Mattie died?

Amanda shoulders the task of raising Ruth and, eventually, the care of her war-wounded brother-in-law, but their peaceful household suffers some fissures when an old flame of Amanda's moves to the town and the teenage Ruth befriends a glamorous classmate. All this is set amid a palpable Great Lakes landscape of sheep meadows, country stores, potato fields, 1920s boating parties and treacherous winter ice. When the cracks in Amanda's fiercely protected life begin to widen, the secrets that seep through defy expectations, and most readers will be entirely under Schwarz's spell.

-- Laura Miller

Luck
By Eric Martin
W.W. Norton, 288 pages

As to the plot of this humid and turbulent first novel, I'll leave the summary to Mike Olive, the protagonist, who tells himself the story in an effort to make sense of his life's recently skewed arc: "A boy returns home, cranes his head around, and with his new inside-out eyes says, Something is wrong here. Some believe him. Some suspect him. He ignores everyone and everything he knows. He turns on his friends, his family, his enemies. He falls in love despite them all."

Mike, of course, is the boy, a collegiate do-gooder home for the summer from Duke University. Home is Cottesville, N.C., a fictionalized little town with not much more to its shabby domain than a barbecue joint, a Stop 'N' Go and a thick wreath of tobacco fields. The "something wrong" is the ugly exploitation of Mexican migrant workers in those fields. And, finally, the despite-them-all love interest is an impudent teenage girl named Hermelinda, the daughter of a migrant worker newly arrived in Cottesville.

Mike hasn't come home to bask between semesters: Armed with tape recorders, cameras and a tiny team of fellow Duke students, he sets out to document the ills being visited upon the Mexican workers, and hopefully, with a glint of youthful idealism in his eye, to fix those ills. But as so often happens in the South, applied idealism leads to violence, and as Mike burrows further into his cause (discovering in the meantime the "amazing difference between theory and practice") Cottesville begins a violent unraveling.

There's evidence aplenty of a Faulknerian curse-destiny here ("the violence of this land that roams unchecked in the August darkness"). The white tobacco farmers are entangled in a racial vortex not so different from that which ensnared their grandfathers, the distinction being as slender as the workers' lighter-hued skin and their silkier-voweled language. But Martin's purview, as suggested by his title, seems more existentialist, less aligned with Faulkner than with, say, Robert Penn Warren. As Hermelinda's father tells her: "I think there isn't any why, there's only luck." The South's old and new troubles, Martin's affecting debut seems to say, were built upon accidents of circumstance, of bad luck meeting bad luck on darkened dirt roads.

-- Jonathan Miles

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"