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'The 19th Wife'

By David Ebershoff (Random House, $26)

There are many indications that David Ebershoff conducted prodigious research to write his novel about polygamy, "The 19th Wife." The main evidence: Ebershoff has fractured his narrative into texts, memoirs, depositions, letters, newspaper articles, an ersatz Wikipedia entry and even a supposed approximate transcript of conversation between wives of Brigham Young, the 19th-century Mormon patriarch.

If falling back on the language of scholarship is one way "The 19th Wife" stifles interest, using a divided time frame is another. This device, the blight of so much contemporary fiction, allows an author to crosscut between a present-day story and a wildly coincidental parallel one that some scholar, detective, witch or psychic has dug up. So in the case of "The 19th Wife," there are two 19th wives. One is the real historical figure Ann Eliza Young, who was decades younger than her husband, Brigham, and earned the nickname "Brigham's headache" when she became a public crusader against polygamy.

"The 19th Wife" intertwines Ann Eliza's story with that of Jordan Scott, a young man whose mother, BeckyLyn, was the 19th wife of a present-day polygamist leader in Utah. The past tense is suitable because that husband is now dead, and BeckyLyn is in jail, accused of having shot him.

All these elements connect as jigsaw-puzzle pieces, adding up to a history and critique of how polygamy works. But try as he might, Ebershoff does not achieve the level of ventriloquism necessary for this process.

—The New York Times

'Alfred & Emily'

By Doris Lessing (Harper, $25.95)

Doris Lessing once declared that "fiction makes a better job of the truth" than straightforward reminiscence, and while that might well be true of her celebrated and semiautobiographical Martha Quest novels, it's an observation that doesn't apply at all to her latest book, "Alfred & Emily," an intriguing work that is half-fiction, half-memoir. The sketchy, insubstantial first half of the book imagines what her parents' lives might have been like if World War I had never occurred. The potent and harrowing second half recounts the real-life story of her parents, and the incalculable ways in which the war fractured their dreams and psyches, and left them stranded in the bush in Africa, eking out a meager existence on a tiny farm in Rhodesia.

This portrait of her parents is familiar in outline to Lessing's 1994 autobiography, "Under My Skin," but whereas the author adopted a detached, matter-of-fact tone in that volume, she writes here with a visceral immediacy, conjuring the awful, unrelieved hardship of her parents' lives in Rhodesia, and the aching disappointment that shrouded their daily existence.

Writing with the incandescent clarity of her 88 years, Lessing — the 2007 Nobel laureate — conveys the appreciation she now feels for the hardship of her parents' lives, and the anger she often felt as a young girl in rebellion against her mother. She also writes about her father's and mother's memories of the war, and how those memories affected her own apprehension of the world.

— The New York Times

'Highway to Hell — Dispatches From a Mercenary in Iraq'

By John Geddes (Broadway Books, $24.95)

"Highway to Hell — Dispatches From a Mercenary in Iraq," by John Gedde is a chatty British page-turner that describes a lot of "slotting along a dual carriageway."

Do you need an interpreter?

John Geddes' actual style is a lot more reader-friendly than that, though he seems to think any American ought to understand that "slotting" is British military slang for killing. "Dual carriageway" just means any two-way road or street. That could be an understated British way to describe the desolate 330-mile stretch between Baghdad and Iraq's border with Jordan. Geddes calls it the "Highway to Hell."

His writing involves copious use of what most American publications call expletives — an uncensored version of the speech habits in American as well as British armed forces. Geddes spells out all the words.

A veteran of an elite British military unit, he proudly calls himself a "private military contractor" or PMC. At 53, he's an executive in London of Ronin Concepts Ltd., licensed by a Security Industry Authority under British law. He says there are 100,000 PMCs in Iraq, many of them hired by the U.S. and British governments to protect VIPs instead of using regular military for the job. They are sometimes paid 10 times as much as American soldiers would be.

The book enthusiastically defends the mercenary trade as useful and ethical, comparing it favorably with the standards of U.N. peacekeepers. The author even describes an imaginary U.S. invasion of a Middle East country in 2015, with improved equipment.