Before videos, camcorders and digital cameras, there was the quilt. Not the quilts made of store-bought fabric, but those fashioned from necessity made from remnants of fabric that touched the family a piece of mother's Sunday dress, a sample of brother's shirt, a square from the curtain that hung over the kitchen window. Once these pieces, these scraps, were stitched together in a new configuration to make a whole, the quilt became a kind of family album a record of the past not in film, but in fabric.

In Clay's Quilt, Silas House's spirited debut novel set in the hills and hollows of Southern Appalachia, Clay Sizemore grows up knowing there are pieces missing from the story of his past. He has some snippets of memory of his life-loving, nurturing mother, but she died (was murdered) when he was only three years old, and he never knew his father. Clay comes into young adulthood still haunted by the unanswered questions of his parentage, despite the love and support he receives from his close-knit, colorful Kentucky family. While he struggles to understand himself and to piece together his own life story from bits of memory and handed-down family history, his Uncle Paul, the family quilter, is painstakingly creating a family album made of cloth, a quilt that will not only serve Clay as a keepsake, but as an enduring source of warmth and comfort.

With unobtrusive skill, House reveals the hidden complexities of simple rural life. A mail carrier and resident of a small Kentucky town himself, House creates compelling, authentic characters and paints the landscape in Clay's Quilt with a sure and gentle brush. A lot of living is going on beyond the humble walls of the tin-roofed frame houses, and while his characters are not perfect people, they are three-dimensional personalities whose lives are imbued with passion sexual passion, religious passion, passion for life, for family, for the land they call home, for music, dancing and fighting. Sometimes, sadly, these passions lead to shattering violence, and when violence shreds his world apart for the second time in his young life, Clay has a hard time holding onto his sanity. But with the help of the beautiful, exuberant fiddle-player, Alma, his beer-drinking, best buddy, Cake, his devoted, visionary Aunt Easter, and others in the Sizemore clan, Clay's Quilt becomes a whole a treasure to be handed down from one reader to another.

Linda Stankard writes from Cookeville, Tennessee.

The passage of time allows every era in history to be viewed through a revisionist prism, and the 1970s are no exception. Recent media portrayals of the decade represent it as a time with only rock and disco music and the coming of age of American teens on its collective mind. Nothing could be further from the truth.

John Searles' compulsively readable debut novel, Boy Still Missing, is also about the coming of age of an American teen in the 1970s. But Searles, the book editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, has much more on his mind than a stroll down memory lane. Boy Still Missing is a story about choices: the ones people had to make, and the ones society didn't allow them to. The 1970s of this novel the era of the Vietnam War, the women's liberation movement and abortion rights protests is decidedly not nostalgic. Abortion, in fact, plays a pivotal, but not polemic, role in the novel.

Dominick Pindle is the 15-year-old only son of a dysfunctional family in the small town of Holedo, Massachusetts. His father drinks and is a chronic womanizer. His mother, when not nursing great anger toward her wayward husband, daydreams about better times spent in New Mexico with the half-brother Dominick has never met. Dominick's mother finally decides to exact revenge on his father in the only way she knows how. That act of vengeance coupled with Dominick's chance encounter and ensuing relationship with his father's pregnant mistress sets off a chain of events that profoundly changes the lives of all the novel's major characters.

Searles renders the characters and the rural New England setting with accuracy and affection. These are clearly people and places that he knows well and understands implicitly. His ability to make their plights and their choices both believable and heartbreaking is testament to this first-time author's extraordinary skills.

I won't reveal the startling conclusion, but suffice it to say that John Searles' debut is an unqualified success. The reader will leave Boy Still Missing disturbed by, and thoughtful about, the turbulent times in Dominick Pindle's life and in the life of our nation.

Michael Grollman is a freelance writer in New Jersey.

Jason "Say" Sayer, the central character of Inman Majors' debut novel, Swimming in Sky, is not the first confused young man ever portrayed in a novel. However, as a child of the 1970s, Say's story and his words will ring true with any number of people whose doubts and mental torments come from some uniquely American factors: the empty facade of suburban life, the emotional fallout of divorce and the weight of familial expectations, for starters.

It would be easy to dismiss Say as a slacker (three years out of college, jobless and living with his mother and her boyfriend) if he weren't such a close-to-home character: a former high school basketball player, a bright kid who got a Vanderbilt degree, someone who has a few close friends but is something of an outsider in almost any crowd. Majors' mostly laconic, sometimes poignant narration allows us to see through Say's eyes as he attempts to move out of his inertia. An almost Walker Percy-esque spirituality bubbles up from time to time during his summer of discontent.

Says' hometown of Knoxville, Tennessee, (site of the University of Tennessee, where the author's uncle, Johnny Majors, was once the football coach) will remind readers of college towns everywhere with its fern bars and football fanatics. But only a Southern boy would have friends named Pel, Trick, Jimbo and Bobsmith and the sounds of Appalachia ringing through his conversations. In this promising debut, Say's catharsis proves painful, but readers will find some good laughs and remarkable insights along the way.

It is a brave writer who would all but invite readers to compare her first novel to those of a master. With Loving Graham Greene, Gloria Emerson does just that, and by and large her gamble pays off. Her fiction debut set in a foreign locale with a plot that hinges on the clash of cultures and good intentions gone awry is the kind of story that Greene himself might have written. And Emerson, an accomplished journalist best-known for her Vietnam-era book Winners & Losers, proves a deft enough novelist to weather the inevitable comparisons with the great English writer. The spirit of Graham Greene permeates and propels the book both metaphorically and literally.

The main character, Molly Benson, is a minor heiress who met Greene once in Antibes and carried on a correspondence with him in the years just before his death. A liberal, wealthy woman who craves purpose, Molly parcels out her money to good causes and travels to far flung war zones to ameliorate human rights violations. She is inspired by Greene's moral anger, but she lacks his insight into the human complexity of the Third World, a failing that will have disastrous repercussions by story's end.

To honor Greene after his death, Molly orchestrates a mission to Algiers, where she plans to bring financial and political support to some outlawed Algerian writers. Molly and her foolhardy friends blunder through their misguided mission and, before returning unscathed to their privileged lives, leave a muddle in their wake, with dire consequences for a number of innocent bystanders.

Emerson is not simply trying to emulate Greene, of course, and while she clearly admires his work, she is well aware of the foolish, ultimately dangerous aspects of Molly's idolatry. Indeed, the way in which she casts a cold eye on her characters calls to mind the emotionally stark novels of Joan Didion more than the more humanistic books of Greene. Either way, that's awfully good company for a first-time novelist to keep.

Los Angeles-based writer Robert Weibezahl considers Graham Greene's The End of the Affair one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.

It gets hot here in Tennessee. And dry. But even in a drought year, to the stoic inhabitants of the Dust Bowl plains in the 1930s, this region would probably have seemed like a tropical rain forest. For nearly a decade, plains farmers endured the ravages of sudden, severe, dirt-hurling storms that destroyed their livestock and eroded the soil from the fields. When first-time author Heidi Julavits introduces a young family Bena Jonssen; her flirtatious doctor husband, Ted Jonssen; and little Ted, her newborn son into this parched, desolate, life-shriveling terrain in her unsettling novel, The Mineral Palace, the effect is almost Gothic.

With relentless Faulknerian images of foreboding and symbolism, Julavits presents Bena with a bleak environment, hostile to new love and new life. Some of these sights are merely dark oddities, like the dog with a missing leg Bena sees running after another dog carrying a prosthetic arm in its mouth, while others are more starkly unnerving like the thin, pregnant prostitute she witnesses hungrily sucking a discarded meat wrapper in the alley for sustenance. But Julavits skillfully weaves the sights on the physical landscape into metaphors for the perplexities and incongruities in Bena's life.

Bena has no desire to move from St. Paul, Minnesota, to the dusty town of Pueblo, Colorado, where her husband has accepted a job in a clinic. But since he is still dizzy, recovering from a mastoid infection, while she is "merely sore" from childbirth, she is the one who drives their Ford Touring Car across the plains. She knows her husband "looks elsewhere," but she observes his behavior towards other women without confronting him, and quietly begins to "look elsewhere" herself. Deeply troubled about her listless newborn, and plagued by the restless demons of her past, she becomes trapped in a perverse silence, unable to share her doubts and fears. Her little family is like the seed in the New Testament parable that gets tossed on poor soil what hope of survival can they have?

But in Bena, Julavits creates a determined protagonist bent on securing at least some level of survival. Like the Mineral Palace itself, "built in 1891 to be one of the wonders of the Western Hemisphere" the Jonssen marriage is a decaying facade requiring more than cosmetic repairs, yet Julavits proves to be an unsparing writer, up to the exacting task of gutting and rebuilding. The Mineral Palace moves with the dark ferocity of a Dust Storm toward its wrenching conclusion swirling, obscuring, and destroying until its energy is spent and we come up at last shaken, but gulping the purified air.

Linda Stankard writes from Middle Tennessee, where she enjoys shade trees and spring water with renewed appreciation.

Summer is a time for gripping books filled with action and adventure, and Akhil Sharma's novel An Obedient Father is not for the faint of heart. Sharma, a young and well-respected author, has painstakingly crafted an absorbing first novel that recalls the conflict and characters of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment.

The story takes place in modern India and revolves around the startling experiences of an unimpressive older man named Ram Karan, who lives in a tiny flat with his widowed daughter and his traumatized granddaughter. His boring job and lackluster personality enhance, rather than dilute, the richness of the plot.

This novel is about crime and the mental battles that precede and follow it. The crimes committed by Sharma's characters range from incest and assassination to a shocking level of government corruption. Is planning a crime worse than knowingly allowing one to happen by accident? Passivity and powerlessness can be crimes as serious as murder, depending on the circumstances. Prepare to be stunned by the power of guilt, which can easily destroy or redeem.

Along with arresting psychological exertion, look forward to informative descriptions of Indian city life, historic religious power struggles, and government structure. Sharma explains the characters' surroundings simply, making it easy for those who have never been to India to imagine how the crowded Delhi streets teem with life, or how the rooftops of the city seem to recede into the sunset from the windows of Karan's flat.

Sharma describes the waves of tension that sweep through the city after the Sikhs assassinate Rajiv Gandhi. The development of the government's upheaval following Gandhi's assassination, along with Karan's frightening experience of it, yields a solid understanding of how the government is meant to function, and how weakness can destabilize it.

The author creates an interesting and exotic world, giving life to realistic characters of ambiguous morality. Instead of populating his steamy novel with good guys and bad guys, Sharma fills An Obedient Father with evil victims and pitiable villains. An interesting literary dimension awaits the reader at every turn in this fine debut novel.

Amy Ryce writes from Charlottesville, Virginia.