Faith and the light

Good Faith, by Jane Smiley (Faber, £7.99)

Never judge a book, and so forth - but Jane Smiley's tale of marital deceit and mortgage default in midwestern suburbia comes with a lithe pair of stockinged legs on the cover. Given that it's actually about a shambling, middle-aged male estate agent, there seems to be something of a deception here; although as deceit is Smiley's principal theme, maybe it's excusable. Joe Stratford is a dour divorcee with a true estate agent's perspective on life: "The 80s began, as far as I was concerned, when modest housing in our rust belt state got decked out with Italian tile," he says. But even Joe cannot resist joining the property gold rush of the Reagan years, and when a smooth-talking former tax official from New York swaggers on to the scene, Joe obligingly turns out his pockets to be embezzled. I'm puzzled by Smiley's critical reputation - she always strikes me as Anne Tyler minus the laughs, and the pace of her narrative is excruciatingly indolent. AH

A Distant Shore, by Caryl Phillips (Vintage, £6.99)

Stoneleigh is a quiet housing development on the outskirts of an idyllic Middle-England village; the kind of place where retired schoolteachers come to settle down, and where the black caretaker receives anonymous death threats and razor blades through the post. Phillips alludes with subtle power to the subliminal current of racism in this country; the net-curtain-twitching manifestations of intolerance. "Who are these people," he asks, "are they the same people who write letters to the paper complaining about the new coins being too bulky? . . . Do I know these people? Do I sit on the bus with them?" Phillips's timely and exquisitely crafted tale of asylum-seeking is founded on a union of opposites: Dorothy, a retired piano teacher who has escaped a loveless marriage; and Solomon, a man who survived the genocide of an unnamed African country and now has to endure the taunts of the local schoolchildren. Out of the mouths of babes and football commentators. AH

Tricks of the Light, by Alison Fell (Black Swan, £6.99)

A feminist of a certain age, Broom is spending Christmas in the Alps and wondering what, if anything much, life has in store since the death of her lover Al, a climber, five years earlier. She is also designing the set for a modern-day Faust, a fact which, in this otherwise subtle novel, becomes rather a clunky deus ex machina. Fell weaves the Faust legend around Broom's recovery from inner collapse as she falls for Mephistophelian advertising executive Micky Flint. As the symbolic names and scenery suggest, there's a hint of fable to this story, though it's movingly fleshed out with forays into Broom's moral universe. Fell, who is also a poet, brings a plain- spoken poetry to her prose, while her heroine's visual intelligence allows the author to explore disturbing but beautiful images. Broom's emotional frankness and cautious revelry pit small pleasures against mountainous personal pains and desires. It's a rueful but absorbing victory over inner demons. LD

The Colour, by Rose Tremain (Vintage, £6.99)

Set beside the North American gold rush, New Zealand's 1860s equivalent is a pretty unexploited seam. Tremain makes fertile psychological use of historical events to uncover an elemental nature in Joseph and Harriet Blackstone, newlyweds from Norfolk scraping a living from farming in the new world. Joseph is escaping an unpleasant past, both are seeking a better future - then he discovers traces of gold ("the colour") on their land and the alienation really begins. Epic and domestic, adventure and romance intertwine with Harriet's attempts to make "a small world" in the midst of a vast elsewhere. The settlers' hubris is tempered by the fragility of the fantasies with which they keep the wilderness at bay. The grip of gold fever, and New Zealand's smothering snows and torrential floods, are very effectively done. Combine these raw materials with Tremain's descriptive powers and finely judged reserve, and you have a thumping good story, expertly told. LD