Madras on Rainy Days is a deeply felt personal drama set against a highly polarized political backdrop. Samina Ali's absorbing story opens in the days leading to a traditional Muslim wedding in the walled city of Hyderabad, India. The bride is part Western, living half of every year in the U.S., but is also a carefully raised and fully sheltered Muslim. A reversal of her feelings about the arranged marriage sends her family into a tailspin, especially her mother, whose every dream would be fulfilled by the union of Layla and her husband-to-be, Sameer. Madras on Rainy Days, Ali's first novel, is notable for its rich depiction of life behind the chador and its description of the search for home in a world that precludes it.

Lynn Freed's sixth book is a stunning collection of short stories, sometimes erotic and always revelatory of human interaction, misunderstanding, and the potential for growth or decay. The settings of the fifteen collected stories range from South Africa to California to venues as exotic and unlikely as Far Rockaway, New York, and Grossinger's Hotel in the Catskill Mountains. Propelled by a kind of underlying violence, and by a hint of unabashed, almost bawdy humor as well, Freed's flawless prose takes us from youth to old age and back again, into the maze of generational conflict and adolescent heat, and ultimately, into a heightened perception of the possibilities of our lives. Freed was the winner of a BABRA award for fiction in 1986 for her novel Home Ground.

Andrew Sean Greer's wise and unique novel describes the life of Max Tivoli, who, through some twist of biology or fate, is born into an old man's body and paradoxically grows younger as his own mind ages. The life of this odd protagonist parallels the development of San Francisco and the Bay Area from the beginning of the twentieth century until the present, and is fascinating as both a personal and a historical account. The prose style is powerfully clear yet intricate, expressing the protagonist's confusion with his own situation and with the developments of the world around him. This is Greer's third novel; his second, published in 2001, The Path of Minor Planets, was also nominated for a BABRA/Northern California Book Award.

An older couple quietly living out their retirement in the English countryside in 1948, Martha and Samuel are unprepared for the impact Gandhi's assassination has on their lives. Martha has been a secret correspondent of the spiritual leader for decades, and when this comes to light just after Gandhi's death, she must face the awkward scrutiny of her family and the media at the same time. Inspired by a line from Gandhi's autobiography, Keith Heller's novel cleverly imagines what might have happened had such a relationship existed and at the same time gives us the taste and feel of turbulent post-war England. Bungling through old narratives and recriminations in her golden years, Martha faces the unexpected challenge bravely and proceeds to re-set the past. She exhibits a sweet but fierce dimensionality on her latter-day journey. Keith Heller is also the author of a trio of murder mysteries set in eighteenth-century London and of the novel Snow on the Moon.

In this pristinely written first novel by Nina Schuyler, the struggle of an unhappily married couple in Japan is juxtaposed with a tale of survival in France during World War I. The balance and relationship between the two stories is delicate, tied together only by a beautiful painting created for her own pleasure by the unhappy wife in Japan and sent to Europe instead, to be sold. The painting is ultimately purchased by an avaricious French dealer in objects of art and human lives, and then stolen from him by his sole employee, a wounded and desperate Danish soldier, who hopes to purchase his own freedom with its sale. As the two stories weave together&emdash;that of the original Japanese artist and that of the wounded European survivor&emdash;Schuyler's novel rises to a challenging and powerful climax which reveals the importance of art, the nature of passion, and the power of the human will.