By Sam Sacks

Graham Swift offers the title of his third collection of short stories, "Twelve Post-War Tales," in an egalitarian spirit. The characters include ex-soldiers and war orphans but also teachers, miners, maids and other working-class Britons who know of battlefields only from textbooks and newsreels. Even these civilians, suggests Mr. Swift, have been shaped by war's carnage. Everyone lives in a postwar world.

The stories layer small, private dramas over what a character calls "the big events of history." In "Fireworks" a father debates whether to postpone his daughter's wedding after the outbreak of the Cuban Missile Crisis. "Zoo" takes place on Sept. 11, 2001, but dwells less on the terrorist attacks than on the quotidian duties of a London housekeeper and nanny. "Where were you when?" she knows people will ask her. At the monkey exhibition explaining the facts of life to her employer's young son.

A long shadow of grief looms over the tales, no matter their distance from war. "Beauty" is a wonderful story -- both heartbreaking and generous -- about a bereft old man's visit to the college dorm room where his granddaughter died by suicide. In "Hinges" a brother and sister are tongue-tied as they try to describe their father to the minister who will eulogize him. "They didn't know what to say about their father whom they'd known all their lives. They were curiously at a loss. At a loss. Exactly."

Loss is an imaginative wellspring for this author, whose fiction includes the 1996 Booker Prize-winner, "Last Orders," which relates the journey of three World War II veterans to scatter a friend's ashes. Mr. Swift's writing is fluent and colloquial. The characters in this collection share their thoughts and memories with the reader as though with a close friend, and the warmth of their confidences balances against their sadness. We feel we've been in the trenches with them, even when a story has gone no farther than the living room.

In the French writer Mathias Énard's "The Deserters," the Sept. 11 attacks interrupt a mathematics conference being held on a river cruise liner in Germany to celebrate the work of Paul Heudeber. As we learn through the narration of his daughter, Irina, this deceased "antifascist mathematician" was a Holocaust survivor who wrote his most revolutionary theorems while imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp. That work and his postwar achievement in East Germany reflected the era's intersection of "historical despair with mathematical hope" -- a conflict complicated for Heudeber's acolytes by the shock arrival of 21st-century ideological violence.

Chapters about the conference alternate with a grim, fable-like story of a soldier who has gone AWOL from a fictionalized war in what seems to be a Mediterranean setting. Escaping to his childhood home, the soldier is discovered by a terrified young woman fleeing to the north. His conflict is primal: Will he help this fellow refugee or ensure her silence with a bullet? "War and torture have taught him all he knows about anatomy, all he knows about women," Mr. Énard writes, as the soldier roughly tends to the woman's injuries. These scenes tremble with the threat of atavistic savagery.

The two narratives create a novel in counterpoint. Nature, for the soldier, is brutal and animalistic. In the academic milieu of the conference, it has the harmony and order of a mathematical axiom. Mr. Énard explores the role of the sciences in the past century's horrors, even as he depicts an innate humanity in the bond between the soldier and the woman.

In Charlotte Mandell's translation from the French, the melding of themes is reproduced on the level of the language, which shifts from crisp scholarly exposition to vivid poetic fragments. Synthesizing so many ideas and styles is customary for this brilliant author. If Mr. Énard carries it off somewhat more erratically here than in his masterly (and much longer) novel "Compass" (2015), his formal skill and provocative intelligence remain well worth the encounter.

In the absorbing opening of Ross Barkan's "Glass Century," it is 1973 and Mona Glass is pretending to marry Saul Plotz. Saul, a high-up New York City bureaucrat under Mayor Nelson Rockefeller, is already a married father unwilling to leave his wife, but he's in love with Mona and thinks the sham wedding will appease her nagging parents. The novel follows their strange, quarrelsome but tenaciously devoted faux-union across the next 50 years, developing a layered portrait of a constantly changing metropolis.

The early sections, set in the seedy 1970s with its muggings and cheap rent, are perhaps the most indelible. Mona falls into a career as a newspaper photojournalist, getting her break by snapping an exclusive picture of a masked vigilante who calls himself Vengeance and roams the streets at night attacking criminals. Saul's government work puts him in contact with white-collar mischief, and he rubs elbows with figures such as Richard Nixon and the Queens real-estate developer Fred Trump, who comes to their meeting with his sneering son Donny.

Soon the novel settles into a traditional, if unusually constructed, family drama, tracing the path of Saul's troubled son from his marriage and the child Saul has with Mona. Mr. Barkan foreshadows Sept. 11 from the start -- the Twin Towers are pictured on the book's cover -- and when he finally arrives there we know the characters so well that the tragedy is charged with heart-in-throat suspense.

"Time is an arrow pointing one way," Mona ruefully reflects near the midpoint of this lengthy, involving book, and there are moments when you wish Mr. Barkan would pause the relentless rush of the years and draw more meaning from the scenes. But the amplitude of "Glass Century" is also its greatest strength. The people it depicts are as textured and as durable as their city.

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May 01, 2025 08:45 ET (12:45 GMT)

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