BRIEFLY NOTED.(The Inheritance of Loss)(The Thin Place)(The Worst Hard Time)(American Vertigo)(Book Review)

The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai (Atlantic Monthly Press; $24). Desai's second novel is set in the nineteen-eighties in the northeast corner of India, where the borders of several Himalayan states--Bhutan and Sikkim, Nepal and Tibet--meet. At the head of the novel's teeming cast is Jemubhai Patel, a Cambridge-educated judge who has retired from serving a country he finds "too messy for justice." He lives in an isolated house with his cook, his orphaned seventeen-year-old granddaughter, and a red setter, whose company Jemubhai prefers to that of human beings. The tranquillity of his existence is contrasted with the life of the cook's son, working in grimy Manhattan restaurants, and with his granddaughter's affair with a Nepali tutor involved in an insurgency that irrevocably alters Jemubhai's life. Briskly paced and sumptuously written, the novel ponders questions of nationhood, modernity, and class, in ways both moving and revelatory.

The Thin Place, by Kathryn Davis (Little, Brown; $23.95). In the opening pages of this brilliant, peculiar book, three small-town girls discover a man's corpse at the edge of a lake, and one of them, Mees Kipp, mysteriously brings him back to life. Davis writes hallucinatory, literate prose, and adopts a cosmic perspective: she is concerned with nothing less than describing the town's every waking moment. The experiences of Mees's dog, trotting through a clearing that smells of porcupine, stand alongside those of a minister's wife reading her morning paper and "confronting whatever form the devil had chosen to assume overnight." In any other book, a magical resurrection would be a central event; for Davis, it's just another moment in a particular place.

The Worst Hard Time, by Timothy Egan (Houghton Mifflin; $28). On April 14, 1935, the biggest dust storm on record descended over five states, from the ...