BRIEFLY NOTED.

Old Filth, by Jane Gardam (Europa; $14.95). This mordantly funny novel examines the life of Sir Edward Feathers, a desiccated barrister known to colleagues and friends as Old Filth (the nickname stands for "Failed in London Try Hong Kong"). After a lucrative career in Asia, Filth settles into retirement in Dorset. With anatomical precision, Gardam reveals that, contrary to appearances, Sir Edward's life is seething with incident: a "raj orphan," whose mother died when he was born and whose father took no notice of him, he was shipped from Malaysia to Wales (cheaper than England) and entrusted to a foster mother who was cruel to him. What happened in the years before he settled into school, and was casually adopted by his best friend's kindly English country family, haunts, corrodes, and quickens Filth's heart; Gardam's prose is so economical that no moment she describes is either gratuitous or wasted.

Living on Air, by Anna Shapiro (Soho; $22). Growing up in nineteen-sixties Levittown, a precocious fourteen-year-old shrinks from the "urchins of plumbers" who share her prefab suburb, disdain her weekly trips to the library, and call her Volkswagen-driving parents "Communists." Preternaturally sensitive to class differences, she secretly applies to the preppie Bay Farm School, where she lurks on the fringes of "bright, cosseted teenagers" whose pedigreed fathers "didn't bother having jobs." There's a fairy-tale quality to this story of a poor girl, nose pressed to the windowpane, obsessively cataloguing the habits of that mysterious tribe the rich--their carelessly worn Pucci nightgowns, their clambakes in Maine. Shapiro, in her third novel, is finely attuned to the self-consciousness and vulnerability of adolescence, and the slippery elision of money and sophistication.

The One Percent Doctrine, by Ron Suskind (Simon & Schuster; $27). In November, 2001, ...