BRIEFLY NOTED.

The Whole World Over, by Julia Glass (Pantheon; $25.95). Greenie Duquette loves her cozy life in the West Village, her work as a pastry chef, and her precocious young son. But she is fed up with her husband, Alan, an underemployed psychotherapist whose once passionate beliefs are ossifying into reflexive bitterness. When, in early 2000, the brash Republican governor of New Mexico offers her a lucrative job, she jumps at it; Alan is free to follow her if he chooses. In Glass's sprawling follow-up to her award-winning novel "Three Junes," a dozen or so characters are plunged into the tumultuous dissatisfactions and challenges of middle age, their paths crossing and recrossing with a pleasing mixture of chance and inevitability. Glass is fascinated by the ways people gamble both with and for their happiness, but her characters are a little too decent, generous, and forgiving. Even as we watch their dramas unfold in the shadow of 9/11, the potential horror of irrevocable choices eludes us.

Cellophane, by Marie Arana (Dial; $24). Arana's inventive first novel draws on some of the same material that animated "American Chica," her memoir about a dual upbringing in Peru and America. Don Victor Sobrevilla Paniagua is an engineer and a dreamer who ferries his wife and children into the Peruvian jungle to build a paper mill, raising "leviathans out of the earth" and creating a "swarming empire" of iron and steel. Don Victor has "the magic of a shaman" and the wealth of a god, but, once he masters the secret of manufacturing the "fragile, pellucid, mysterious" substance cellophane, Arana unleashes a destructive magic and, with deadpan comic timing, unravels his rain-forest demesne.

The Parliament of Man, by Paul Kennedy (Random House; $29.95). Kennedy's history of the United Nations takes its title from "Locksley Hall," Tennyson's weirdly prescient vision of air war and world government. Like the ...