BRIEFLY NOTED.

I'll Steal You Away, by Niccolo Ammaniti, translated from the Italian by Jonathan Hunt (Canongate; $23). Ammaniti's previous book, "I'm Not Scared," which was made into a movie, used to memorable effect the point of view of a terrified young boy. This novel centers on Pietro Moroni, a skinny, introspective boy in a small village, who is taunted at school and ignored at home. When his favorite teacher, a spinster with problems of her own, lets him down, his anger--at the world, at his loutish parents and his hopeless brother--combusts. The story of the boy and his teacher intersects with that of a local playboy, a ne'er-do-well newly returned to the village, whose gargantuan narcissism cannot ward off a dawning realization of his life's errors. Ammaniti beautifully evokes the lopsided streets of an Italian backwater and, especially in Pietro's surprising friendship with the prettiest girl in the village, the shadow life of childhood.

Golden Country, by Jennifer Gilmore (Scribner; $25). Early in Gilmore's high-spirited debut novel, Mae West makes a cameo appearance, returning home to Brooklyn and showing off the mirrored ceiling above her bed to her neighbor's rapt six-year-old grandson. History and fiction mingle throughout this family saga, which spans almost half a century, from Prohibition to the age of television, tracing the lives of the children of Jewish immigrants in New York. Desperate to escape the "American shtetl" of Williamsburg, one joins the Mob and elopes with the local beauty; another invents the first two-in-one cleaning product. Gilmore favors broad dramatic strokes: a frustrated actress, wallowing in drink, dismisses the theatre as "homosexual"; a mother bullies her daughter into a nose job that destroys her sense of smell; a former gangster turned Broadway producer placates former colleagues with house seats.

Redemption, by Nicholas Lemann ...