BRIEFLY NOTED.

Breakable You, by Brian Morton (Harcourt; $25). This packed novel about the vagaries of love and grief takes place in a New York straight out of Woody Allen: enormous apartments abound, and girls in bars say things like "Paul Auster makes me wet." Adam Weller, an aging, still handsome Jewish novelist, has recently left his wife, a psychologist. She, when not (with justification) trying to smash grapefruit into Adam's face, worries about their daughter, a philosophy grad student who is having a sexually obsessive affair with an Arab-American who, in turn, is mourning the death of his young daughter from a rare blood disease. The forced, almost pedantic quality of Morton's social caricature obscures the fact that he can write ferociously moving prose about the tragedy of a child's illness. Inside his broad comedy of manners is a heartfelt novel about the redemptive power of suffering.

Secondhand World, by Katherine Min (Knopf; $23). This disquieting debut novel begins like a murder mystery: in a hospital burn unit, a badly scarred eighteen-year-old flatly informs us of her parents' death by fire. The story that follows, however, is less an investigation than an exorcism. As the daughter of Korean immigrants, growing up in the seventies, the narrator is bullied by classmates and barely noticed by her parents. She finds kinship with a "fellow freak," an albino boy, but their love affair soon ends, and she turns her rage against her mother, who she discovers is leading a secret life. Symbolism is the primary force here, occasionally overwhelming the plot. Still, the writing is exquisite and exacting, as when the narrator describes the dregs of whiskey in a glass as her father's "spoor," or recalls her lover's "dazzling Kabuki face."

Moscow 1941, by Rodric Braithwaite (Knopf; $30). As German troops approached Moscow in June, 1941, two million people were evacuated from the city, in seventy thousand trainloads, including ...