BRIEFLY NOTED.

Chicken with Plums, by Marjane Satrapi, translated from the French by Anjali Singh (Pantheon; $16.95). The writer and illustrator who chronicled her childhood in the best-selling graphic memoir "Persepolis" now turns to the life of her great-uncle Nasser Ali Khan. A revered musician, he takes to his bed and refuses sustenance after his frustrated wife breaks his tar--an Iranian lute--over her knee. It takes him eight days to die, and in that time Satrapi reveals the futures of his children and unearths his past. She shows her great-uncle not merely as a wayward romantic but as a conflicted man whose story embodies several aspects of Iranian cultural identity during the late nineteen-fifties. Satrapi's deceptively simple, remarkably powerful drawings match the precise but flexible prose she employs in adapting to her multiple roles as educator, folklorist, and grand-niece.

The Blue Taxi, by N. S. Koenings (Little, Brown; $23.99). Koenings's debut novel, set in a fictional East African city in the nineteen-seventies, centers on Sarie Turner, a lumpish, naive Belgian woman married to a British former clerk living off his uncle's beneficence. After she witnesses a bus accident in which a Muslim boy's leg is severed, she and her young daughter visit the boy's home, where she meets his father, Majid, a widower and a failed poet. Their ensuing affair liberates Sarie from her sheltered existence and Majid from his bereavement. Koenings skillfully weaves together the stories of individuals from disparate cultures converging in a city that is entering a new era of political independence, but the characters display a frustrating inertia, and this sleepwalking quality is compounded by Koenings's fondness for indulgent, at times fanciful description.

Love and Louis XIV, by Antonia Fraser (Nan A. Talese / Doubleday; $32.50). Adelaide of Savoy, a favorite companion of ...