NEW YORK, Jan 31 — There is not a sluggish moment in Kris D’Agostino’s second novel, which, like his first, follows a family in crisis. Just when you think he has overdone things a bit — the approach of a massive hurricane, a dying father, estranged siblings, financial turmoil, the threat of a redemptive ending with tears and hugs — the narrative strands unfold with plenty of dark comedy. The Westfalls own an antiques store in upstate New York, but they might lose it after the death of their patriarch, George. Family members are forced to confront their troubles and one another. The callous, ethically challenged Josef, whose sex addiction and infidelity killed his marriage, faces bankruptcy if a big business deal falls through; his sister, Charlie, lives in Los Angeles, where she works for a tantrum-prone movie star and pops antidepressants like Tic Tacs; and the sensitive Armie (“unmarried, unfocused, demoralised, penniless”) still lives at home in his parents’ basement. Their mother, Ana, does not know what to make of any of them: “She’d envisioned specific lives for her children and it stung to see reality dash those grand designs.” The siblings’ reunion sets off rounds of score-settling and the reopening of old wounds, and the author lets them play out with sharp, funny dialogue that never seems formulaic. More impressively, he conveys the disorienting and ever-shifting effects of grief.

The Antiques

By Kris D’Agostino

289 pages. Scribner. US$26 (RM115).

New Year’s Eve, 1984: An 85-year-old woman in a mink coat and wide-brimmed navy-blue fedora strolls around Manhattan, encountering colourful characters as she revisits her past and beloved former haunts. Her reverie takes her back to her early years, working as a pioneering copywriter for R.H. Macy’s. Lillian Boxfish was once the highest-paid female copywriter in the country, and a popular light-verse poet who published several books. It is an unlikely story based on a real one: The remarkable life of Margaret Fishback, an outspoken protofeminist who also met the demands of her era by being a wife and mother. Lillian is given a rich interior life by Rooney. As a young woman, Lillian is tough and ambitious, and a regular presence in the society pages. Known for her mordant wit, she is indifferent to propriety and scornful of romantic love. (She prefers the ease of one-night stands.) As she recalls her glamorous days in advertising, along with darker personal struggles to come, she laments the current state of the city — squalid, crime-infested and on edge, thanks to the Subway Vigilante. Undeterred by lurking dangers, she insists on roaming the streets for miles each day. “I am old and all I have left is time,” she says, adding, “Time to kill until time kills me.” Lillian’s wide-ranging meditations are reason enough to read this charming novel, but it’s also like taking a street-level tour through six decades of New York.

Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

By Kathleen Rooney

287 pages. St Martin’s. US$25.99.

In these 13 stories by Irish writer Rob Doyle, a sunny disposition is nowhere to be found. It is a collection saturated with nihilism. Nearly all the characters are men, several are writers, and all suffer from failures of some kind — literary neglect, listless sexual encounters, creative impotence. In the opening story, “John-Paul Finnegan, Paltry Realist,” the narrator listens uneasily to his friend Finnegan rant against Ireland, claiming that no one has ever actually read Ulysses, while he chugs a concoction he calls the Guinnskey (Guinness with a shot of whiskey). As Finnegan rages on, he proclaims himself the practitioner of a bold new genre, paltry realism — “which, for the time being, consists solely of me” and involves “writing rapidly, and yes, even writing badly, in fact only writing badly,” as he denounces the “vanity” of writing well. In Paris Story, a failed novelist, envious of his friend’s success, writes a cruel review of her work that haunts him for years. On Nietzsche recalls the narrator’s obsession, years ago, with writing a book about Nietzsche, a project he cannot complete. Elsewhere, an aspiring writer suffers “a prolonged psychic unravelling” when he accepts, finally, that he will never write like Martin Amis. A few of the stories seem slight, like clever vignettes. More often than not, though, Doyle plumbs the bleaker aspects of literary life with startling precision and candour.

This Is the Ritual: Stories

By Rob Doyle

188 pages. Bloomsbury. US$26.

The plight of unauthorised immigrants is nothing new, but in our current political moment the issue has acquired a fresh urgency, its implications more tragic. Along with trenchant observations of privilege and power, Sekaran delves fearlessly into rape, infertility, adoption, identity politics and more. She captures — in harrowing, moment-by-moment detail — the treacherous border crossing of 18-year-old Soli, who makes it from Mexico to California and finds work as a housekeeper and nanny for a wealthy Berkeley family. Her precarious existence is further complicated by the birth of her son, Ignacio, whom she is raising as a single mother while earning around US$200 a week. In catastrophic ways, Soli’s narrative will collide with the story of an affluent Indian-American couple, Kavya and Rishi, whose bedroom comes to signify a “theatre of failure” after they are unable to conceive. In pitting two very different kinds of immigrants against each other — one comfortably assimilated, the other helpless in every sense — Sekaran offers a brilliantly agonising setup. “When you have just one possession,” Soli says, “you guard it with your life.” Although a number of brutal events occur in this exceptional novel, comic relief is found throughout — namely in the clumsy and often baffling attempts of Soli’s new boss, Mrs Cassidy, to bond with her: “Help yourself to anything in the kitchen. OK? Mi casa es su casa. Or whatever.”

Lucky Boy

By Shanthi Sekaran

472 pages. Putnam. US$27. — The New York Times