Book Review

They sell frocks at F. G. Goode’s, these women in black, and when they arrive for work they don rayon crepe dresses that smell of frequent dry cleaning, cheap talcum powder and sweat. Do not confuse the Ladies’ Cocktail Frocks Department, where some of them work, with Day Frocks or Evening Frocks or exclusive Model Gowns. The last carries one-of-a-kind dresses, which means you won’t run into someone wearing the same thing unless she bought it in Melbourne. But “who goes to Melbourne?” Department store particulars are part of the charm of Madeleine St. John’s “The Women in Black,” a deceptively smart comic gem that tracks four women through the pandemonium of one holiday season in 1950s Sydney. St. John, who died in 2006, was the first Australian woman to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize (for a later novel, “The Essence of the Thing”), and though the plotlines here are somewhat reductive — marriage, dating and dresses are the characters’ central preoccupations — the book is laced with a fierce intelligence that captures the limited options for women and postwar xenophobic views. It’s also a love letter to department stores of yore, and to the operatic flow of trade. “It was a wonderful spectacle,” Mr. Ryder, the floor manager, observes, looking out onto the Goode’s sales floor. “All of human life is here.”

Language is failing Beryl Dusinbery. She is 99 years old and having trouble retrieving words. “One minute she has a word, then she hasn’t. Where does it go?” Conversely, Shimi Carmelli, 91, can’t forget. “Selective morbid hyperthymesia,” he calls it. One burdensome memory in particular refuses to recede. Live a Little, Howard Jacobson’s 16th novel, is ostensibly a love story about these two nonagenarians, who live across from one another on North London’s Finchley Road. But its themes have less to do with romance than with humiliation and regret, privilege and bad parenting, a temperamental prostate and, above all, words. Those themes have run through Jacobson’s novels (and his columns for the British newspaper The Independent) from retellings of Genesis and the Shylock story to the contemporary The Finkler Question. This new book is classic Jacobson: smart and quippy, full of literary allusions and mined with barbs.  The cover art features skeins of hearts and skulls, and the latter ought to serve as a trigger warning. Beryl is no sweet old lady; she’s self-absorbed, nasty, racist and verbally abusive to the two long-suffering caregivers who dutifully tolerate her offensive behavior. She refers to one as a “Russian whore” and hypothesizes that the other has bad posture because she’s from Africa and “It’s what comes of eating lizards and carrying baskets of bananas on their heads.” Sometimes Beryl falls down just to give them something to do. “I see it as a favor,” she says. “It increases their job satisfaction.”

Nina Stibbe’s “Reasons to Be Cheerful” is so dense with amusing detail that I thought about holding the book upside down to see if any extra funny bits might spill from the creases between the page. Or maybe I’m just a sucker for a novel that opens with a British dental surgeon named JP Wintergreen injecting himself with lignocaine and attempting to pull his own teeth. Lizzie Vogel is a wise and cheerful guide to the absurdities and injustices in the dental surgery where she works. This is Stibbe’s third novel featuring scrappy, highly literate Lizzie, who, now 18, leaves her Midlands village after charming her way into an interview at JP’s practice in Leicester by tossing about phrases like “periodontal gum disease, acid saliva and unchecked dental caries.” A cut-rate flat above the surgery is among the perks of her new job; it even gets late afternoon sun, making it “tantamount to living in Australia.” Although she’s been warned about the hazards of urban life, including prostitutes and “people trying to sell you things you didn’t need but would soon be addicted to — like feather boas, foreign cigarettes and ready-made sandwiches,” Lizzie is eager for permanent work, a challenge to find in late 1979 without connections or O levels. She embraces her new life, immersing herself in women’s magazines and aspiring to look like a “busy city woman,” which in addition to certain sartorial choices involves carrying lots of things: “bags and picture frames, and almost dropping them but laughing as if slightly shocked.”

Whether Orion ought to be feet- or head-up in the night sky depends on the hemisphere. When Stan, a 23-year-old student from South Australia, rides his bike through the Rocky Mountains, he marvels that the constellation is upside down. So does Jean, arriving in the Antipodes 16 months later from the States to cycle around Tasmania. In such celestial allusions lies the DNA of Heather Taylor-Johnson’s quirky debut, “Jean Harley Was Here,” a novel about stars and oceans and destiny, but also about bicycles and point of view. This is a love story about loss, a sweet romantic comedy that is not meant to be funny but still skews to conventions about overcoming obstacles and finding true love. Jean and Stan first meet after he sideswipes a deer and falls off his bike. He’s banged up, hungry and in need of a few pints, which leads him to the Corner House Grill in Telluride, where Jean works. After dinner, silhouetted against the moon, Stan wants to kiss her, but their timing isn’t right. They will meet again, despite the nearly 10,000 miles between their hometowns. The union has been preordained by the universe, or at least by the omniscient voice that periodically pops up to tell us what’s what: “Stan and Jean were destined to be lovers. It was painted on the walls of prehistoric mountains and sung by the fish in the southern seas; Stan and Jean were written in the stars.”

One Shabbat, toward the end of the morning service, Tova Mirvis was stricken by a debilitating headache, in which “the pain concentrated along the line where my hat met my head.” She rushed from the synagogue, entertaining worst-case scenarios: Was this, perhaps, a brain tumor or an aneurysm? But once she stepped outside and removed her hat, the pain subsided. This dramatic scene is just one instance in The Book of Separation, a graceful and deeply affecting memoir by an author of three novels, in which Mirvis’s struggles with Orthodox Judaism and an increasingly unhappy marriage began to manifest physically, as if her body were sending distress signals to her more-cautious brain. Chronicles of leaving Orthodoxy have been plentiful during the past few years, informally referred to as “Ex-Frum” or “Off the Derech” memoirs. Among the more notable books are Shulem Deen’s All Who Go Do Not Return, which won a 2015 National Jewish Book Award, and the best-selling Unorthodox, by Deborah Feldman. With this latest contribution, Mirvis applies her novelist’s flair to what might otherwise be a narrative familiar to anyone who has wrestled with religious doubt, endured a troubled marriage—or simply felt trapped.

And then there is the appendix. You have turned the last page of Lucy Ives’s intricate, darkly funny debut, and a curious timeline appears. Have you missed a plot point or two or 10? How does Jenna Lyons’s appointment as the creative director of J. Crew figure into this novel about a brainy hot mess of a cartographic specialist and the strange goings-on at the fictional Central Museum of Art — or does it? Ditto for the mental-health woes of Caligula. If this sends you flipping back to Page 1, all the better, because there is so much going on in this novel, so many sharp observations packed into sentences as sensual and jarring as a Mardi Gras parade, that it bears a second look. Stella Krakus, the reliably unreliable narrator of “Impossible Views of the World,” is a 30-something doctorate-holding dilettante stuck in an entry-level job that involves wrestling a mercurial coffee maker and performing “inane email tasks.” Stella is biding time along with others of her generation “until the boomers disperse and perish, etc.” When a 57-year-old colleague mysteriously vanishes, something of this nature may in fact have just occurred.

“It seemed to be one of life’s wonders,” observes Sherwyn Sexton, the not wholly unlikable cad at the center of Fay Weldon’s lively if sometimes frustrating new novel, “Before the War,” “that nothing happens and nothing happens and all of a sudden everything happens.” The line is a sly wink in a novel full of playful authorial interjections, in this case channeling an aphorism widely attributed to Weldon herself. Eventfulness is indeed what fuels this comedy of aristocratic manners, set in a bygone era when Britain is in a state of collective shell shock and relative deprivation. “We like to dream the costume drama of Edwardian times, all fine clothes, glittering jewels and clean sexy profiles,” Weldon writes, “but we are less drawn to the 20 years between the wars.”

A photograph on the pamphlet extolling the benefits of emigration features women in red swimsuits, skidding on water skis across Sydney Harbor — a jarring contrast to the bleak circumstances of a British couple named Charlotte and Henry in their mold-afflicted, too-small house in Cambridge. It’s so cold outside that the cows have steam rising from their flanks, and Charlotte, suffering from a debilitating postpartum depression while caring for a 7-month-old, has just discovered that she is, again, pregnant. Set in the mid-1960s and spanning three continents, Stephanie Bishop’s “The Other Side of the World” is an exquisite meditation on motherhood, marriage and the meaning of home. The novel, Bishop’s second, is a rich period piece that captures an era when “every man and his dog” seemed to be moving to Australia as the country sought to swell its population by offering assisted passage to Britons who were “healthy and of good character.”

As David Sibelius boils the lobsters for the annual dinner he hosts for his graduate students at the Boston Institute of Technology, his 12-year-old daughter, Ada, observes him with a sense of foreboding. “She could not articulate what was different in his demeanor, but it triggered a deep-seated uneasiness in her,” writes Liz Moore in her enthralling new novel, “The Unseen World.” Ada will soon learn that her brilliant, enigmatic computer-scientist father is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.