On a gentler note, two richly evocative novels which look back to different eras.

Such a story is at the heart of Leah Hager Cohen's evocative first novel, "Heat Lightning."

The questions may not seem of particular moment, but they have provided Peter Ackroyd, a British writer, with a pretext for an evocative and humorous novel.

There's water, water everywhere - every drop of it deadly - in Clare Francis' evocative novels of psychological suspense.

This evocative novel is successful on more than one level.

It is "an artfully evocative first novel," Lisa Shea wrote in these pages last year.

Susann Cokal's evocative first novel is set in the 14th century in Villeneuve, a crowded, disease-ridden French town.

In this evocative first novel, two small English sisters in the 1960's are taken by their hippie mother to Marrakesh, where they are stranded without money.

Postwar Chilean politics and literature infuse this densely learned, richly evocative novel.

The plot is all resonance, which is why these rather compact, evocative novels have a life beyond their pages: they are more true to life than to fiction.