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A collection of aerial photographs of 36 world cities, taken over a period of 10 years, raises questions about 21st-century urban space. Barbieri employs color and registration, and deletes details, in order to distort reality for dramatic effect. Above, "Venezia 09." THROUGH THE NIGHT By Stig Saeterbakken Translated by Sean Kinsella Dalkey Archive , paper , $15. There's a house in Slovakia within whose walls lurk your greatest fears, whatever those may be. Of the people who've been inside, Boris tells his friend Karl, some emerged relieved and joyful, while others never recovered: one turned gray and died, another threw himself under a train. This isn't the kind of story Boris should really be telling Karl, a middle-aged Norwegian dentist who is living through his own greatest fear: the suicide of his teenage son. "A thousand times a day I forgot that Ole-Jakob was dead," Karl explains in the book's opening paragraph. "A thousand times a day I remembered it again. Both were unbearable." The author took his own life in 2012, not long after this book was first published in his native Norway, leading the reader to wonder how much of the pain in these pages is Karl's and how much Saeterbakken's. In Karl's case, it's not always easy to sympathize. Before Ole-Jakob's death, Karl runs offwith a younger woman, only to decide she isn't what he wants after all. He slinks home to a "haughty" wife and a son who barely speaks to him : "The only thing he could use me for now was to ensure he didn't end up like me himself." In the wake of the suicide, Karl leaves again, this time making his way to that house in Slovakia, where the last part of the book is set. These chapters are both nightmarish and dreamlike, a solipsistic despair mixed with sunny visions of "everything the way it could have been. Us, together, for all eternity." Saeterbakken entices the reader along some dark paths from which, in the end, there is no easy escape. THE MATCHMAKER, THE APPRENTICE AND THE FOOTBALL FAN More Stories of China By Zhu Wen Translated by Julia Lovell Columbia University , $26.95. For most of the characters who inhabit the eight stories in this collection, life is a trial: jobs are assigned by the state, living conditions are grim, love's hard to find and bureaucracy is a constant nag. In the face of all this, these men - for all Zhu's protagonists are men - tend toward a kind of self-deprecating resignation to get by. "I have an unusually low opinion of myself," one explains. "It didn't bother me until it was too late, until I became a conscious adult and realized that everyone else shared my view." Among Zhu's Everymen, though, there are also a few shady outliers, like the narrator in "The Football Fan." Over the course of 13 pages, he repeats the same biography six times: "My name is Chen Zhiqiang. I'm 25 years old. I used to work at the Xinhua Printing Factory. My father worked at the same factory all his life. He never smoked a cigarette in his life and then died of lung cancer before he was 50. No one could understand it." The recitations are reminiscent of a P.O.W. giving his name, rank and serial number, and for good reason. Chen, it turns out, is under interrogation for the murder of a neighbor. Even in this grim tale, Zhu manages to inject some of the sly humor that suffuses these stories, which, unlike some of the lives he describes, are never dreary. The miserable Chen describes an outdoor sit-in over factory layoffs where it was so cold that "anyone whose trousers were too thin had to sit in standing up. . . . And so the demonstration petered out, without our gaining a single thing from it." ELÉCTRICO W By Hervé Le Tellier Translated by Adriana Hunter Other Press, paper, $14.95. Two men, four women, nine days. The two men are Vincent and Antonio, a writer and a photographer thrown together to cover the trial of a suspected serial killer in Lisbon in the mid-1980s. And though the story is ostensibly theirs - with Vincent doing the telling - it revolves as much around the women. The first of them is Duck, Antonio's childhood sweetheart, who's also the reason he hasn't been back to Lisbon in a decade. They met when he was 11 and she 7 , and were separated eight years later when a pregnant Duck was banished by her angry father, "sent far away, hidden with an elderly cousin in Braga." Vincent, meanwhile, is mourning Irene, whom he leftbehind in Paris after she wouldn't reciprocate his love. He comforts himself by translating the extremely short stories of the Portuguese writer Jaime Montestrela. (Here's one of the shortest: "On the island of Tahiroha, on Good Friday, cannibals who have converted to Christianity eat only sailors." ) Early on, Vincent discovers his Irene is actually in love with the rather ambivalent Antonio and, in a kind of revenge fantasy, decides to track down Antonio's forgotten love. "I would find a way of rebuilding their lost happiness, I would rewrite fate, I would be their fate." Le Tellier likes wrapping stories inside stories, with yet more of them spilling out in unexpected places. There's Duck, her father, Montestrela, as well as two other women who stumble into the central love triangle - or maybe it's a quadrangle. As Vincent says at the outset, "there was actually nothing extraordinary, fascinating or, in a nutshell, bookworthy about Antonio," but he provides a good enough pretext for what is an engaging snapshot of these briefly intersecting lives. THE SINISTRA ZONE By Adam Bodor Translated by Paul Olchvary New Directions, paper, $15.95. Like everything else in this cryptic novel, its main character is a bit of a mystery. He's about 50 and has come to the Sinistra Zone - a militarized, mountainous area somewhere along the border between Ukraine and Romania - to find his adopted son, Bela, who he fears has "gotten mixed up in something or other." Even his name, Andrei Bodor, is an alias, given to him by a local colonel, who dies of the mysterious Tungusic Flu, which regularly sweeps across the region. During his time in the zone, Bodor (the character) has various jobs, from overseeing the wild fruit harvest (the fruit is for bears that are kept "locked up in the ruins of a chapel and caged in abandoned, caved-in mines" ), to working in a mortuary ("It is the duty of a coroner's assistant to sit in a room with the deceased and keep watch, making sure that the subject does not stir during his shift" ). Adding to its perplexity is the book's structure: 15 overlapping chapters that could double as independent short stories. Treating them as such may be the best way to read Bodor, who doesn't so much advance a plot or a narrative line as paint a picture of an Eastern Europe under Communist rule, where harsh living is controlled by absurd rules, even when you're dead. That same colonel, who succumbed to the mysterious disease on a mountaintop where a bird built its nest in his mouth, is later "sentenced posthumously to death" for smuggling messages and money inside the bellies of fish. If there's a magic realism Easternbloc style, "The Sinistra Zone" is surely its paradigm. Alison McCulloch, a former editor at the Book Review, is an author and journalist living in New Zealand.

Le Tellier (Enough about Love, 2011) is a quadruple threat: writer, journalist, food critic, and mathematician. But threat is not quite the right intensifier to describe him. Nor should one take his fifth novel too seriously or regard it as lightweight, though it is humorous and reads effortlessly. Vincent Balmer, lovable loser, is our protagonist and narrator. Photographer Antonio Flores, a Lisbon native, joins him there to cover the trial of a serial killer for a French newspaper. The novel covers nine days in nine chapters, each named for a different character. While detailing his failures at love and Antonio's successes, Vincent is translating a book of short stories and writing a historical novel. Many threads overlap: Le Tellier means for us to appreciate the gentle vibrations of this net woven from distinct narrative tropes, capturing reflections and feelings, accumulating and preserving details. Noticing a couple getting soaked in a downpour, Vincent remarks, Watching them, I succumbed to the all-encompassing amazement I always feel about lives that are not my own. --Autrey, Michael Copyright 2010 Booklist

Romantic and atmospheric, this novel also benefits from a particularly fine sense of place and time. It is 1985 in Lisbon. The narrator, Vincent Balmer, is a French journalist. He is trying to finish a novel when Antonio Flores, a photographer, asks him to help cover the trial of Pinheiro, a serial killer. The two men share a suite in a hotel and interact with a complex group of characters, such as "Duck," an important woman from Antonio's past; Irene, a woman known to both men, who once told Vincent that he had "a young man's body that hadn't aged well"; Aurora, a young woman who gives what is quite possibly the funniest violin recital ever rendered in literature; and Vincent's father, among others. Dealing with so many characters sometimes gives the book a cobbled-together feel, but also makes it lively and fleet. An epilogue describes the characters' futures so neatly and completely that the reader may want to skip it. But skipping anything else in this witty, sad, and interesting novel would be a shame. Agent: Isabelle Laffont, Editions JC Lattes (France). (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

A French journalist and a Portuguese photographer find they have some uncomfortable things in common in this latest from Le Tellier (Enough About Love, 2011, etc.). Narrator Vincent Balmer has relocated to Lisbon to escape from his fruitless love for flirtatious, withholding Irene. When he agrees to cover the trial of serial killer Ricardo Pinheiro with photographer Antonio Flores, he doesn't know that Antonio is having an affair with Irene. When he finds out, he determines to get his revenge by tracking down Duck, the childhood sweetheart Antonio still pines for; then Irene will know what it feels like to be rejected. This mildly distasteful premise is mostly an excuse for Le Tellier's atmospheric, leisurely narrative of nine days in 1985, which mingles Vincent's search for Duck, the first day of the trial and his wanderings through Lisbon with Antonio and Irene--who arrives from Paris and is not pleased to find Vincent supposedly involved with someone else. He's faking this romance, aided by a woman he meets at a cafe. Another very young woman met by chance gives Antonio a taste of the hopeless love Irene and Vincent have both experienced, providing more satisfactory payback than Vincent's eventual discovery of Duck. Unfolding memories give readers a better understanding of and sympathy for Vincent, who has endured a difficult childhood, his mother's death and a fraught relationship with his father, who recently committed suicide. Intermittent excerpts from Portuguese writer Jaime Montestrela's Contos acquosas, which Vincent is translating, amplify the novel's tone of existential unease, which is also buttressed by glancing references to the Salazar dictatorship and Vincent's memories of a journey to the Okavango Delta in Africa, "a metaphor for unfinished business, for adversity, for an unreachable goal." It makes an allusive kind of sense that he names his novel after a Lisbon tramline that no longer exists. Delicate handling of deep themes--loss, missed connections, meaninglessness--gives the novel an emotional charge greater than its low-key particulars and pacing.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.