First fiction

Pretty Birds

Scott Simon

Random House: 368 pp., $24.95

Back in the early 1990s, National Public Radio’s Scott Simon covered the war in Sarajevo. In his first novel, “Pretty Birds,” Simon offers up a grisly portrait of that sniper-infested city at the height of the longest siege in modern warfare. Perhaps it’s an opportune moment -- with nightly reports of street fighting emanating from another corner of the world -- to recall the half-forgotten Bosnian war, one that, in Simon’s telling, disabused the world (at least, the part that paid attention) of the notion that “[w]ars weren’t begun by people who wore soft French jeans and stylish running shoes.”

Nor would you think a war could be fought by high school girls in Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson basketball jerseys. Simon’s heroine is Irena Zaric, an unabashedly secular Muslim with a Westernized preoccupation with sex (she loves checking out cute guys in the pages of Face and Q) from the ethnically cleansed neighborhood of Grbavica. Irena is a star basketballer, whose best friend and teammate is the blond, beautiful and Christian Amela. When Serbian forces move in, Irena and her peace-loving parents (devoted fans of the Beatles and Neil Young) go into hiding, and Irena and Amela are separated, left to pursue their opposing fates. What ensues is a nightmare of Sarajevo transformed: The zoo becomes a target range for Serbian snipers, while Muslims are reduced to subsisting on grass, snails and worm-infested macaroni and scurrying from crumbling wall to crumbling wall while bullets zing around them.

Yet Irena -- whose lost Timneh African gray parrot gives the book its wistful title -- refuses to become a target. She’s hired by a local brewery to do odd jobs, which turn out to be sniping at the enemy. Her charismatic mentor, Tedic, teaches her to handle an M14, to confirm the presence of “mist” (the sanguinary evidence of a hit) and to despise the blue-helmeted U.N. troops who do nothing to stop the slaughter. “The mandarins in Washington and London, the cafe crowd in Paris and New York wring their hands over our fate,” Tedic tells her. “They wail against war. But they don’t undo their fingers from their prayers or their espresso cups to help.”

“Pretty Birds” -- a true-to-life tale spun out with frontline immediacy, black humor and a cameo from Osama bin Laden -- is as much a damning dossier of Western indifference and Serbian brutality as it is a jolting portrait of a teenage girl forced by gruesome circumstance to become a cool, calculating killer.

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House of Thieves

Kaui Hart Hemmings

Penguin Press: 242 pp., $22.95

In Kaui Hart Hemmings’ bracing stories, each of which is as refreshing as a cool offshore breeze, Hawaiians young and old mull over lives spent in a radiant tropical demesne whose place names and icons evoke languid splendor even for those who have never set foot there: Waimea, Waikiki, Diamond Head, Duke Kahanamoku, Eddie Aikau. You quickly get the idea, though, that these men and women -- Hawaiians, haoles and half-breeds alike -- are every bit as insular as their island paradise, adrift at sea and hopelessly beyond reach of the emotional mainland.

The very first line of “The Minor Wars” -- about a masochistic 10-year-old, the daughter of a coma victim, who is given to swimming with Portuguese man-of-wars -- sets the tone: “The sun is shining, mynah birds are hopping, palm trees are swaying, so what.” (Hemmings has a flair for first lines and for riding a sentence like an experienced boarder shooting the curl.) “Final Girl” tells of a well-off plantation-dwelling mother coping with the discovery of a girlie magazine stashed under her aloof teenage son’s mattress. The title story finds a self-professed 12-year-old writer, diarist and actress mediating between an imperious best friend and the friend’s delinquent brother, who were separated after what might have been an incestuous incident. And “The After Party” shows the unsettling effect of a lost election bid on the alienated son and daughter of a philandering former surfing champ.

Sprinkled with disastrous dinner parties, rivalrous brothers, estranged couples bickering over ancient Hawaiiana and parents who cannot abide each other, “House of Thieves” can be as exhilarating -- and as treacherous -- as Oahu’s notorious Pipeline.