DISCOVERIES

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Beasts of No Nation

Uzodinma Iweala

HarperCollins: 142 pp., $16.95

AGU is a young boy of unspecified age in an unnamed West African country. In English that is as broken and remade as the child himself, the protagonist of “Beasts of No Nation” tells of being dragged from a hiding place and recruited to fight by guerrilla soldiers who had attacked his village and killed his family. Under the brutal guerrilla leader Commandant, Agu and another boy, Strika, are trained and forced to kill.

“I am not wanting to be killing anybody today,” Agu thinks the first time. “I am not ever wanting to be killing anybody.” Soon, though, the voice in his head tells him, “I am not a bad boy.... I am a soldier and a soldier is not bad if he is killing.... So if I am killing then I am only doing what is right.”

Agu has memories of learning to read, going to school and dreaming about his future. “God is forgetting everybody in this country,” he thinks after raiding a village and helping to kill a mother and her daughter.

Uzodinma Iweala’s debut novel recalls Ismail Kadare’s stunning “Chronicle in Stone,” the quintessential tale of war seen through a child’s eyes. In the blood and vomit and angry voices captured in “Beasts of No Nation,” a reader sees human nature reforged, manacled to evil, tragically perverted.

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Making It Up

Penelope Lively

Viking: 216 pp., $24.95

IT’S hard to go wrong reading Penelope Lively. Her careful thinking about fiction and memory oddly makes her writing lighter, not ponderous or self-conscious. Lively insists that even “Making It Up” -- a book on autobiography in fiction and her answer to the often asked question “Is your work autobiographical?” -- is pure “confabulation,” “anti-memoir.” The word “confabulation” refers to “the creation of imaginary remembered experiences which replace the gaps left by disorders of the memory,” she explains.

Lively uses several scraps, junctures and decisions from her life to create fictional scenarios: what might have happened if Lively, her mother and nanny had fled to Cairo instead of Palestine in the early 1940s to escape the war; a ghost child that might have been born if she had gotten pregnant at 18; what might have happened if the man she married hadn’t returned from the Korean War.

“The distorting feature of anyone’s perception of their own life is that you are the central figure,” she writes, explaining how she has used herself as a peripheral character in her fiction. “But nobody else sees it thus.... So in the interests of truth and reality

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A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

Stories

Yiyun Li

Random House: 204 pp., $21.95

WE all know what little atomic bombs lurk in the best short stories; they can be far more upsetting and emotional to read than their long-winded and venerable cousin, the novel. “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers,” stories set in China and America, are written in a quiet style dependent more on detail than sudden movement or violent overstatement: old-fashioned showing versus telling.

Perhaps this is because so many of the characters are in between worlds: imperial dynasty to communism; China to America; even youth to old age. “If you grew up in a language that you never used to express your feelings,” a young woman tells her Chinese father who is visiting her in America, “it would be easier to take up another language and talk more in the new language. It makes you a new person.”

Yiyun Li’s characters -- including Granny Lin in “Extra” and the “young man” in “Immortality” (winner of the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize for new writers), who is born in a town famous for providing eunuchs to the imperial family and has the distinction and misfortune of looking exactly like the country’s new Communist leader -- step from the cocoons their elaborate culture has woven around them.

They blink. They don’t know what to do. So much change in history, Li reminds us in her quiet way, can boil down to a new hardness in the eyes of passers-by.