TIME ON MY HANDS

By Giorgio Vasta

Translated by Jonathan Hunt

Faber & Faber, paper, $16.

First novelists less courageous than Vasta get their plots moving before revealing just how creepy their narrators are. From early on, “Nimbus,” a self-named 11-year-old, gouges furniture and himself, tortures animals, sniffs the TV to analyze people onscreen and calls his parents Stone and String. The setting is Palermo in 1978, when the Red Brigades’ murder of a former prime minister dominates the news, inspiring Nimbus and two equally hateful young friends to form a gang that moves from school pranks and symbolic protests to senseless acts, including the kidnapping of a classmate. Although the story and the narrator’s improbably “mythopoetic” style initially seem to satirize the media’s effect on the impressionable, as the plot turns violent Vasta uses the boys to parody the wild-child actions and “puerile magniloquence” of the Red Brigades. A “Lord of the Flies” with concrete political content, “Time on My Hands” won two Italian book prizes and was a finalist for others. But the novel is pervaded by references to Sicilian life and Italian pop culture, and may require considerable patience from readers who know little about the history it so grotesquely eviscerates.

THE EDGE OF THE EARTH

By Christina Schwarz

Atria, $25.

In 1898, young Trudy Schroeder of Milwaukee dumps her conventional fiancé to marry impulsive Oskar Swann and accompany him to his new job at a remote California lighthouse, where she tutors the children of Euphemia and Henry Crawley, the head keeper. Euphemia’s brother, disagreeable Archie Johnston, is the third keeper and obvious source of the troubles that will begin after Schwarz details the sea, the weather, the children and lots of canned food. Archie appears to be the father of an infant buried below the lighthouse, but who is (or was) the mother? When the children tell Trudy of a “mermaid” in a nearby cave, she and then Oskar pursue the mystery woman in a surprise-filled plot that ends with one man drowning and two women forming an unusual friendship. Schwarz has invented persuasive voices for the educated Trudy and the homespun Euphemia, as well as the go-getting Oskar. Except for a rushed, somewhat implausible conclusion, “The Edge of the Earth” is skillful storytelling given welcome weight by the author’s knowledge of lighthouse technology, tide-pool ecology, Native American ethnology and her narrator’s proto-­feminist psychology.

Image SWISSTED: Vintage Rock Posters Remixed and Reimagined

By Mike Joyce. 208 pp. Quirk Books. $40.

Born of Joyce's love for alternative music and typography, "Swissted" refashions rock concert posters of the 1970s, '80s and '90s through a Swiss modernist lens.

MAYA’S NOTEBOOK

By Isabel Allende

Translated by Anne McLean

Harper, $27.99.

Supposedly the product of a 19-year-old high school dropout, “Maya’s Notebook” recalls Maya Vidal’s charmed childhood in Berkeley with her Chilean grandmother and African-American step-­grandfather. At 16, however, Maya starts using drugs, extorts money from pedophiles, escapes from rehab in Oregon and runs away to Las Vegas, where she becomes a heroin addict, works for a drug dealer and counterfeiter, falls into prostitution and ends up homeless, while being pursued by a corrupt cop who believes she has the counterfeiter’s valuable plates. Fearing for Maya’s life, her grandmother sends her into hiding with an elderly anthropologist friend who lives on an island off southern Chile. Since little besides bad weather happens there, Maya has plenty of time to describe the lives of the locals and investigate the abuses of the Pinochet era. Eventually, evil from North America comes to call, a literal cliffhanger occurs, and it takes a village to save Maya. Too stylish to have a journal’s authenticity, Allende’s novel is too slack to be artful. Its climax is predictable, some characters are pre-sweetened caricatures, and the Las Vegas sections seem ripped from cheesy TV. But the Chilean setting — the homes, customs and daily activities of the islanders — does give the book a certain anthropological interest. Like most writers’ journals, “Maya’s Notebook” is a gathering of disparate materials that might have been the basis of a sharp and shapely novel.