Valerie Sayers.

Three recent novels I've found compelling braid politics, religion, and families so tightly that it's nearly impossible (and probably pointless) to pull out the strands. All three explore the ways family life and religious belief can both reflect and deflect the oppressions of their surrounding cultures. If this makes them sound grim or drily sociological, let me quickly add that all three are steeped in the pleasures of rich and complex narratives.

Indeed, Brick Lane (Scribner, $25, 369 pp.), the first novel by the Bangladesh-born, London-bred Monica Ali, is almost unaccountably ebullient, given the measures of grief and struggle doled out to its protagonist Nazneen. A Bangladeshi girl of eighteen who is flown to London for an arranged marriage with a man twice her age, Nazneen is a devout Muslim whose first instinct is to obey, to serve, to accept her lot. When her beloved first-born son dies, her fatalism seems sure to endure; yet gradually her devotion to other women--her Bengali neighbors, her young daughters, and especially her sister in Bangladesh--leads her to question her own responsibility for her fate. Most of this ambitious story (thick with detail and covering a long stretch of time) is told from Nazneen's point of view, in a sharp, stylish, and often funny narrative. Her story, which strikes a sublime balance between sympathy and satire, is interrupted regularly by epistolary sections in which her sister, a barely literate but consummately energetic writer, reports on her own precarious situation in Bangladesh: she describes wife beating, rape, prostitution, destitution, and--in one harrowing subplot involving a friend--acid burning. As Nazneen reads of her countrywomen's woes, and as she witnesses her London community's burgeoning Islamic pride, she must choose how she will define herself as wife and as post-9/11 Muslim. The particulars of her world--from her little apartment, where so much of the action takes place, to a riot in Brick Lane--are rendered with exquisite precision, the characters with boundless authorial forgiveness.

Forgiveness is also central to Zakes Mda's new novel, The Madonna of Excelsior (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $23, 258 pp.). At the story's heart is an absurd moment in South Africa's bitter history: in 1971, nineteen black women and white men in the Free State were charged with interracial sexual relations. The men were released on bond, the women jailed, the charges eventually dropped after legal machinations. But the event has profound implications for the novel's fallen Madonna, Niki, a rape victim who has sought a complicated form of sexual vengeance. Her biracial daughter, Popi, will join with Niki's black son Viliki to lead the local struggle for South Africa's liberation. Mda's characters, both pre- and postapartheid, are rendered with broad satiric strokes, but his sympathy and especially his political optimism seem closely related to Monica Ali's narrative hopefulness in the face of brutal history. His novel is structured around giddy descriptions of the paintings of the real-life Belgian missionary priest, Fr. Frans Claerhout, whose portraits of the fictional characters convey a joyful respect for their physical lives. (Mda is well aware of the dangers facing male artists--whether they be priests or novelists--who portray naked women, and his commentary on the subject is droll.) The novel's distinctive, splashy prose and insistent rhythms--Mda rarely delivers a sentence whole when he can break it down into two or three emphatic fragments--make reading The Madonna of Excelsior a charged, often exhilarating experience.

If these two third-world novels look with hope and good humor to the future of the formerly oppressed, Rosetta Loy's Hot Chocolate at Hanselmann's (published in Italy in 1995 and recently released here in an elegant translation by Gregory Conti, University of Nebraska Press, $16.95, 183 pp.) looks back at the Holocaust and the hounding of Europe's Jews with tightly contained fury. This is a deeply disturbing book whose conventional domestic surface (Isabella, the wife of an Italian professor, has an affair with his Jewish colleague Arturo) is probed--gently at first, then insistently--by the family's elder daughter. The story's limpid prose, which circles memory to replay events in greater and greater detail, reflects the charmed lives of the Catholic family whose story it tells: the academic branch of the family, in Italy, and the leisure-class branch, in Switzerland, register the fate of Europe's Jews but do not intervene until it is too late. Isabella's sister pities Arturo's plight and escapes with him--but she cannot forgive him, finally, for the act he commits to save himself. Loy has said that she is interested in contrasting the Jewish idea of justice and the Catholic notion of pity; her epigraph is from Blake: "Pity would be no more / If we did not make somebody Poor." Her narrative shakes us to the core with its quiet insistence on the complicity of so many Catholics in the deaths of so many Jews.

Rosetta Loy's narrative of uncovered memory reminds us that we must be honest about the past before we can be, along with Monica Ali and Zakes Mda, hopeful about the future. All three of these striking novels bring to life families peculiar to their own cultures, each capable of nourishing cowardice and selfishness, courage and sacrifice.

Valerie Sayers

Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, Valerie Sayers is the author of five novels.