Ronan Bennett’s fifth novel, Zugzwang, is populated by double agents, doppel­gängers, counterpropagandists, agents provocateurs, and assassination conspirators so numerous and mutually entangled that you can’t tell them apart without two scorecards—one for their real iden­tities, another for their false ones. The protagonist, Otto Spethmann (Nabokovian punsters, take note), is a Freudian psychoanalyst accustomed to dealing in such dualities. The son of a Jewish baker in prerevolutionary Saint Petersburg, he has learned to sweep Yiddish under the rug, live in a wealthier neighborhood, and eat fluffier bread. He has also developed a sixth sense for digging into his patients’ murky dreams

The power of flies; they win battles, hinder our soul from acting, consume our body.” Blaise Pascal proposed this notion in Pensées, his seventeenth-century postconversion writings, which provide the intertext for Lydie Salvayre’s The Power of Flies, originally published in 1995 as La Puissance des mouches. A Pascal devotee—a tour guide in the philosopher’s abbey at Port-Royal-Des-Champs—is on trial for the murder of an unidentified victim; as he narrates his life events in a disjointed coordination of personal anecdotes and literary interpretations, the novel unravels into a testimony of domestic violence. Despite the brutality on display, The Power of Flies

There comes a point early on in Stewart O’Nan’s novel The Good Wife (2004) when you realize, with dismal certainty, that you aren’t reading the story of a young pregnant woman whose husband is serving twenty-five years to life in prison for a murder he may or may not have committed, but rather, the bloodless story of a woman who waits for her husband for twenty-eight years. It is a novel about marking time, about making ends meet, about a disappointing mother­hood, and about a long, unrewarding marriage. An old-school formalist, O’Nan ensures that we really suffer the passage of

Two-thirds of the way through The Match, an exacting yet tender novel about expatriate life, its protagonist, Sunny Fernando, visits Sri Lanka for the first time since childhood. He goes to look for the house he grew up in and finds it gone: “None of the things that had made up his early world, imprinted as images on his brain, existed any more. Everything had been violated. There was no past—no place, no people—except what he remembered. It frightened him.”