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\"Ned and Nina are working hard to get pregnant. But when Ned suddenly flies across the country to attend the funeral of college friend Douglas, Nina follows in hot pursuit. When she finally catches up with him, Nina finds her husband holed up in Douglas's upstate New York compound, surrounded by his former NYU roommates, instantly immersed in the rivalries and politics of their student days. Nina's role as an outsider gives her a unique perspective on the group as she watches them grapple with the death of their revered Douglas and attempt to reappraise their lives, relationships, and futures through the clarifying lens of the passage of time\"--Review, Booklist.

Susan Minot's new novel, \"Thirty Girls,\" to be published next year, concerns a victim of the crazed insurgency led by Joseph Kony in Uganda. Mark Lee's 1998 novel \"The Lost Tribe\" deals with an unnamed Central African republic most likely based on Uganda. Dave Eggers's 2006 novel \"What Is the What\" dramatizes the fate of one of the Sudanese Lost Boys. Philip Caputo set his 2005 novel \"Acts of Faith\" in Sudan, where the unending civil war seemed to be coming to an end. It is returning in fire. The subject renews itself, alas, and the geography accommodating violence expands: The faith-based slaughters proceeding in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq (still!) await their literary anatomists. Mr. [Alexander Maksik] writes, credibly, across the boundaries of gender and, in this book, race. He has written before from a woman's point of view. One narrator of his first novel, \"You Deserve Nothing,\" is a young Frenchwoman who determinedly seduces her instructor at an international school in Paris. The book received praise as an evocation of disordered passions, as an erotic fantasia along the lines of James Salter's novel \"A Sport and a Pastime.\" (Later, it came to light that the book was apparently a roman a clef, when the humiliated woman Mr. Maksik seems to have based his heroine on accused him of violations of confidence.) The question of complicity on the part of [Jacqueline]'s family in Charles Taylor's reign of terror comes up in a serpentine way at different points. \"Later,\" Mr. Maksik writes, \"she listened to the BBC as the U.N. unsealed Mr. Taylor's indictment: murder, torture, rape, sexual slavery, terrorism, looting, the unlawful recruitment of child soldiers. ... Her father looked at her and smiled a cold smile, a smile that meant, What I'm about to say is the last we'll speak of it. ... He said, 'That's Ghankay. Exceptional men have exceptional habits.\"'

IT was never going to be easy for Wole Soyinka. An aspiring playwright with deep roots in his Yoruba home country, highly educated, with passionate expectations for a free and democratic Nigerian state, he was at university in Britain during the years just preceding the independence that would be brokered into existence in 1960.

It was never going to be easy for [Wole Soyinka]. An aspiring playwright with deep roots in his Yoruba home country, highly educated, with passionate expectations for a free and democratic Nigerian state, he was at university in Britain during the years just preceding the independence that would be brokered into existence in 1960. As he shows early on in his new memoir, \"You Must Set Forth at Dawn,\" the portents were bleak from the beginning: \"The nationalists, the first-generation elected leaders and legislators of our semi-independent nation, had begun to visit Great Britain in droves. We watched their preening, their ostentatious spending and their cultivated condescension, even disdain, toward the people they were supposed to represent. ... Some turned students into pimps, in return for either immediate rewards or influence in obtaining or extending scholarships. Visiting politicians financed lavish parties for one sole purpose to bring on the girls! They appeared to have only one ambition on the brain: to sleep with a white woman. ... One scandal after another was hushed up by the British Home Office.\" The 1959 elections that led to the First Republic of Nigeria were manipulated by the British, with consequences that would afflict Nigerian politics for years to come. As Soyinka writes: \"The elections that placed a government in power at the center were rigged by the British! ... On instruction from the British Home Office, even the Nigerian census was falsified, giving an artificial majority to the North, which was largely feudalist by tradition and conservative in political outlook. ... Specific instructions were issued. ... The final results of the election to the federal legislature must be manipulated, where necessary, in favor of the political conservatives.\" Others concern Soyinka's secret diplomatic exercises. For example, we learn that Soyinka met with Shimon Peres in 1998 in an attempt to persuade the Israelis to withdraw assistance to Abacha's security forces. The details of exile politics are presented unsparingly. Soyinka survives the infighting, and when he returns to Nigeria after Abacha's death, receives serious appeals to run for the presidency. (He declines.) Soyinka is what might be called a democratist. Soyinka has not moderated his demands for full democracy in Nigeria. According to the Nigerian National Commission for Refugees, since the restoration of democracy in 1999, some 14,000 people have died in communal conflicts and more than three million have been driven from their homes. The Ogoni and Ijaw people of the oil- producing Niger Delta region, whose cause Soyinka has long supported, are in continuing revolt. For all the determined hopefulness of Soyinka's title, it's still dark in Nigeria. *

The article describes youthful encounters with the body au naturel and his quest to see live nudes.

CAN the literary novel ever really get its arms around the problem of human evil? It keeps trying--a difficult assignment for the poor beast. In any case, an undaunted Alexander Maksik has brought his skills to this very problem. His second novel, \"A Marker to Measure Drift,\" recounts a season of homeless exile...