Many of the 19 stories in Patricia Henley's collection "Worship of the Common Heart" take place in the isolated parts of the Western United States or small towns of the Midwest, where a transient stranger or a wandering hired hand can shake up people's lives almost as much as birth or death. It is in these stories that Henley is in her glory: stripped of distracting outside influences, she can tear open the chests of her characters and hang their insides out to dry in the wind. In the simplest places, populated by people with simple lifestyles, Henley can expose the tumult and complexity within.

Henley, author of "Hummingbird House," a National Book Award finalist, wrote the stories in this collection over the course of 20 years, but the themes and the stark rendering of pain and beauty emanate from the same place, in a voice, uniquely Henley's, that speaks through her strong, vibrant characters. Her people live where down-and-out mothers drink gin out of old jelly jars and smoke Virginia Slims, where families clash, divide and send young children to relatives' homes and orphanages, where women work the land and lay naked and free in the sun after a day's toil, and where the past and the present coexist bittersweetly in a warm, webby alcove of the mind.

Henley's characters have names like Celestial, Birch and Rein. Some are nuns, some fruit pickers and some housewives. They've suffered difficult childhoods, years of disappointment and hard luck in love. Their men, their mothers or their fathers are usually absent, either in body or spirit. Often, Henley's depictions of women, especially young women, recall those of Margaret Atwood; her subtle observations, and their sly intents, linger. In "Sun Damage," Hannah forces her young daughter Meg to remain in the room every time Rex, the diaper deliverer, stops by -- presumably to prevent anything scandalous from happening. Meg observes Hannah "put on a gold cross pendant that slipped perilously between her breasts. You would never notice Hannah's modest neckline of her modest blouse if not for that cross." Henley's ability to show how religion, desire, right, wrong, prudence and pleasure can be welded together within the careful words of two natural, ambling sentences is one of her most thrilling talents. She can effortlessly move between past and present, memory and reality, without disturbing the momentum of the story. Instead, she raises the stakes.

When Henley completes a story, a scene, even a paragraph, she leaves her readers slightly stung, but grateful at the gift of an unvarnished truth. By the end of "Worship of the Common Heart" doesn't feel like separate stories. It feels as though you've read a satisfying novel, one that lovingly lays bare the story of an aged, weather-worn but still beating heart.

--Suzy Hansen

The Sugar Island
By Ivonne Lamazares
Houghton Mifflin, 205 pages

This debut novel by Cuban-born Lamazares paints a haunting, vivid yet elliptical picture of life on the island in the wake of the revolution. It's the late '60s and early '70s, and the shadow of the unknown world beyond barricaded Cuba looms large for Lamazares' heroine, Tanya. Her unhappy, erratic, desperate mother joins the rebel guerrilleras, returns, attempts a sea escape and eventually is taken away by the party for "rehabilitation," leaving Tanya and her brother Emanuel to live in Havana with an old aunt. Defeated but still defiant, Mamá rejoins the family and is assigned to work in a matchstick factory. By night, she is pulled into a neighbor's Santería rituals, and Tanya watches with growing horror as her mother slips ever farther away while grave, inchoate dangers seem to loom everywhere.

Full of well-chosen details and an understated emotionalism, "The Sugar Island" economically conveys a sense of life in Cuba: the deprivations, the bizarre juxtapositions of party rhetoric, Catholic rituals and voodoo, the small victories of tenacious Cubans determined to hold fast to their dignity and traditions.

But Lamazares' central subject is really Tanya's growing estrangement from her mother and the toll their fraught relationship takes on her as she grows to womanhood. The more Tanya learns of her mother's slippery heart, the less she trusts that Fidel's revolution is the sole cause of their misery. And yet the outward signs of the revolution's corruption and failure are obvious. Eventually, Tanya is forced to choose between a perilous raft escape to Miami with her mother or a life in Cuba, left behind and watching her options crumble around her. Like the rest of the novel, what happens to Tanya in the end may seem to be full of the tragic ironies that are the lot of the Cuban-born, but Lamazares' subtle intelligence manages to wrest imaginative possibilities out of even the most dire situations.

--Maria Russo

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"