This book haunts.

Chaon gives us three narratives that eventually merge. We first meet college student Ryan as he’s losing consciousness, comforted by his father. Ryan’s hand has just been sliced off by some thugs. Next, we meet Lucy Lattimore, who has ditched her small-town life in Ohio with George Orson, her high school history teacher. Miles Cheshire is the third leg; he’s on a quixotic drive to the Arctic Circle in search of his identical twin, Hayden, who’s clinically insane. (It’s a 4,000 mile drive: who’s the crazy one?)

I was hooked by all three but I confess a fondness for Lucy, a dumpy orphan who blossoms under the tutelage of her older, wiser lover. Theirs is the most Gothic of the three stories: George takes her to his family’s home, a Victorian house beside a shuttered motel, on the banks of a dried-up lake. There he hides himself in the study, with computers and a wall safe. Lucy, like any out-of-place teenager, watches t. v. and eats poorly. Even she gets bored with that routine. When George leaves her alone too long, she has to snoop — and what she finds in the safe turns her into a player.

It’s a dangerous game.

I liked Chaon’s first novel, “You Remind Me of Me” (2005) but had a hard time recommending it because it was so sad. In it, a young man whose face was scarred by the family’s dog sets off to find his brother, who was given up for adoption as an infant. The scarred brother has spent his whole life with the mother who regrets her decision. Beautifully written, but heart wrenching.

“Await Your Reply” will find a larger audience. It’s not a thriller, but its characters will keep you in their grip.

Earlier this week I was fortunate to join in a book club’s discussion of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. I hadn’t talked about a difficult read, at length, with a group of smart, educated women since I was in college. Such interesting talking points: Does it matter if a character is unknowable? Unlikeable? If there’s a plot? If we know the story’s end at its beginning?

When we couldn’t agree on the book’s subject — alienation? immigration? colonialism? a marriage? — the hostess (thank you) piped up. She liked the “business” of the book we were discussing, but pined for a structured read with a character-driven plot. Such as? “Jane Austen.”

I enjoy difficult reads, but I also welcome and sometimes deeply need an Austen-like read, where there’s a problem, or three, worked out in a pleasing way that sometimes ends with a marriage. “Or two marriages,” a book club member observed.

This is a long way to recommending Cathleen Shine’s The Three Weissmans of Westport. Using Austen’s Sense and Sensibility as a frame, Shine provides a smart, funny, satisfying read about two adult sisters who move with their elderly mother, newly divorced and homeless, to a Connecticut cottage. They’re all New Yorkers, so the dislocation from fabulous lifelong digs on Central Park West, to the suburban seaside, is a hilarious jolt.

They’re a recognizable but nutty bunch. Instead of divorce, the mom pretends she’s widowed; after all, she is mourning a marriage. Sister Miranda falls in love with … her lover’s toddler son! Sister Annie frets over their collective spending (they have no money!) and her puzzling on-again, off-again romance with a famous writer.

Sure, it’s Austen’s set up, but Shine unravels the story in new, fresh, witty ways. I laughed out loud, on a city bus, reading it. Best of all, the book ends with a funeral that’s as good as a wedding.

A delightful read.

Mason offers alternate tellings and endings for the Trojan War and Odysseus’ life. Achilles is “reborn” in clay, and continues his ruthless fighting. Odysseus never goes home. Penelope marries another. Penelope is dead. Ithaca is abandoned. Revisiting Troy, Odysseus finds a carnival town for tourists, his shield remade as a cheap souvenir.

I found myself weeping, more than once, while reading these tales. Incredible, to be moved again and again by these characters! Credit Mason, who is never glib or jokey. His tone is majestic, befitting these great ancient tales. I easily bought into the book’s conceit: because “The Odyssey” was from an oral tradition, there were many other tellings and retellings, additions, subtractions. This novel is those “lost” and now found books.

And in this age of Kindle, I particularly enjoyed holding this book in my hands, tucking it into my bag. It’s tiny: short and thin, with a white paper cover that features a warrior etched in red and black lettering mixed with silver discs, for the words’ O’s. While I was reading it other people wanted to touch it, or picked it up when I’d put it down.

With so many wondrous tales retold, this story could go on and on and on. I was sorry to come to its end.

I’ve said before that books are like lovers. Private companions. We take them to bed, tuck them into our bags, panic (as I did) when we misplace a book pages from its conclusion.

The object of my grief? Russell Banks “The Darling” (2004). Hannah Musgrave is a 60ish hippie farmer who returns to Africa to find the body of her husband and the fate of their three young sons.

Hello? Why is a counterculture WASP who clings to her Puritan roots sneaking into Liberia in the back of a flatbed, under a tarp?

The answer to that question is the story of the book, and in Banks’ hands it is a deliciously slow, steady, surprising read.

It’s a discomfiting tale. Hannah is variously cold, uncaring, willfully blind, criminal, proud, foolish, naive, mean, generous, racist, sexist. Also, an adulterer, and a thief. Her husband is a high-level functionary in a corrupt African government; it is he who calls her Hannah, darling.

Like the characters in Banks’ “The Book of Jamaica” (1980) and “Continental Drift “(1985), Hannah is the American dreamer who loses herself in a foreign place, with tragic consequences.

As with all Banks’ work, this is a story of place. He weaves Liberia’s fantastic past into the story’s present, where the nation and its decorous capital turn from civility to savagery.

I didn’t especially like Hannah — she trades a false American existence for a hollow wifely life in Africa — but I understood her choices. At its close, I felt like I’d lost a difficult but treasured friend, one whose life was more varied, and more foolish.

I know, I know: buy a Kindle. But I like books, big books, messy full-bodied reads. Hardy, Dickens, Tolstoy. From the here and now: Price, Russo, Ishiguro, Diaz. Their weight, their textured jackets, their pages.

I end up with door stoppers because I take chances; I want to find and devour good reads, to be taken in, seduced. These led me on, but left me cold.

1) I am Charlotte Simmons, Tom Wolfe. Pre-ordered from Amazon. Read 90 pages. A boring, predictable read from the master of the universe? When I tried to sell, hundreds of new copies already for sale, for $1.40. Later, a born-again friend invited me for coffee; she was troubled Charlotte gave up her virginity. All I could say was, “You read that whole book?!?”

2) Man Gone Down, Michael Thomas. Interesting set up: a black man has only a few days to regain his young family. That’s all: an interesting set up.

3) And then We Came to the End, Joshua Ferris. Don’t know anyone who made it to this book’s end. Told in the collective first person.

4) The Emperor’s Children, Claire Messud. New York narcissists? My kind of story! One chapter. Friend who lent won’t take it back.

5) Beautiful Children, Charles Boch. A child is missing: where’s the urgency?

6) Driftless, David Rhodes. If fly-over country is this odd, we’re doomed.

7) A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore. Same suspicions as above, re fly-over country. Provocative ideas, none fleshed out.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Marisha Pessl. One breathless chapter.

9) Away, Amy Bloom. Rapturous reviews, ludicrous tale. When my friend Jennifer wouldn’t take it back, we left in on an empty seat at a book signing.

10) The Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver. Read to page 62. Bland character heading into a Forrest Gump life. Even my niece, a Kingsolver fan, won’t take it off my hands.

Another, by a lauded literary writer, had an interesting set up but was so poorly told I pressed it on a writer friend as a great example of a how not to tell a story.

Why keep reading?

When we open a book, we take a leap. And sometimes we’re rewarded: we’re hooked, we’re grabbed, we’re taken in.

From a stack of newly published books I pulled C.E. Morgan’s “All the Living,” Farrar Straus Giroux, $23. I was nabbed by its first sentence: “She had never lived in a house and now, seeing the thing, she was no longer sure she wanted to.”

She is Aloma, a young woman just out of school, orphaned at a young age, arriving at the tobacco farm her boyfriend, Orren, has come to own.

Sex is their common ground. She’s a trained musician, aching to leave the moment she arrives. He devotes his every hour to saving his family’s farm. When Aloma signs on to play piano for the local church, the pastor quietly, and heartbreakingly, pursues her. It sounds hopelessly old-fashioned, but the book’s most moving passage is when the pastor shames Aloma for leading him on.

It’s a present day story but the world we’re taken into — its language, and foods, and landscape — seems from the near past. Television, but it’s on only for its tornado warnings. Telephones, but no cell phones; no texting, no tweeting. Places to eat, but no fast food. “Don’t be ill” means “don’t be mad.”

There’s no bad guy, no boogie man lurking in the woods. The only menace is the drought, and a mean rooster, and Orren’s buried grief for the family he’s lost.

It’s a Plot 101 tale — will she stay or will she go? — but the quality of the prose kept me reading. A simple story in a remarkable landscape, tightly focused and exquisitely wrought. A model of Aristotle’s unities of time, place and action.

It had me in its grip all weekend.

We’re not camping.

Indeed, certain services at Club Pythonga are downright luxurious: blocks of Ice, cut from the lake during the winter, are delivered to the cabin daily. The ice keeps food and drink cold and in the evening, we take a chunk of ice, smash it into rough cubes, and use it in our cocktails.

We don’t keep a lot cold: there’s a central kitchen, and everyone who’s “in camp” eats together, breakfast and dinner, at the dining hall or at picnic tables outside.

It’s truly a vacation when someone else is cooking.

Shared meals create a time when families and generations come together. (At its August peak, Pythonga draws 100 people.) Sure, the teenagers sit at one table — not texting! — but when one gets up for another helping, he’ll stop and chat with someone else’s grandfather, or tease one of the high-chaired babies.

What does it mean to spend a few weeks unplugged?

During the day it’s easy to spend time sunning or reading or hiking or swimming. At night, after dinner, what’s there to do? Some nights we look at the stars. Others we play hearts, or Scrabble, or poker. The kids play a card game called Spoons: it’s fast, and loud.

Mostly, we visit.

Visit? Typically it’s an invitation to come by after dinner, to sit on a screened-in porch or inside by a fire, drink and talk and maybe look at photos from the day’s outing. We talk about books, bourbon, who’s catching fish and how he’s doing it. The Pleiades, and whether they’re the source of this summer’s shooting stars. Isaac’s inner-city 8th graders, and what they should read. The future of newspapers. Heath care.

Like the kids, we get loud; we laugh a lot. But outside, it’s quiet, and when we leave a cabin for our own it’s so dark we need a flashlight to find our way.

We have everything in this life of ours; some weeks the greatest pleasure is doing without.