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It’s so satisfying to be in the hands of a seasoned storyteller.

In a row, I read three newly published novels written by authors who have been winning prizes and selling boatloads of books for decades.

What sets their work apart? The art of storytelling: what to show, what to hold back. Dialogue, description, pace. There’s no one formula; it’s the mix that makes a great read.

In Paul Theroux’s “The Lower River,” we meet Ellis Hock, just turned 62, whose wife has given him a new kind of cell phone, which connects to his email account. There his wife discovers hundreds of flirty missives to and from dozens of women. Goodbye, wife. With their divorce, Ellis’s only child, a daughter now grown, insists on receiving her inheritance immediately. Goodbye, daughter. The men’s haberdashery Ellis owns is dying, a victim of the recession. Goodbye, store.

Where will Ellis go? To the place that once made him happy, the Lower River district — bush country — in the African Republic of Malawi. As a Peace Corps worker forty years earlier, he’d taught school in the village of Malabo, the only foreigner, a respected man.

We know where Ellis is going, but we spend a lot of time with him in the world he’s leaving. That’s important, because once in Africa he — and we — pine for home.

Most of this magnificent novel is set in and around the small, poor African village of Malabo; the area’s customs, foods, vegetation, animals and people fascinate. Ellis is remembered; he is considered a great man, a chief. Even so, the woman he once loved warns him to leave. “‘They will eat your money…when your money is gone, they will eat you.”

The villagers’ kindness will save Ellis, but their menace nearly kills him.

“Just like them, he was a wisp of diminishing humanity, with nothing in his pockets — hardly had pockets! — and he felt a lightness because of it. With no money he was insubstantial and beneath notice. As soon as everyone knew he had nothing, they would stop asking him for money, would stop talking to him altogether, probably. Yet tugging at this lightness was another sensation, of weight, his poverty like an anchor. He couldn’t move or go anywhere; he had no bargaining power. He was anchored by an absence of money, not just immovable but sitting and slipping lower.”

Except for its Hollywood ending, I loved every page of this novel. A marvelous read.

Theroux is best known for his travel writing and his 1995 novel, “The Mosquito Coast.” (The other two masters I read: John Irving’s, “In One Person,” and John Grisham’s “Calico Joe,” both worth studying for their skillful telling.)