(Viking. $21.95). Her name is Akiko, or so her daughter Beccah has always believed. Not until her mother’s death does Beccah learn that Akiko’s real name was torn from her at the age of 12, when she was sold from a Korean village to be a “comfort woman”–a sex slave for Japanese troops in World War II. These two stories, Akiko’s and Beccah’s, make up the somber skeins that Nora Okja Keller beautifully weaves together in “Comfort Woman,” her first novel.

Akiko’s harrowing memories of the “recreation center” are seared into her brain and soul, from the first night she is raped - “It was a free-for-all, and I thought I would never stop bleeding”–until she escapes after the camp doctor gives her an abortion. “He did not bother tying me down… Maybe he knew I had died and that ropes and guards couldn’t keep me anyway.” Rescued by missionaries, she marries one of them and moves to America but never really returns to life. The gods and spirits who swarmed into her consciousness at the camp and helped her survive don’t let go: they keep command of her ever after. Beccah grows up both protective and resentful of the mother who guards her from Saja the Death Messenger by wrapping the child’s nightie around a raw chicken and flinging the bundle out the door.

Like Amy Tan–in another now legendary debut, “The Joy Luck Club”–Keller skillfully mingles the Asian past and the American present, the earthly world and the spiritual one, a mother’s trauma and a daughter’s quest. But she is very much her own writer, with an emotional touch so sure and a sense of language so precise she seems to have sprung into print full-grown as a novelist. The gods in charge of terrific new fiction must be very pleased.

LAURA SHAPIRO

PURPLE AMERICA BY RICK MOODY

(Little, Brown. $22.95). Rick Moody’s third novel brings together a mother’s progressive paralysis, a son’s alcoholism and nuclear follies from H-bomb tests to power-plant accidents. Profound? Silly? You’ll never know if you don’t get past the second sentence of “Purple America,” which goes on for four pages, strung together out of “whosoever” clauses. True, it’s a demand for unconditional surrender before you’re told what you’re surrendering to. But the “hero,” Hex Raitliffe, is a great American basket case, his true heart buried in a Superfund site of dysfunction. His stepfather, Lou, is a decent man free-falling through the space beyond the end of his rope. What holds the book together? The title suggests that some sort of political ax is being ground, but God knows just what. (The “purple” alludes both to a purple sky after a nuclear blast and to Mom’s purple painted walls.) Luckily, Moody seems to have more to tell than he has to say. This book will stick with you if you stick with it.

DAVID GATES

THE AGUERO SISTERS BY CRISTINA GARCIA

(Knopf. $23). When Cristina Garcia’s first novel, “Dreaming in Cuban,” about a family torn apart by Castro’s revolution, was published in 1992, it was widely praised and nominated for a National Book Award. (Garcia’s own family left Havana when she was a toddler.) Now, five years after her debut, the former journalist has made good on her early promise with a superb second novel, “The Aguero Sisters.”

The story centers on two middle-aged half sisters. One lives in New York, the other in Havana; they’ve been estranged for 30 years before their reunion in Miami. Like “Dreaming,” Garcia’s new novel depicts a family straddling two cultures and struggling to come to terms with its past–as well as Cuba’s. “Sex is the only thing they can’t ration in Havana,” says Dulce, one of Garcia’s characters. “It’s the next-best currency after dollars, and much more democratic.” With sensual prose and a plot that captures the angst of the Cuban diaspora, Garcia seductively draws us in and refuses to let go.

SUE MILLER

BEAR AND HIS DAUGHTER BY ROBERT STONE

(Houghton Mifflin. $21.95). Robert Stone may be one of the best, most visceral writers we’ve got, but he can get on your nerves. Stone’s first collection of stories finds the novelist hard-charging into harm’s way with characters who are inward and seething–and so dislocated from the ordinary stream of life that the drug trip they’re often on seems redundant. Several stories are creepy and riveting: a counselor at a state hospital is spooked by a patient’s dream and begins dangerously unraveling, a librarian steals aborted fetuses and tries to intimidate a priest into giving them a Christian burial. But one or two–including a drugged-out woman’s conversation with a fascist porpoise–would puzzle David Lynch. (" “Our lousy Western culture is worthless… We’ve got to get back. Please,’ she implored the dolphin. “Tell us how!’ “) Ultimately, you weary of all the crises, all the incipient violence, all the post-Vietnam shell shock the author sees everywhere. Stone is brilliant, so can’t he swagger less? It’s fine if he knows how good he is, but he doesn’t have to write like it.

JEFF GILES