"The Orchardist," by Amanda Coplin, and More Harper/HarperCollins, $26.99. ELECTRICAL BANANA: Masters of Psychedelic Art. By Norman Hathaway and Dan Nadel. Damiani. $39.95. This overview of seven artists - a compilation of images, essays and interviews - aims to revise and expand common perceptions of the 1960s psychedelic aesthetic. Above, Martin Sharp's "Mister Tambourine Man" (silk-screen poster on foil, 1966). "His face was as pitted as the moon," Coplin writes of her late-19th-century protagonist, a well-meaning orchardist named Talmadge whose familial yearnings are eclipsed by early misfortune: the mysterious disappearance of his teenage sister. At the cusp of middle age, Talmadge forms surrogate kinships with Della, a young girl also haunted by the loss of a sister, and Caroline, the herbalist who attended his mother before her death. Della rejects Talmadge's attempts to assert a quasi-paternal influence, opting instead to hazard a series of traditionally male occupations and pursue an obsessive mission to destroy her sister's childhood tormentor, an evildoer of spaghetti-­western proportions. The dispassionate surfaces of the novel belie its subtext of psychological crosscurrents as Della's push for vengeance is confronted by Talmadge's mulish strategies to keep her out of harm's way. Coplin's deliberately paced account of Della's emotional descent threatens to pull the book down with it, but she rallies with a startlingly orchestrated climactic sequence. Many contemporary novelists have revisited the question of what constitutes a family, but few have responded in a voice as resolute and fiercely poetic. Weinstein Books, $24. A self-described "child of the Disney princesses," 27-year-old Olivia Greenley zones out on books after reading the first paragraph, but is able to construct a complete sentence with an informed reference to "The Bachelor." Somehow, this BlackBerry-brandishing fluff ball has garnered an appointment as finance director for a charismatic presidential hopeful named Landon Taylor. In short order, Olivia finds herself in bed with this high-­profile Prince Charming, bedazzled by his lofty ideals and "the way he made talking about serious topics over a drink seem so acceptable." But you don't have to be a chick-lit scholar to intuit that she has a nascent love connection with her comparably insipid colleague, Jacob Harriston. He's a "Police Academy" fan, and they share conspiratorial exchanges that suggest they're the only ones who don't know they're fated to be mated. A first-time novelist and veteran campaign worker, Siegel knows her PAC rules and political acronyms, but this ham-handed "Gidget Goes to Washington" burns out on the same diet of "stress and junk food" as its Dorito-popping protagonist. Hogarth, $25. Like so many fictional academicians, Percival Chen, the titular headmaster at the center of Lam's sumptuously plotted first novel, is a crummy role model. The founder of the most prestigious English-­language school in 1966 Saigon, Chen readily confesses that he's in it for the money and shows little discretion in lavishing his profits on gambling and sex. Ripe for an awakening, he gets one far ruder than he deserves when his Chinese-­patriot sentiments are parroted by his 16-year-old son in front of his classmates, unaware that Vietnamese nationalism is shifting into high gear. The boy is promptly spirited away by the police, propelling Chen into heroic-parent mode - and into the thick of a city suffering a violent identity change. And that's just the beginning. As the novel progresses, Lam goes for the jugular, combining an operatic love story involving a French-­Vietnamese prostitute with wince-­inducing evocations of Vietnam's occupation by the Japanese and the later horrors of the Vietcong's persecution of the city of Hue. Lam's narrative is businesslike yet nimble, albeit crowded with a few too many shrewish women. His most provocative character is the shadowy Teacher Mak, Chen's longtime aide-de-camp, whose shifting masks of comrade and adversary potently embody the intricate survival tactics required of aliens afloat in a country of fractured allegiances. Translated by Anthea Bell. Haus, $24.95. Jan Stuart is the author of "The Nashville Chronicles: The Making of Robert Altman's Masterpiece."