New Books From Richard Mason, Lucy Ferriss and Others This month a few new books import love stories from the Continent: An Italian affair waits out a war. A sybarite finds what he's looking for in Amsterdam. And in Paris (and only in Paris) a woman devotes herself to her home. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95. As if plucked from a patisserie display case, Mr. Mason's novel is a gorgeous confection. In turn-of-the-last-century Amsterdam a smoldering young striver, Piet Barol, takes a job as a tutor to the troubled son of one of the city's wealthiest families, becoming something of an apprentice himself of the shimmering life of the grand household. While on the make he pays lip service to having a fear of God. But mostly he's too busy with another kind of lip service to worry much about consequences. Certainly the satisfied lady of the house isn't complaining. Piet eventually heads to South Africa to make his own fortune. While at sea, as a stowaway in first class, he shares the pleasure of his company with both men and women, finally teaming up with a charismatic singer who's ready to collaborate on his ambition. Piet is the rare character - the rare being - whose unfailing charm and luck only make us cheer him on more. THE DETOUR By Andromeda Romano-Lax 307 pages. Soho Press. $25. Two encounters between a German man and an Italian woman bookend World War II and this novel. The first is in 1938, when Ernst, a courier for the German government, arrives in Rome to retrieve for Hitler a famous marble statue of a discus thrower. The transaction is historically accurate; the sculpture was returned to Italy in 1948. When one of Ernst's driving companions, an Italian policeman, dies, the man's twin brother, also on the trip, takes them to his home to bury the body. This is where Ernst meets Rosina, the twins" sister. One war and 10 years later Ernst's memory of Rosina is well preserved, but did he make too much of their affair? He returns to Italy to find out. ME AND YOU By Niccolò Ammaniti Translated by Kylee Doust 153 pages. Black Cat. $14. At 14 Lorenzo is having a tough time: "They picked on me for the way I dressed, because I didn't talk," he says. And then they stoned me with chalk dusters. To ease his parents" worries he tells them the popular kids have invited him on a ski vacation. He plans to spend the week hiding out in the warm, secluded peace of his building's cellar. But just as he's nesting in, his estranged older half-sister arrives. A drug addict who's hit bottom, she blackmails him into letting her stay and ends up detoxing there over several wretched days. Lorenzo wraps her in blankets. When the storm passes, he feeds her tuna and jarred artichokes. She is grateful, but no more so than he is. A brief no-frills book that's long enough to accrue emotional depth, Mr. Ammaniti's poignant story was a huge seller in his native Italy. Berkley Books. $15. In the same way that Judi Dench won an Oscar in 1999 for eight minutes of screen time in "Shakespeare in Love," Ms. Ferriss's prologue is a doozy at a mere 11 pages. Though her prose is positively unexciting, she has a real knack for creating dramatic tension. The opening scene is in a motel room, where two panicked teenage lovers have gone to see an accidental pregnancy to its end. They believed, or made themselves believe, that this was a miscarriage, that the baby, at six months, wasn't breathing. The rest of the book is fallout. We find the two, Brooke and Alex, 15 years later, still working out the ambiguities of what happened in that room. She's married to someone else and has a daughter. He's divorced and gets back in touch. "I knew something was wrong with the story we told ourselves," Brooke tells him. I didn't know what was wrong. I couldn't look at it. But now I am looking at it. SIMON The Genius in My Basement By Alexander Masters Illustrated. 359 pages. Delacorte Press. $25. That this biography fails to capture fully what goes on in the brilliant mind of its subject, a British mathematician named Simon Norton, turns out to be its strength. Once a well-known prodigy, Simon, at 58, now spends most of his time studying mass-transit schedules. This is one of many aspects of his life that Mr. Masters struggles to understand, and Simon doesn't offer straightforward explanations. It's left to the consistently funny author (whose last book, "Stuart: A Life Backwards," was about a homeless man) to decode the various grunts and irregular pronouncements. At the same time he refrains from trying to diagnose Simon's peculiarities. In the tradition of Gay Talese's famous 1966 nonprofile of Frank Sinatra for Esquire, the story ends up being about the quest to tell the story, and the portrait that emerges is of a rather touching friendship. THE HOUSE I LOVED By Tatiana de Rosnay 222 pages. St. Martin's Press. $25.99. In this grown-up (but less moving) version of the animated film "Up," a widow refuses to be bought out of the house she shared with her husband. It's 1860s Paris, and Baron Haussmann is obliterating whole neighborhoods to make way for wide, modern avenues. In "Up" the widower simply tied his house to a very large bunch of balloons. Ms. de Rosnay's heroine holes up in the basement, frantically writing letters to her dead husband, as the pounding of the prefect's armies grows louder by the day. One of this author's earlier novels, "Sarah's Key," has sold over five million copies worldwide, but that doesn't justify lines like this: "From time to time, your eyes would meet mine and I felt safe, safer than I had ever been in all my life, safe in your love, safe in your house."