"Jacob's Folly," by Rebecca Miller, and More JACOB'S FOLLY By Rebecca Miller Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26. Hatje Cantz. $70. Schapiro says he has "photographed everything from presidents to poodles." Perhaps best known for portraits of notables, he is also a master of the street scene. Above, "Rooster, Burning Man, Nevada, 2009." Bravura storytelling elevates this tale - narrated by a fly on the wall - from the merely fanciful to the fantastic. Set in 18th-century Paris and contemporary Long Island, Miller's novel tells the story of two Jews lured from ritual observance by the siren call of assimilation: Jacob Cerf, a Yiddish-speaking peddler in Enlightenment-era Paris, and Masha Edelman of present-day Far Rockaway, a young Orthodox woman whose raven hair, violet eyes and acting talent recall a young Elizabeth Taylor. After a feverish death, Jacob, reincarnated as a fly, wings his way to earth, imagining himself to be "a Viking with blond hair." His horror at discovering his entomological incarnation is tempered by his delight in his newfound power to manipulate the destinies of others. "Jacob's Folly" crisscrosses space and time, unspooling his transformation from street peddler to unseen force in the lives of both Masha and "reliable, true Leslie Senzatimore," a Patchogue boatman. The Joycean echo of Leslie's epithet is a signal that Miller has sent her characters on a daring odyssey that traverses history, religion, philosophy and cultural identity. A genteel family with three fetching daughters. A fond but hapless father. A marriage plot. Welcome to Austen country. This painstakingly wrought novel by Hall, a poet and onetime professional squash champion, is a modern take on "Persuasion." Tennis is the lifeblood of the Adair family, who live near a venerable club where the middle daughter, 28-year-old Diana, once reigned supreme. She returns home from graduate architectural studies to compete in a championship match and finds a larger contest looming: The family's beloved, now crumbling carriage house is slated for demolition by a rancorous neighborhood association. When a standoff ends in the immolation of the carriage house, it's up to Diana to make the case for rebuilding it. The themes of memory and nostalgia threading through the novel are especially resonant because the family's mother suffers from Alzheimer's disease. By reconstructing the carriage house, Diana - who differs from Austen's sensible, cleareyed heroine in her propensity for self-doubt - regains her confidence. Hall sometimes lobs her symbols a bit too obviously, but her graceful prose style generally lands them within the line. You've probably rubbed shoulders with people like John and Veronica, the wealthy couple at the heart of Goodman's first novel. Perhaps you've spotted them at Dean & DeLuca, contemplating brands of organic goat's milk, or at Tribeca Paint, scrutinizing palettes of yellow before choosing "pollen" for the baby's nursery. The toll of parenthood proves a terrible realization for John and Veronica, who find both their home and their circadian rhythms upturned by their 6-month-old daughter, Clara. One January weekend, John, a researcher for a successful hedge fund, spontaneously jets to Barbados with the baby, telling Veronica, only after their arrival, that he and Clara have gone to visit his mother in the suburbs. Is this a kidnapping? A betrayal? Or merely the act of a man wrecked by months of exhaustion that "seemed to calcify within him, then crack"? The fallout from John's lie (and Veronica's solo weekend adventures) threatens the marriage. If these characters sometimes seem obtuse, their domestic upheaval - captured by Goodman's spot-on descriptions - will be acutely recognizable to readers with children: "Cheerios were all over the floor. The baby sat in the high chair. Veronica "lay on the rug on the floor a distance away. . . . She'd been up since 5:20, reading the interminable "Busytown." " Calgon, take me away. TRAPS By MacKenzie Bezos Knopf, $24.95. Four women - Dana, a bodyguard; Jessica, an Oscar-winning actress; Vivian, a teenage mother; and Lynn, who rescues abandoned and unwanted dogs - meet by happenstance in this novel set in Southern California and Nevada. Vivian escapes a menacing boyfriend (and sometime pimp) by fleeing with her infant twins, lucking into a job at the dog rescue "farm" run by Lynn, who takes them in and shelters them with motherly toughness. They all cross paths when Jessica and Dana, her security guard, seek medical treatment for Jessica's dog at the canine sanctuary. Bezos writes spare, present-tense prose that lends her writing an urgency as the four women slip in and out of psychic and physical peril. Yet because the novel is driven by emotional epiphanies (Jessica gives Dana "a full peek into her deep well of irrational, emotional, tortured, contradictory, past- and future-bound secret needs. . . . Dana is shocked") it reads at times like the treatment for a screenplay, reminiscent of movies like "Crash" and "Grand Canyon," in which characters converge to prove a point. In this case, the message is that women can overcome and learn from "weaknesses and mistakes. Unlucky accidents. As Lynn says, sometimes these traps "led us where we needed to go." THE LIARS" GOSPEL By Naomi Alderman Little, Brown, $25.99. Alderman's historical novel about Jesus depicts Roman-colonized Judea as a tinderbox where a clash between Jews and imperial soldiers leaves the landscape "heaped with corpses." Against this backdrop, Alderman probes the minds of Miryam (Mary), Iehuda (Judas), Caiaphas (the high priest) and Bar-Avo (Barabbas), who alternate as narrators, portraying a Jewish community in crisis, its leader and high priests co-opted by Rome's prefect, its temple in Jerusalem plundered and its populace increasingly disillusioned and restive. Into this void steps Yehoshuah (Jesus), seen here in the mold of the H. G. Wells classic "A Short History of the World" as hot-tempered and charismatic. In this telling, the Judas character is a pious Jew who is shocked when his friend accepts the mantle of "Messiah" and a revolutionary movement begins "to tip over into madness." Yehoshuah's outrage at the corruption of the temple threatens Caiaphas, and his abandonment of his blood relatives for a "family" of followers embitters Miryam. By turns poetic and visceral, "The Liars" Gospel" liberates towering figures from the stasis of iconography, giving them psychological depth. Abigail Meisel has written articles and book reviews for The Times.