There is a first novel by a British author - Samantha Hunt's The Wilderness, the story of the slow disintegration of a man with Alzheimer's; Burnt Shadows, a sweeping family story that moves from Nagasaki, to Karachi, to New York, by Kamila Shamsie (pictured); and Molly Fox's Birthday, by Deirdre Madden, the reflective tale of three friends.
The palace's balconies gaze over the lake towards the city's other famous landmark - the Lake Palace - a reflective, fairy-tale confection gleaming by day and spotlit by night.
Artfully crafted and layered in its characterizations, High Plains Fandango is both a morality and cautionary tale, reflective of modern sensibilities, while hearkening back to some of the best themes old Westerns offered to a hungry public: there is good and bad in every human.
In fact, the maturation of the male bonding tale is reflective of a bigger change taking place in American cinema, one that has seen the 34-year-old Bahrani described as "the new great American film director" by the renowned film critic Roger Ebert.
Reflective time in every sense.
And he often admits, in other reflective moments, that whatever the tales that surround him he often has to gulp down fear, as he did after that high-explosive mortar round somehow did not kill him and he stood on shaking legs, checked his cameras, and within minutes was shooting again.
Talk of Trinidad inevitably brings up VS Naipaul, and he becomes reflective: "Now there's a cautionary tale," he says.
LEAVING THE ATOCHA STATION (Coffee House Press, paper, $15), Ben Lerner's remarkable first novel, published last year, is a bildungsroman and meditation and slacker tale fused by a precise, reflective and darkly comic voice.
By turns funny, seductive, reflective, exultant and nightmarish, it is filled with tales of love and loss, sisterhood, betrayal and brutality, hopes raised and warped and crushed.
He is set to graduate with a degree in criminal justice, and is thoughtful and reflective in describing his experience as something of a cautionary tale.
With its tales of death and unplanned pregnancies, Telefone was reflective of the unpredictability of living in an impoverished sector of a big city: On one hand, this is home; on the other, scarcity is your only constant.
