HOUSE OF WOMEN

By Lynn Freed

Little, Brown: 212 pp., $23.95

Somewhere in Africa, a girl has been raised by her mother, an ex-opera singer, in a walled compound, visited infrequently by the girl's father, a wealthy playboy who never lived with his wife and child, though he loved them both. The mother is beautiful, wretched and fueled by hatred, by some accounts a madwoman. When her daughter is 17, envisioning nothing but life on the verandah with her mother, her father's cousin kidnaps her, marries her and takes her to live on a remote island in a palace on the cliffs. The girl learns that her father lost her in a bet with his cousin when she was only 6. Since then, the cousin has been waiting to collect. She alternates, in her captivity, between succumbing to him and fighting him--and longing to return to her mother, though he will not let her. Lynn Freed's "House of Women" is a gauzy novel with loose particulars flapping in the breeze that blows through these rarified lives. The mother-daughter relationship is rich and complex, and certainly the strongest in the novel, but it has the feel of a medieval tale. It verges on parable; the characters seem at times like ornate chess pieces, nothing more.

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THE CAPRICES

Stories

By Sabina Murray

Mariner Books: 160 pp., $13

Sabina Murray's stories about colonialism and war glitter with juxtapositions: the white shirt on the dark Indian man at dinner in the colonialist's club in India; the Italian and the Irishman, two soldiers walking out of the jungle in New Guinea, arguing about Joe DiMaggio; the lazy midafternoon on a village street emptied by war; the strange normalcy of the old woman's flowered shift and the abnormality of a child's life in a war-torn city. Murray's stories are set in the Philippines, India, New Guinea and Sumatra in the 1920s through 1950s. Headless victims make a ghostly appearance in many of the stories, set in steamy landscapes or dusty villages with brackish water. "The dripping water punctuated the day's waning with its steady beat. On the mainland, the trees rose up like a purple wall, muted and unreal." She writes of the relationships between soldiers. The decay of colonialism, its steady drip like the melting of an icicle, is Murray's true theme: "Your time has passed," says a young Indonesian to an old Dutch settler. "You have profited in another's country, which is equivalent to theft, and I would rather see you leave, but could easily kill you and feel justified."