-- Benjamin Kunkel

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Four Spirits, A Novel; Sena Jeter Naslund; William Morrow: 544 pp., $26.95

Forty years ago, four young girls were killed when a bomb exploded at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. As Sena Jeter Naslund reminds us in one of several deftly inserted passages of historical exposition in her fervent new novel, 16th Street was African American Birmingham's wealthiest congregation, cool to the fiery activism of Bethel Baptist minister Fred Shuttlesworth and only slightly more receptive to the less confrontational stance of out-of-towner Martin Luther King Jr. "Their class of colored wanted to negotiate," thinks Gloria Callahan, a fictional 16th Street parishioner who has tentatively joined the civil rights movement. Mocking that class' hesitant entry into the fray, Gloria's combative friend Christine Taylor sneers: "Now educated, rich Negroes talking to rich white folks." But moderates and militants alike were all "niggers" to the white men who set the bomb, and murder was their chosen way of backing up Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace's vow to preserve segregation today, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever.

The bombing and other brutal real-life events form a backdrop against which Naslund's large cast of characters confronts ethical, political and even romantic dilemmas in the city that came to symbolize white intransigence. Herself a Birmingham native, a college student there during the most intense years of the struggle for racial justice, Naslund recaptures that period with immediacy and intimacy. She has written a stirring popular novel that vividly conveys the everyday texture and moral significance of a movement that permanently changed American society.

-- Wendy Smith

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The Furies, A Novel, Fernanda Eberstadt; Alfred A. Knopf: 452 pp., $26

The flinty topography of contemporary marriage is the terrain mapped by Fernanda Eberstadt ("When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth") in her newest novel, "The Furies," a cautionary tale for those who would live in wedded bliss. Reminiscent of classical mythology in the author's use of archetypal themes, the narrative is also up to the minute in its exploration of the difficulties plaguing modern marriage.

Eberstadt's writing is up to the epic task she sets herself. Her descriptions of new parenthood are incisive, capturing both the awe and the exhaustion an infant brings, along with the wedge it can interpose in even the closest relationship.