Who said country life is relaxing? Not when village gossip travels fast and grudges go back centuries. In (Scribner, $25), Matt Bondurant roams to Cape Clear Island, off the south coast of Ireland, a wind-throttled place where bird-watching tourists and goats outnumber locals. Bondurant鈥檚 heroine, Elly, thinks she鈥檚 living out an emerald-hued dream when her husband, Fred, wins an honest-to-goodness Irish pub in a contest and the two ditch their corporate lives in New England. All too soon they find out what the 颅islanders think of 鈥渂low-ins.鈥� With the 颅island鈥檚 ruling family scaring away the pub鈥檚 customers and her marriage to Fred dissolving, Elly finds herself escaping to the only place she can: the water. Bondurant, the author of two previous novels and a competitive open-water swim颅mer, is at his best when he鈥檚 describing Elly in the ocean鈥攆eeling like 鈥渁 spider crawling across the back of an ele颅phant.鈥� The plot stumbles slightly as Elly gets embroiled in a war between a goat 颅farmer and the village toughs, but it鈥檚 a rare writer who can turn the hypnotic euphoria of 颅endurance sports into a moving literary experience.

The Night Swimmer

The Night Swimmer

The Evening Hour

The Evening Hour

Newcomer Carter Sickels strips away all rural romance in (Bloomsbury, $15), finding a deeply sympathetic hero in Cole Freeman, a nurse鈥檚 aide, small-time thief, and pill dealer who has never really set foot outside of his hometown of Dove Creek, West Virginia. Courtesy of a nefar颅ious mining company leveling the nearby mountains, constant blasts damage the foundations of homes, and people get nervous whenever it rains and the dam holding back the town鈥檚 slag-polluted reservoir begins to bulge. As Cole starts to recognize the environmental wreckage鈥斺�渢he forest floor was so cracked and eroded that he stopped halfway, didn鈥檛 want to see anymore鈥濃�攈e has to deal with the recent return of both his deadbeat mom and his onetime best buddy, who tries to get him in on a meth-cooking operation. When the dam bursts and Dove Creek is washed away by a tide of black sludge, Cole is just one voice among many crying out for justice. Though some of these elements鈥攎eth, evil mining company鈥攕eem a little familiar, Sickels fashions a miniature epic out of them, less activist tract than redemption story.

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