The inexplicable and the ordinary

I'm a sucker for novels that mix the magical with the mundane. I love that sense that even in the most casual of moments, the exceptional glints.

''Maybe a Miracle," by Brian Strause (Ballantine, $21.95), is a first novel with an irresistible premise. Teenager Monroe Anderson goes to grab a smoke before his senior prom only to discover that his sister, Annika, is floating facedown in a pool. He dives to the rescue, but she's sunk into a coma. Annika's hands bleed as if she has stigmata. Rose petals flutter from the sky. The media go wild, and religious pilgrims begin to flock to the hospital to worship, to wish, to beg for healing.

So is this a miracle or not? The delight in this book is that Strause doesn't give any definitive answers. Monroe reacts with sarcasm. If his sister can heal others, how come she can't heal herself or cook all the throngs of pilgrims pancakes? But while Monroe occasionally provokes the pilgrims, he's surprised by his own sense of awe about what's going on, and his questions about faith and miracles become more pointed, until even ordinary life becomes majestic.

''The Mercy of Thin Air," by Ronlyn Domingue (Atria, $24), is by turns absolutely enchanting and a little forced. Feisty women's-rights advocate Razi Nolan is involved in a passionate love affair in 1920s New Orleans when she dives into a pool and crashes to her death. Fast-forward 70 years. Now a ghost in ''the between," the period after death and before whatever comes next, Razi takes up residence in the house of a modern couple, Scott and Amy, and quickly becomes involved in their complicated love story. Amy's struggles to forget a tragic, earlier love threaten her marriage, but they also spur Razi to search for the truth about her own lost beau.

What's most magical here is when the two women tell their stories, which are complex and heartbreaking. Through the alchemy of Domingue's rich, lovely prose we are transported back and forth through time. But while the modern sections ring true, occasionally the dialogue in the past sections seems fake, and some of the plot here, particularly in the afterlife sections, seems like ersatz ''The Lovely Bones." Too, the secret that propels the ending feels tacked on and obvious, and unnecessary in a book that otherwise is so powerful.

Let me say right off the bat that Tim Winton's ''The Turning" (Scribner, $25) has no ghosts, hauntings, or healings. It's firmly rooted in the here and now, the damage of ordinary lives, all set against the expanse of Australia's harsh and gorgeous landscape. So why am I including this book here? Because its portrayal of the mundane is so fresh and vivid and startling that like Annika's rose petals raining from the sky it shocks us into seeing things differently. Winton has twice been nominated for a Man Booker Prize, though he's not as well known to Americans as he should be.

''The Turning" is a collection of interrelated short stories where the turnings are not necessarily for the better. Husbands leave their families; siblings stop speaking; lives break and crash against Australia's rocky coast or smother in its stultifying small towns.

The writing is frankly brilliant. Characters wonder at ''the heat each of us leaves in our wake." The bush tumbles and ''twists like an unmade bed."

Violence, deceit, rage, love, loneliness -- it's all here and all so freshly rendered here that each story attains a sort of powerful beauty and even tenderness. Winton shows us how startling ordinary life is. And he does it in a way that's more amazing than if he had shown a ghost shimmering on the page.

And for me, that's the purest kind of magic.

Caroline Leavitt can be reached at www.carolineleavitt.com.