Military matters

Frank Schaeffer's life was turned upside down in 1998 when his son, John, joined the Marines straight out of prep school. To the well-off novelist, service in the military was as foreign as a life in poverty.

Schaeffer accepted his son's decision and immersed himself in military matters, writing four nonfiction books, including ``Keeping Faith" with his son, who is studying history at the University of Chicago after serving in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Now Schaeffer, who lives in Salisbury, has returned to fiction and the turmoil of having a son eschew college for the military. In his new novel, ``Baby Jack," Todd is so furious with his son Jack that he stops talking to him. Jack is killed in combat in Iraq. ``This is what I woke up sweating and praying about," Schaeffer said of his son's time overseas.

In ``AWOL: The Unexcused Absence of America's Upper Classes From Military Service -- and How It Hurts Our Country," published earlier this year, Schaeffer explored questions surrounding class and military service, who serves and who doesn't. The same issues ripple through ``Baby Jack."

``I think fiction is more true than nonfiction," Schaeffer says. ``You're not pretending to have all the answers. You're writing from the heart."

Noel Perrin, who died in 2004, wrote funny, wise, and bittersweet essays about being a sometime farmer in Vermont. They are collected in four volumes, from ``First Person Rural" in 1978 to ``Last Person Rural."

Now comes ``Best Person Rural," with selections from each of the earlier collections and five previously unpublished essays. In ``Life on Nothing a Week," he revels in not spending a dime, though he does eat an awful lot of homemade biscuits. The new collection ends with a farewell to the farm he lived on for 41 years as he prepares to move into assisted living, what he calls his ``exile."

Claire Messud, whose novel ``The Emperor's Children" has been roundly praised, will appear at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday at Harvard Book Store, Cambridge. Her novel is among 19 on the longlist for Britain's annual Man Booker Prize for Fiction. The shortlist of six will be announced Thursday, the winner Oct. 10.

``The J Curve: A New Way to Understand Why Nations Rise and Fall," by Ian Bremmer (Simon & Schuster)

``On Agate Hill," by Lee Smith (Algonquin)

``Nicole Kidman," by David Thomson (Knopf)

Lois Ava-Matthew at Toadstool Bookshop in Milford, N.H., recommends ``Jar City," by Arnaldur Indrid a son: ``Set in Iceland, this fine police procedural becomes deliciously more complex as the story progresses. The translation from the Icelandic crackles with a terse, business-like tone. A new author to those of us here in the States, Indrid a son joins the ranks of some of the very best crime fiction authors."

Jan Gardner can be reached at JanLGardner@yahoo.com.