If your idea of a good book is one that transports you to different times and places yet speaks to current issues — and you don’t mind some initial disorientation — climb onboard. Among Ward’s reading women are Laura Agnelli, a foundling who hopes to become a nun but is conscripted to sit for a temperamental artist, Simone Martini, who’s been commissioned to paint an altarpiece of the Annunciation for the new cathedral in Siena in 1333. He poses her with the Koran, and their somewhat unlikely, anachronistically feminist-tinged conversations encompass everything from the symbolic import of lilies and vessels to the Bible’s take on abortion.

Zoom ahead 300 years to 17th-century Amsterdam, where deaf housemaid Esther struggles to keep her job despite the enmity of her mistress and the unwanted attentions of her master, painter Pieter Janssens Elinga. He catches her reading one of his wife’s untouched books and immortalizes the scene in a painting in which the viewer spies the scene from behind.

Nearly 200 years later, the modest widow of a photographer strives to run her husband’s Piccadilly portrait studio while training their young son to take over the business. When her long-estranged, flamboyant twin sister, a spiritualist who moved to America, shows up on tour, the two hash out old resentments from a childhood in enforced show business that suited only one of them. The once-identical twins are beautifully captured in a succinct assessment: “Two carriage wheels, weathered differently.”

What’s the connection between these stories — beyond depictions of women with their heads bent over printed pages? Trying to figure out the link is, in part, what keeps us reading, so I won’t give away Ward’s surprising and utterly audacious climax. What I can mention is her primary interest in women’s struggles for independence and autonomy through the centuries, which leads to an ongoing debate over whether marriage is desirable or just a benign form of bondage. She brings these themes to a head not just in her highly original, futuristic final chapter but in the most contemporary of the tales. This involves a late-night, unexpectedly intimate conversation between an ambitious, politically engaged woman working for a Conservative MP and a stranger she meets in a neighborhood pub. That Jeannine Okoro, “a person who decided what she wants and then gets it,” would share her private life — she is agonizing over whether to accept her longtime boyfriend’s marriage proposal — with a man she at first lashes out at for trying to snap her picture may seem as unlikely as the earlier scene in which meek Laura Agnelli confides in forbidding Simone Martini, but Ward manages to pull off these serendipitous conversations.

Be forewarned, however, that Ward is a demanding writer. In addition to her penchant for throwing us into disorienting, unfamiliar situations that only gradually become clear, she eschews setting off dialogue with quotation marks and often avoids commas as well. She prefers to imply rather than spell out conclusions — a tendency that will frustrate some readers while enthralling others. (In the case of her 2008 Shoreditch Bar story, I must confess that I’m not 100 percent certain what her cryptic coda indicates, though I have my theories.) That said, “Girl Reading,” with its intricately worked, wide-ranging scenarios, rewards the careful reader and would make a great book group selection, with plenty of latitude for discussion. It’s an impressive, intelligent debut.

Szalay’s main character, James, is a born entrepreneur and risk taker who has made and lost several fortunes since he decided to skip university at 17 — including, on paper at least, a multimillion-pound killing on an Internet start-up that succumbed to the dot-com bust. Now he’s involved in shady horse racing fixes, though he finds himself no longer yearning for extravagant wealth so much as middle-class stability, even in his personal life. Unfortunately, he’s a poor judge of character. This leads him into business dealings with a stalker; a sleazy, ultra-conservative horse trainer; and a self-destructive misfit schoolmate. It also contributes to his persistent, hopeless pursuit of skittish Katherine Persson, a Cambridge University graduate who is currently working in a posh Park Lane hotel, in a dissatisfying managerial job that’s intellectually beneath her, with vague hopes of someday opening her own resort. Katherine, separated from her philandering photographer husband, Fraser King — whom she met while he was staking out a celebrity in the hotel lobby — is uncertain how she feels about Fraser or James.

James worries constantly “that things are not okay,” his moods fluctuating with Katherine’s willingness to see him. Even when she is brutally honest about her wishy-washy feelings, James somehow fails to recognize that things are neither OK nor destined to be. She dodges his kisses and pares down planned weekends together to “the pathetic rind of Sunday evening.” Worse, she greets his early confession of love with a series of sighs and “several frozen seconds” of silence before responding, “I can’t say the same, James. I can’t say the same.” Szalay captures both the clueless nature of infatuation (love is blind) and a disconnection so profound that nothing transmits between this couple without static and distortion.

Fortunately, flashbacks to Katherine’s initial passion for her husband and James’ high-flying days whizzing around town in a new Aston while checking in on his bankers and tech teams “to make sure everything was okay” let some air into what might otherwise be a suffocating narrative. So, too, do deft switches among the various characters’ perspectives, including that of the morally bankrupt horse trainer, who seems to have wandered in from a Dick Francis novel.

As T. S. Eliot noted in “The Waste Land,” there’s a cruelty to spring, “mixing / Memory and desire.” Szalay turns vernal rejuvenation into a source of further sadness, “the way everything is moving on, starting something new.” Even the changeable spring weather is, like Katherine, “still making up its mind what to do.” This study of frustration and ambivalence — of a woman who worries about passion being a thing of the past for her and a man unable to feel his feelings, never mind express them — is insightful but (sigh) depressing.

“Kayak Morning,” which deals with the tenaciousness of grief, is a more melancholy read, less cathartic and reassuring. It is a bereaved father’s meditation on unacceptable loss. What it has going for it is searing honesty, exquisitely expressed. Discussing his earlier volume, Rosenblatt writes, “In it, I tried to suggest that the best one can do in a situation such as ours is to get on with it. I believe that still. What I failed to calculate is the pain that increases even as one gets on with it.” A therapist friend tells him, “Grief comes to you all at once, so you think it will be over all at once. But it is your guest for a lifetime.” The challenge, Rosenblatt comes to understand, is to transform grief into a positive force.

Always a loner, Rosenblatt takes up kayaking two and a half years after Amy’s death as an escape from his hectic household — which gathers in Quogue during the summer. Affording rare moments of solitude, his time on the water is brooding time away from the brood. “Kayak Morning” opens just past dawn on June 27, 2010, a few months after the publication of “Making Toast.” While the rest of his family — including his wife, two grown sons, and six grandchildren — sleep, Rosenblatt slides his olive-green kayak into the water and paddles out to Penniman’s Creek. Over the next seven hours (and 145 pages), he explores both his own life and that of the half-mile-long creek, letting his thoughts and boat meander, “bob[bing] along in solitary confinement” as the “tides rummage with the pebbles.”

Rosenblatt’s observations about his palindromic vessel, literature, and his own painful feelings are sometimes somber but always rich. He comments, “You can’t always make your way in the world by moving up. Or down, for that matter. Boats move laterally on water, which levels everything. It is one of the two great levelers.” Rosenblatt is practiced enough to know that his statement is far more powerful without spelling out the second leveler.

As Rosenblatt’s reflections make clear, it wasn’t as if he lived a life sheltered from painful realities before Amy’s death. The author of 15 books, including “Children of War,” Rosenblatt recollects grim assignments reporting on Cambodian girls in Thai refugee camps, patients in a Beirut mental hospital, and children of Hutus and surviving Tutsis staring out windows in a U.N. camp in Tanzania. He recalls the many U.S. presidents he has met, including an affable Ronald Reagan, about whom he wrote the “Man of the Year” story for Time magazine.

Amid his anger at God and disgust with his own weakness and self-absorption, his thoughts frequently turn to literature, including works about fathers and daughters (“King Lear,” “Emma,” “Washington Square”) and “crazy old men in boats: Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, Hemingway’s Old Man, Captains Ahab, Nemo, McWhirr, Wolf Larsen, Queeg, Bligh.” Commenting that “Only literary jerks like me think of ‘Moby-Dick’ in Starbucks,” he adds, “Seeing the world through a book darkly. I’m not sure it’s good for you.”

In other words, all that intellectualizing and introspection may not be as effective a path to happiness as just doing what you have to do: “Too much is made of the value of plumbing the depths. The nice thing about kayaking is that you ride the surface, which is akin to dealing with the task at hand.” Still, for certain people — Rosenblatt among them — plumbing the depths is inescapable. And writing, which, like kayaking, requires “precision and restraint,” is what keeps him afloat, even if it is not as effective at making “sorrow endurable, evil intelligible, justice desirable, and love possible” as he would wish.

Drifting on the water, he realizes that “Art does not make up a life. Experience does not make up a life. And death does not make up a life either.” What does, then? Love. “Kayak Morning,” with this hopeful epiphany, leaves us looking forward to Rosenblatt’s next update on how he and his extended family are getting on with the business of making “somewhere out of nowhere,” triumphing over the devastations of abiding grief through enduring love.

David Lodge informs us upfront in “A Man of Parts,” his novel based on the life of H.G. Wells, that “Nearly everything that happens in this narrative is based on factual sources.” While this makes his book an excellent introduction to Wells’ life and work, it’s evident that this staunchly faithful approach poses some daunting artistic constraints on a novelist.

It’s not hard to see what attracted Lodge to Wells, who was the author of more than 100 books (including “The Time Machine,” “War of the Worlds,” and “Tono-Bungay”) and lover of more than 100 women (including Rebecca West and Moura Budberg, a probable Russian spy). Beyond character study, Lodge’s mission is to make this brilliant, controversial writer, who, comet-like, “appeared suddenly out of obscurity at the end of the 19th century and blazed in the literary firmament for decades, evoking astonishment and awe and alarm — glow in the firmament once again.”

Wells’ rapidly written novels reflected a kaleidoscopic mix of his political concerns about the effects of science and capitalism run rampant and his extremely complicated personal life. At his best, including his World War I novel “Mr Britling Sees It Through,” (“The last one anybody would want to read twice”), his fiction contained “many recognizable fragments of his life, shaken up with some invented ones to make a new pattern.” He was decades ahead of his time not only as a proponent of Free Love, but in foreseeing the “destructive application of new advances in science and technology,” including tank warfare, nuclear fission and atomic bombs, and in proposing world government as a safeguard to mankind’s well-being.

Lodge, a literary critic and author of 13 novels, including “Changing Places,” “Therapy” and “Author, Author,” often writes with humor about affairs among academics. His last novel, “Deaf Sentence” (2008), concerned a man with hearing loss who gets into a sticky situation with a younger, manipulative woman — a perfect warmup for writing about Wells, who had an amazing capacity for getting himself into — and out of — godawful messes with women half his age.

“A Man of Parts” opens in blitzed London in the spring of 1944, when Wells, nearly 78, diagnosed with liver cancer and eclipsed by modernists like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, retreats into his own head to review his life. Lodge writes, “The mind is a time machine that travels backwards in memory and forwards in prophecy, but he has done with prophecy now. His mind is at the end of its tether, he cannot bear to look forward into the chaos ahead. He looks back, at his life: has it, taken all in all, been a success or failure?” Lodge has Wells realize that “In trying to answer this question it is useful to have a second voice. He can, for instance, interview himself about his past, lobbing easy questions and answering them expansively, as he used to do in the days when journalists were still interested.” This leads to a somewhat clunky setup in which ersatz interviews are interspersed with more general reminiscences written in a tight but somewhat awkward third-person point of view.

“A Man of Parts” is as readable as it is in large part because Lodge has structured it around the most prominent of Wells’ string of sexual entanglements. In his posthumously published postscript to his 1934 two-volume “Experiment in Autobiography” — one of Lodge’s primary sources — Wells asserted that his “passages” often had nothing to do with love but were about giving and receiving pleasure. Lodge writes, “Sex for him was ideally a form of recreation, like tennis or badminton, something you did when you had completed a satisfactory bit of work, to let off steam and exercise the body instead of the mind for a while.” Physically incompatible with his unbelievably tolerant second wife, Jane, they reached an agreement early in their marriage that she would be his helpmeet and run his home while allowing him his dalliances, as long as he was open about them. He, in turn, vowed never to leave her. She was “an absolute brick” even during the scandals that arose after he slept with the virgin daughters of friends, impregnating several of them: “He thought of it as completing a young girl’s education at her request.” A novel written from Jane’s point of view is one I’d love to read.

As Lodge makes clear in his epigraph, his title alludes to both senses of the noun “parts” — his subject’s many abilities and his privates. Lodge attempts to do justice to all aspects of Wells, but it’s the sexual shenanigans more than the tussling with fellow members of the socialist Fabian Society that hold sway. Blocks of quotes from Wells’ novels and from prickly correspondence with George Bernard Shaw and Henry James, however welcome in a biography, interrupt the novel’s narrative flow. Yet despite some unwieldy patches, readers who stick with “A Man of Parts” will be rewarded with an insightful portrait of a flawed but magnetic man who tried to change the world through both his behavior and his writing, between bedcovers and bookcovers.

“The Call” takes the form of a series of wry, terse bulletins about the stresses and joys of work and family. The narrator — or diarist — is a veterinarian who lives in rural Vermont with his wife, a harried homemaker/writer, their three children, and their two Newfoundland dogs. (Yannick Murphy lives in rural Vermont with her veterinarian husband, three children and two Newfoundlands.) If this sounds prosaic, let me stress that “The Call” is anything but: It is fresh and beguiling on several levels.

First, there’s the unusual outline format, in which the narrator, David Appleton, telegraphs his daily thoughts and activities in descriptions pared to the essentials but flecked with humor. For example: “CALL: A cow with her dead calf half-born. ACTION: Put on boots and pulled dead calf out while standing in a field of mud. RESULT: Hind legs tore off from dead calf while I pulled…. WHAT THE CHILDREN SAID TO ME WHEN I GOT HOME: Hi, Pop.”

Packed into the clever, clipped entries is all sorts of quirky information, providing fascinating glimpses into what, for many readers, will be a world almost as exotic as that of Mata Hari. The narrator receives calls for “colicking” horses, “chokes,” prepurchase exams, difficult births, and putting down lame animals. His tools include an emasculator for castrating a draft horse, a tube to snake through a colicking horse’s nostrils in order to pipe oil into its stomach, gentamicin injections for a shire’s respiratory infection, and portable X-ray equipment. His clients include an old woman who takes her beloved sheep, named Alice, with her to church, and a man who winters his cows in his basement. The good doctor is reminded the hard way — with an eyeful of spit — never to look an alpaca in the eye. Ducks, we learn, unlike chickens, defecate liquid, and the pig is the rare animal that uses mirrors the way people do. Among the goods David is offered in exchange for his services are mutton, maple syrup, and a pet rat — which, in deference to his wife’s sensibilities, he declines.

All this is plenty to hold our interest, but there’s also dramatic tension. “The Call” spans four seasons, beginning with the fall, when David takes his oldest child, 12-year-old son Sam, deer hunting for the first time. In order to spot their prey, they climb onto two wooden tree stands on their property. When Sam is knocked off his perch by the impact of a gunshot hitting his shoulder — mistaken for grouse by a fugitive hunter — David “can’t get to him fast enough.” He rushes Sam to the hospital, where he languishes in a coma, his future uncertain. His wife reacts with rage. David obsesses over finding the man responsible, surprisingly difficult in a town of 600 with 100 hunting licenses.

Murphy’s narrator is an idiosyncratic guy. He’s convinced that he keeps seeing spacecraft — one of the book’s less engaging leitmotifs meant to highlight David’s sense of the myriad dangers always lurking and ready to upend his family’s happiness and safety. There’s an additional plot development (which I won’t give away) concerning a caller who tests the family’s moral fiber. The book would have been fine without it, though it demonstrates the lengths to which the narrator will go to protect the people and animals he cares about.

All is not hunky-dory at chez Appleton, but it’s a loving home nonetheless. Their bedroom is abuzz with flies. Their diapered pet rabbit is given free rein. Work is worrisomely slow. The couple fight: “WHAT MY WIFE CAN DO: Make me angrier than I have ever been. WHAT OUR NEWFOUNDLAND DOGS DO: Never make me angry.” His reaction when she rants about the household mess or hounds him to have his abnormally high PSA levels rechecked is to run outside with his kids.

It’s fascinating to read about all this from a male point of view, as imagined by a woman, and even more intriguing when one considers Murphy’s authorial flexibility and generosity in stepping outside herself to show the wife in a less than flattering light and give the husband the last word. One of David’s entries reads: “THIS IS WHAT I WANT ON MY TOMBSTONE: He loved his children.” The portrait of family life that emerges in “The Call” — at once ironic and warm — is “as layered as something in nature.” Wonderful.