Call it the Merchant/Ivory syndrome: “My, what beautiful wallpaper!” Malouf, whose last novel, “Remembering Babylon,” was short-listed for the Booker Prize, spreads thick his beautiful, evocative prose in “The Conversations at Curlow Creek,” but the swatches hang together in a slightly mismatched and irritating pattern, never cohering into a whole.

The plot, as Malouf sets it up, is interesting: Two Irishman — one a career soldier, the other a rebel peasant — spend the night in a hut in the outback of Australia in 1827, the officer present to oversee the dawn hanging of the peasant. The peasant had wanted a priest, and he’s ready to pour his heart out; the soldier wants to go home to claim the girl of his dreams.

The majority of the book, however, is given over to a backstory that would’ve made Dickens proud. Every last detail of the soldier’s upbringing amidst the Irish gentry is recounted. We learn of the tragic death of his opera-singer parents, his adoption by eccentric landowners, his love for the wealthy, smart and reckless neighbor girl, as well as his having to raise his adopted parents’ son. There is an inevitable triangle between the soldier, the girl and the son, a three way psychological tug of war for affection. The soldier is all order. The neighbor girl is all fire. The young boy is all rebellion. The soldier traipses around the world to exorcise his demons and to find the inner spark that will win the girl. In New South Wales he learns that the boy he raised has become a rebel leader. By the time he gets to Curlow Creek the only survivor of the young man’s band is a lone peasant to be hung in the morning.

Unfortunately, little is exchanged between these characters. Instead there are many poetic passages about rivers, trees and horses. The central theme — the inner conflict of chaos and order — is merely glimpsed in a few compelling passages. With this kind of book, you forget why you are reading it and find it easy to put aside when your eyes glaze over as you stare at the pretty words.

Naguib Mahfouz, the 85-year-old Egyptian Nobel Prize-winner best known for his Cairo Trilogy, packs a lifetime of wisdom and reverence into this slim new book. This is not a dry, academic “I was born here, studied there” recounting, but a series of half-page meditations which capture the essence of a writer deeply tuned in to the spirituality of the everyday.

Fellow Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer writes in her introduction that “For Mahfouz life is a search in which one must find one’s own sign-posts.” Throughout his remembrances, anecdotes, allegorical and mystical tales, Mahfouz concludes that rapture is found in being constantly open to the world, and that the most perfect moment in one’s life may well be in “the fleeting look of contentment under the date palm” which is “the secret of life and its light.” The entries are filled with a constant struggle between polarized ways of living: between the need for order and the freedom of anarchy, between the pureness of abstinence and the humanity of sensuality, between the urge to examine everything and the contentment of letting life flow. The latter part of the book is taken up with the musings of a mythical Sheikh abd-Rabbih al-Ta’ih, a mystical figure who dwells in a desert cave that he refers to as a “tavern” because friends gathered there get drunk on the joy of communing with like-minded spirits. The Sheikh acts as a medium for Mahfouz to distill his Sufi-infused philosophy, a vision of acceptance, tolerance and a constant striving for the spiritual.

The Yaak Valley, one of the most remote places in the United States, is nestled in the northwest corner of Montana bordering Idaho and Canada, where the Rockies meet the Pacific Northwest. It’s a wilderness filled with incredible biodiversity — trees, rare orchids, wildflowers, grizzlies, wolves, coyotes, elk, moose and caribou. Bass, a geologist turned naturalist and short story writer, is one of only a hundred people who call the Yaak home. In this, his tenth book, Bass takes the reader on long walks through what can only be described as a spiritual place. With detail-rich prose, he relates the delicate rhythms that the valley’s fauna, fish, wildlife — as well as various human recluses — go through over the course of brutal winters, short, spectacular springs and picturesque summers and falls.

Peter Hoeg, the Danish author of the surprise international bestseller, “Smilla’s Sense of Snow,” has concocted a new book that’s as awkward as its own half-breed protagonist. “The Woman and the Ape” centers on a captured ape of an unknown species — a missing link that’s nefariously smuggled to London to be the centerpiece of an expanded zoo and animal research center.

Hoeg has tried to write what might best be termed a feminist/animal-liberationist/futurist/social-disaster thriller, and the result is half bird and half rhino — an ungainly monster that never gets off the ground. The Woman, a pampered, upper-crusty Dane named Madelene, is the wife of zookeeper Adam, and she’s the only one who can save The Ape from grisly testing and permanent imprisonment. After they run off together, The Ape quickly learns English, and (naturally) one thing leads to another — and we are faced with some truly absurd cross-species pollination. This happens in a paradisaical animal preserve in Northern England, a place of Darwinian simplicity where the humans have left the animals to fend for themselves within the confines of the forest.

Sherman Alexie is a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian who’s received much deserved praise for his wry, taut, short story collection “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven,” and for his blackly funny first novel “Reservation Blues.” With the ambitious and provocative “Indian Killer,” however, Alexie has arrived as one of the most potent new voices in American fiction. This multi-faceted tale is set in Seattle, a melting pot of Indians and whites, and the home of John Smith — a tall, full-blooded Indian of an unknown tribe, raised by his loving white adoptive parents. A construction worker on “the last skyscraper in Seattle,” John is a loner who hears voices, mainly that of his mentor, a Jesuit Indian who walked into the desert never to be seen again.

Sherman Alexie is a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian who’s received much deserved praise for his wry, taut, short story collection “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven,” and for his blackly funny first novel “Reservation Blues.” With the ambitious and provocative “Indian Killer,” however, Alexie has arrived as one of the most potent new voices in American fiction. This multi-faceted tale is set in Seattle, a melting pot of Indians and whites, and the home of John Smith — a tall, full-blooded Indian of an unknown tribe, raised by his loving white adoptive parents. A construction worker on “the last skyscraper in Seattle,” John is a loner who hears voices, mainly that of his mentor, a Jesuit Indian who walked into the desert never to be seen again.