Nov. 24 (Bloomberg) -- With so many books in the stores, we’re often asked for recommendations. Here’s a list of recent novels.

“Nine Dragons,” by Michael Connelly. Published by Little, Brown in the U.S. and Orion in the U.K.

Harry Bosch is a tunnel rat. He spent his army years exploring the dangerous maze beneath the Vietnam jungle. When he got out, he burrowed into Los Angeles, learning every inch of the city as a police detective. Now, in the 15th hard-boiled Bosch novel, Connelly sends his hero halfway around the world, to Hong Kong, and doesn’t give him any time to dig below the surface while he tries to save the only person in the world he loves.

It’s nerve-wracking -- in a good way -- to see Bosch out of his element. He makes seemingly small mistakes that lead to life-changing consequences. That would never happen in L.A.

“Last Night in Twisted River,” by John Irving. Published by Random House in the U.S. and Bloomsbury in the U.K.

Fans of John Irving who relish the mutilations he inflicts on characters might be delighted to learn that his 12th novel opens in a 1954 New Hampshire logging camp. Yes: hatchets, axes, chain saws and sawmills.

Yet it’s a simple clobbering with cast-iron pan that really starts the damage report here. Mutilations will come later, after the naked Lady Sky parachutes into the pigpen. The book is tightly plotted, suspenseful and ultimately evocative.

“Chronic City,” by Jonathan Lethem. Published by Doubleday in the U.S. and will be published by Faber in the U.K. in January.

Lethem, the MacArthur “genius” known for his Brooklyn roots, sets his entertaining, unsettling new novel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where: “Money has been here so long it’s a little decrepit. If one of money’s laws is that it can never buy taste, here is where it went after it failed, and here’s what it bought instead.”

The novel cocks a snook at the city’s haves, fears and fads through a few characters who inhale at least a bushel of marijuana. Oddly, there is scant reference to the financial markets.

“The Original of Laura,” by Vladimir Nabokov. Published by Knopf in the U.S. and Penguin in the U.K.

Nabokov made it clear before he died that he didn’t want his notes for his unfinished final novel published; he wanted them burned. But here they are 32 years later between hard covers, in a volume edited by his only child, Dmitri Nabokov, and it seems unlikely that very many people are going to complain.

The book is magnificently packaged (the design is by Knopf’s resident genius, Chip Kidd), bizarrely plotted (adultery, suicide, girth) and a short, fast read.

“Sunset Oasis,” by Bahaa Taher. Published by Sceptre in the U.K.

A fourth-century B.C. temple called Umm Ebeida has been reduced to a jumble of building blocks and Pharaonic reliefs. Nature and desert winds didn’t turn the shrine into rubble; a mysterious act of vandalism did. A fictional account of the demolition forms the climax of this rich, multidimensional novel set in British colonial Egypt.

The book won the inaugural International Prize for Arabic Fiction last year and recently became available in an English translation by Humphrey Davies.

To contact the reporter on this story: Lili Rosboch in New York at erosboch@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: November 24, 2009 13:34 EST