An overview of recent fiction with Hawai'i and Pacific ties:

"TU: A NOVEL" BY PATRICIA GRACE; UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI'I PRESS, PAPER, $16

This beautiful, award-winning novel by a Maori writer is the story of three brothers who join a Maori unit during World War II. It begins at the end, with the one remaining brother, Te-Hokowhitu-a-Tu, a writer, handing over to the younger generation papers that will reveal for the first time the truth behind family secrets. It is a novel of hope and healing, gracefully written and containing a message about war that is particularly timely now. It also brings to mind other native peoples and disenfranchised people who went to war for their countries.

"LANGUAGE OF THE GECKOS AND OTHER STORIES" BY GARY PAK, UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS, PAPER, $18.95

These stories are like scenes that flash by as you sit in a slow-moving train — you see just enough to get a sense of what might be happening, but the majority is left to the imagination. Even so, Pak's characters are fully realized and memorable: the barren woman and her doubting husband who visit a Filipino healer, the bar girl who lives in a world where her poet-lover is still in her arms, the retiree who eschews the real world to inhabit old movies, and the man who talks to geckos — and in so doing is united with his estranged brother. Thought-provoking and reflective, as Pak promises in his introduction, of the complexities of Island culture.

"WHO WROTE THE BOOK OF LOVE?" BY LEE SIEGEL, CHICAGO PRESS, PAPER, $24

In one life, Lee Siegel is a professor of South Asian religions at the University of Hawai'i with a specialty in (well, obsession with) India. In another, he is the author of a trio of novels about love and sex. Mostly sex. A lot of sex. You've been fairly warned. This latest is a hilarious and often intensely uncomfortable (in a good way) memoir of the coming of sexual age of a young Jewish boy in Beverly Hills in the 1950s. It is fiction, but also clearly contains elements of memoir. Only, as Siegel has said, in the novel, he's much more handsome. The evocation of the oddities in the modern-day Jewish-American experience (families that hid Easter eggs with afikomen at Passover; the kid who gets condoms for his bar mitzvah) is exceptionally skillful. It's to laugh. And squirm.

"SUGAR & SMOKE: A NOVEL" BY NAPUA CHAPMAN, PUBLISH AMERICA, PAPER, $19.95

Joyce Lebra, a part-time Island resident writing here under a pen name, once overheard a snippet of conversation that, coupled with some later research, was the seed of this book. She heard a Hawaiian man on the Mainland say he could never go home because members of his family had been killed for refusing to give up their land and he feared the same would happen to him. Conversations with other anonymous sources, who claimed this was far from an isolated case, decided her to write the story of Kiana Fernandez, a Native Hawaiian activist of the 1970s, and Gary Southworth, a plantation owner's son — two people who get caught in the middle of a plot to strip Fernandez's family of their land by whatever means necessary. The book is an easy, fast-moving read that, while it allows some shades of gray in the characters of the two protagonists, dwells primarily in the familiar territory in which Hawaiians are victims and Caucasians (and their allies of other ethnicities) are villains. An abrupt and violent ending leaves the reader wondering what the lesson is. That the only good haole is a dead one? That there is no common ground to be found? Subsequent editions would benefit from a review of the use of diacriticals and of other language-related glitches.

"WILEY'S REFRAIN" BY LONO WAIWAIOLE, ST. MARTIN'S MINOTAUR, HARDBACK, $24.95

This is the third in a series of crime noir novels about a Portland, Ore.-based poker player with Island roots. Wiley is no do-gooder, but like John McDonald's Travis McGee, he is clearly on the side of right, a doer of favors for friends who often does himself a little good in the process. When a musician friend gets killed, Wiley finds himself on a plane to Hawai'i, a place he's heard about but never been. And that's all I'm going to tell you, because if you like mysteries, you shouldn't miss this one, which is well-written and nicely plotted. Like Wiley, Waiwaiole lived in Portland but now makes his home in Kea'au, according to the press release that came with the book. It'll be interesting to see if Wiley moves to the Islands, too, at some point.

Reach Wanda A. Adams at wadams@honoluluadvertiser.com.