JIM THE BOY By Tony Earley; Little, Brown: 228 pp., $23.95 : THE QUESTION OF BRUNO By Aleksandar Hemon; Nan A. Talese / Doubleday: 232 pp., $22.95 : CHANG AND ENG By Darin Strauss; Dutton: 324 pp., $23.95

JIM THE BOY By Tony Earley; Little, Brown: 228 pp., $23.95

From its wistful, retro cover depicting a barefoot boy in overalls to its epigraph from “Charlotte’s Web,� Tony Earley’s “Jim the Boy� puts us squarely in mind of young-adult classics like “The Yearling.� And though Earley--the author of the highly praised short-story collection “Here We Are in Paradise�--clearly wants to nibble around the edges of the juvenile genre, this exquisitely wrought story of a boy named Jim growing up in North Carolina during the Depression with his mom and three uncles exhibits a clear-eyed maturity, and an understated daring, rarely seen in the most cutting-edge adult fiction.

It’s 1934, 10 years since Jim’s father, Jim Glass Sr., keeled over dead in a cotton field a week before Jim’s birth. Over the course of the year following Jim’s 10th birthday (“He was nine years old when he went to sleep, but ten years old when he woke up. The extra number had weight, like a muscle, and Jim hefted it like a prize.�), we see Jim waking up to an ever-expanding world: accompanying Uncle Al on a motor excursion to the Atlantic shore; arriving at a new school and encountering a tightknit posse of mountain boys; exploring the menacing alleyways of nearby New Carpenter with his new best friend and rival Penn Carson; stumbling across Mr. Whiteside’s awkward attempts to woo his mother; witnessing the arrival of electric lights to the community; and eventually visiting, for the first time, his hermit grandfather as he lay dying in his mountain home. Earley delivers Jim’s bittersweet coming-of-adolescence story with the pared-down, earthy lyricism of a classic folk ballad.

THE QUESTION OF BRUNO By Aleksandar Hemon; Nan A. Talese / Doubleday: 232 pp., $22.95

Aleksandar Hemon left his native Sarajevo in 1992 and immigrated to Chicago; by 1995, he had already acquired enough English to begin writing like a modern-day Conrad in his adopted language. The result is “The Question of Bruno,� an inventive and thorny collection of interlocking narratives that has the jarring immediacy of autobiography, as if Hemon were brandishing a hand-held video camera at the inchoate episodes of his life. But his artful anarchic jump-cutting is firmly grounded by the undeniable heft of history. Indeed, for Hemon’s alter-ego protagonists, the boundary between private life and history is as vulnerable as Sarajevo’s shell-pocked walls.

In “Islands,� a boy on a seaside family holiday finds his innocence eroded by his Uncle Julius’ unsolicited gulag memories. “The Sorge Spy Ring� is a heavily footnoted dual narrative in which a kid obsessed with Soviet spy Richard Sorge imagines that his father may be a spy too. In “Exchange of Pleasant Words,� a sprawling reunion of the Hemon clan fuels the notion that the family tree is hopelessly gnarled around knotty issues of geopolitics and revisionism. And “Blind Josef Pronek & Dead Souls� shows a Bosnian immigrant encountering all the baffling cliches of America, from overwrought salad dressings to spoiled slackers who smoke weed, play video games and advise him, “You should stay and get your family out and let those [expletive] kill each other if they want.� Whether pondering the coldblooded craft of Saravejo’s snipers or offering a Proustian joke, Hemon has an impeccable ear for the mundane ironies and bleak compromises elicited by extraordinary events.

CHANG AND ENG By Darin Strauss; Dutton: 324 pp., $23.95

As Darin Strauss’ “Chang and Eng� opens, we find a 63-year-old man facing--and savoring--solitude for the first time in his life. The moment is brief, however, because that man--Eng, of the famous Siamese twins Chang and Eng--is on his deathbed, waking to find his brother, who’s been attached to him since birth, already dead. Throughout Strauss’ richly imagined life of these twins, Chang and Eng pull in opposite directions, even as they share enormous affection and a bond of mutual fate: Eng is aloof, healthy, reads the Bible, yearns for separation and is a teetotaler; Chang is a showman, gets sick often, speaks immigrant English, is content to be connected and eventually becomes an alcoholic.

Their double story is told by the proudly erudite Eng in a series of flashbacks, in which the brothers are born on a Mekong houseboat in 1811, spirited away to the king of Siam and then, at 14, shipped off to New York and a freak-show career. After arriving in Wilkesboro, N.C., in 1842, the twins discover love in the form of two blond sisters, negotiate elaborate strategies in the marriage bed, spawn 21 children, adopt the patriotic surname Bunker, own slaves and endure the War of Yankee Aggression, in which, as Strauss cleverly suggests, the country, like Chang and Eng, finds itself to be contentiously inseparable. Strauss elevates Chang and Eng’s story far beyond the sideshow, making this a haunting and thoroughly entertaining parable of loyalty and love.