London booksellers are brave: They display works of quality along with best sellers. Not too long ago, on their laden tables, I found three superb new novels—one British, two Irish—that are now available in American editions and deserve an American audience.

Ian McEwan's Black Dogs is brilliant, with a scope, depth and unity that belie its brevity. Beginning as a quest for family, the novel gradually encompasses England, Berlin, Poland and southern France, brings in politics, rationalism and religion, involves mythic dogs and ancient dolmens, and ends as a symbol of Europe from World War II to the 1989 collapse of Communism. In a similar expansion, the black dogs begin as horrid memories, develop into painfully real beasts of attack and, by the end, symbolize European political oppression on the right and on the left. The novel's movement from realism to symbol is seamless, and McEwan faultlessly balances sensuous detail—the “scent of thyme crushed underfoot”—with the resonance and scope of myth.

A novel of memory, Black Dogs has a disarmingly simple plot. The middle-aged Jeremy, orphaned when he was eight, finds family in his wife's parents—June and Bernard Tremaine—and tries to piece together their life-stories. The novel is a “memoir” of his discoveries: how June was attacked by dogs during her Languedoc honeymoon, how she and Bernard reject English Communism, how their affection outlives their marriage and how June turns to religion and Bernard to rationalism. Jeremy also has his own memories: visiting a Polish concentration camp in 1981, experiencing Berlin in 1989 as the Wall was being pulled down, hiking to the dolmens—the sacred altars—of Languedoc, where June fended off the dogs in 1946. McEwan smoothly weaves all this together—self and family, 1946 and 1989, dogs and dolmens, history and politics, England and Europe—into a resonant myth of politics, rationalism, religion and “the chasm of meaninglessness.” By the end, Jeremy has found a family, yet feels a foreboding: In 1946, the black dogs of fascism—“spirit hounds” of “the savagery beyond”—ran away from June, yet lived on as “black stains in the grey of the dawn, fading as they move into the foothills of the mountains from where they will return to haunt us, somewhere in Europe, in another time.” Gliding so suavely from realism to symbol, Black Dogs is a remarkable feat, an extraordinary performance. With this novel, McEwan becomes a major writer. …

All three novelists, I might note, are experienced and well regarded. Ian McEwan (British, b. 1948) has done T.V. plays, a film script and six novels, including the celebrated The Comfort of Strangers (later filmed), The Child in Time and The Innocent. Patrick McCabe (Irish, b. 1955) has published two novels, a children's story and several short stories. Roddy Doyle (Irish, b. 1958) is known for his fictional trilogy, The Commitments, The Snapper and The Van, two stage plays, and the screenplays for films of The Commitments (1991) and The Snapper (1993).

In these new novels, each writer is at his best, probing memory, self and family, worrying about love and permanence and crafting inventive stories with verbal skill. The booksellers of London were right: The novels are superb, and have all won prizes. Happily, American readers can now enjoy them also.