Terrorists in the United States feature prominently in His Illegal Self (Random House Canada), the new novel by two-time Booker Prize winner Peter Carey.

Except it's the early '70s and these terrorists are college radicals, young men and women from good homes who want to turn things upside down.

One of these homegrown terrorists is Susan Selkirk, involved in a life-or-death struggle with her own upbringing. Susan has a son - Che, of course - but Che hasn't seen his mother since he was two years old. He's been living with his grandmother in a posh apartment on New York's Upper East Side. As the book begins, Che reunites with the woman he calls his mother, although she insists on being called Dial.

The woman and the boy are supposed to spend some time together, but deception leads to tragedy, and Che and Dial are on the run.

Much to the bewilderment of both, they find themselves in a creepy hippie commune in rural Australia. (It's interesting that Carey, a native Australian, hasn't lived there in years - he lives in New York - but his books keep getting drawn back there.)

It's a suspenseful story, but at its heart is the beautiful, tortured relationship of Che and Dial. Carey not only masterfully creates a precocious eight-year-old boy, he also describes how two people, even with all the love in the world, can't always say what they know.

. . .

The Lake (Alma Books) is an antipodean mystery of sorts by Argentine writer Paola Kaufmann.

It's 1975, and Juan Peron, the perennial president of Argentina, has died, leaving his third wife, Isabella, to run the country. The country's military has other plans and are beginning to assert its presence. Dark days are about to descend on the country.

Meanwhile, in a rural backwater in Patagonia, a woman named Ana Mullin lives in a house built by her late father, a German immigrant. The house sits on a cold, dark, deep lake and there have long been rumours of some sort of monster living in its murky depths. Ana is determined to discover the truth.

At times, the book seems overwritten, and a Holocaust subplot seemed obvious to me, but Kaufmann powerfully evokes a foreboding mood, and the book's central conceit, a prehistoric monster as a metaphor for the evil in the world, is striking.

Paola Kaufmann was trained as a biologist and wrote several books before she passed away at the age of 37 in 2006. The Lake, translated from Spanish by Miranda France, was her last novel.