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In her U.S. debut, A Time of Angels, South African novelist Patricia Schonstein uses lush language and a slippery sense of time and place to create a stunning verbal portrait.

The plot revolves around a love triangle that includes two close friends and a beautiful woman. Primo, a quiet, introverted soothsayer, marries the lovely Beatrice after his friend Pasquale, a passionate baker whose small restaurant is the social center of their Cape Town neighborhood, gives her up to move on to another romance. Years later, though, Pasquale -- long distraught over his failure to hold on to Beatrice -- wins her away from her husband.

The oft-told tale could be dismissed as clich? but for the remarkable way in which Schonstein tells it.

She weaves strands of faith and theology, philosophy and history into the narrative, reminding us that every story is somehow larger than itself. And she brings the supernatural into play with the everyday in a seamlessly believable manner, the mark of well-crafted magic realism.

Schonstein's playfully skewed approach to time serves the novel well, drifting from the present drama to the stories of Primo's and Pasquale's parents' experiences in World War II-era Europe. This easy interplay between distant decades creates a timeless feeling, bolstered by the contemporary South African neighborhood's resemblance to its midcentury Italian counterparts. When mention is made of a peculiarly contemporary phenomenon -- e-mail, for example, or Red Bull -- the reader is startled momentarily into the 21st century.

"She stood on the veranda," Schonstein writes of Beatrice, "all lit up by flashing neons, her hair rippling in the wind, her long white nightgown picking up the lurid colours of the pulsing 7Eleven lights."

But even these reminders are charming in the overall context of the novel.

Schonstein's delight in language and storytelling is at the heart of the book's appeal, and will leave readers looking forward to her next effort.

William Kowalski also attempts to weave familial histories into a contemporary story in his newest novel, The Good Neighbor.

Successful stockbroker Coltrane Hart and his wife Francie buy a country house in rural Pennsylvania, each for wildly different reasons. While Coltrane sees the property as a means to impress his boss and colleagues, Francie sees the home as a retreat from her unhappy existence in New York and a chance to return to poetry, a passion she hadn't pursued since before her marriage.

The history comes into play when Francie discovers a diary kept by Marly Musgrove, the wife of the man who built the house. She relates to the 19th century woman and takes the side of Musgrove's descendants -- the Harts' current neighbors -- when Coltrane decides to unearth the Musgrove family cemetery in the back yard.

The novel begins promisingly enough. Kowalski's description of the landscape and the Harts' response to the house they stumble across on an afternoon drive is well-crafted and draws the reader into their story.

However, the characters quickly fall into caricature, and the dialogue seems contrived. Coltrane is the standard-issue financial wunderkid -- the money- and power-driven jerk who is too insensitive to see the damage he's doing to his relationships. Likewise, Francie seems concerned only with her "poetic soul" and the damage done to it by their hollow New York lifestyle. The supporting characters, too, are drawn in single stereotypical dimensions.

Part of the problem is the novel's saturation with tangential themes and subplots. Kowalski throws in everything from mental illness to drug deals to a billionaire's desire to fly to the moon via a private Russian spaceship. There's not much room to flesh out characters when each chapter seems to introduce another story.

A better edit might have made this a completely different book. It would have been well served by the elimination of some of the seemingly aimless filler for the sake of creating more complicated characters.

<b>czempter@thisweeknews.com