he afterword to Hugo Hamilton’s new novel, THE PAGES (Knopf, 272 pp., $28), you’ll find an ominous quote from the poet Heinrich Heine: “Wherever they burn books, they will end up burning human beings.” Hamilton’s provocative way of reinforcing that point is to give a human voice to a book that escaped a Nazi book burning — only to be returned to Germany several generations later, in “this new anti-intellectual age,” a time when “people have now developed an appetite for dishonesty. The lies they like to hear.”

The book in question is a copy of Joseph Roth’s 1924 novel “Rebellion,” written in response to the horrors of World War I and rescued by the grandfather of Lena, an American artist whose émigré father extracted a deathbed promise that she look after it “like a little brother.” An account of Lena’s travels as she tries to decode a map sketched into the back of the book is just one of Hamilton’s cleverly intersecting narratives. Also on view is Roth himself, increasingly alarmed by Europe’s descent into violence between the two world wars — and by the descent of his beloved wife into schizophrenia. The hero of Roth’s novel appears as well, in scenes recounting this one-legged army veteran’s tragic decline.

But the most intriguing perspective belongs to the book Lena carries back to her ancestral homeland. “I have accumulated the inner lives of my readers,” it explains. “Their thoughts have been added in layers underneath the text, turning me into a living thing, with human faculties.” As such, it offers comments on the behavior of the other characters as well as on the act of reading, on the force that can be exerted by a seemingly powerless stack of bound pages. If you’ve ever surrendered to the “reality” of a work of fiction, you’ll know how eloquently this book can speak.

Billy O’Callaghan uses a trio of voices in his poignant novel LIFE SENTENCES (Godine, 200 pp., $24.95) as three generations of an Irish family probe a legacy of poverty and war. First up is Jer, awash in sorrow and guilt, about to bury his sister — if he can avoid getting locked up for making drunken threats against her abusive husband. It’s 1920, a few years after Jer has left the army, but life in the trenches continues to haunt him: “The quiet was worse somehow than the noise, like a stuck breath or like being blind and a step away from the brink.”