WINTER IN THE BLOOD By James Welch (Penguin: $6.95)

The narrator of this brooding tale of life on a Blackfoot reservation in Montana is haunted by memories of his dead father and brother. He grapples with the emptiness of the Montana landscape and the incipient alcoholism that has claimed so many of his relatives and friends. Uncomfortable in the alien world of the white man, but no longer tied to the land as his ancestors were, he yearns for a comfortable middle way. Only when the mystery of his family’s origin is revealed does the narrator begin to integrate divergent cultures and times into a viable identity.