Rooms with a sombre view

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How does it feel to be involved, even indirectly, in atrocity? That's one of the many uncomfortable questions looming over The Dark Room, which attempts to look unflinchingly at the Holocaust from a German perspective.

First-time author Rachel Seiffert was brought up in Oxford, but is half-German and now lives in Berlin. Her novel explores the indelible shadows cast by war which still have an impact on everyday family life several generations after the event.

In three distinct sections, Seiffert charts the lives of ordinary Germans at different points in time, reaching back from the outbreak of war to the present day. The first part, set in the early war years, follows the fortunes of a young photographer, Helmut, who compulsively takes snapshots of Berlin, sensing somehow that the city is losing people. When his house is bombed, he seeks shelter in the dark room of his employer's shop, away from the "dark, new mountains of stone" outside.

Fast-forwarding to 1945, the second section tells of the flight of a 12-year-old German girl with her siblings across the country to reach their grandmother in Hamburg. With their Nazi parents now in Allied hands, the young travellers pass through nameless towns, begging for food and shelter.

The final, most intricate section of the novel takes us up to the present, where a young German college-professor, Micha, learns some nasty truths about his grandfather's role in the war.

Each of these tales avoids detailed descriptions of the war. This vague lack of specifics is irritating in places, but lends universal relevance to Seiffert's portrayal of these young innocents, caught up in horrific circumstances they hardly understand. As the truth slowly dawns, they each learn the devastating human price of the war in which they have unwittingly played a part. Although it's painful to read in places, and sometimes buckles under the weight of its subject, The Dark Room is a brave and admirably honest work.

Equally intrepid in its own very different way is Ali Smith's Hotel World, which also favours a split-level approach to storytelling in an attempt to get fresh angles on the truth. The events are recounted by five diverse (if not downright incompatible) women who all meet in some way at the Global Hotel in an unnamed town. Smith begins her story, as it were, at the end, with the death of a young girl called Sara Wilby, when she climbs into the hotel's dumb waiter and drops six floors to her demise.

Her mischievous ghost narrates the first section, followed by the four other voices. There's Else, a homeless women who sits outside; Lise the receptionist; Penny, a jaded journalist on an assignment to write up the hotel, and finally Sara's sister Clare. Avoiding any semblance of plot, Smith prefers to follow the wild daydreams and complex interior lives of her characters, and to pursue her own playful ideas and imaginings.

And, somehow, she pulls it off magnificently. Her seemingly effortless style turns the conventional novel inside out, peering into the cracks of everyday life and finding a rich seam of poetry there. Best of all, though, is the virtuoso ending, where the narrative point of view opens out into a wide-angled portrait of Britain at the close of the 20th century. It's a finale as poignant and universal as that of James Joyce's short story, The Dead.