First-time novelist Rachel Kushner, 39, spent six years writing Telex From Cuba.

Los Angeles Times / BRIAN VANDER BRUG

Telex From Cuba, by Rachel Kushner, read by Lloyd James. Unabridged, 13 hours. Tantor Audio, $34.99.

In the latter part of the 1950s, as Fidel Castro’s revolution grew from a rumble of insurgency in Cuba’s faraway mountains, Havana was a lush city of nightclubs and cabarets where dissolute military men and other adventurers sought a good time — and usually found it.

In the shadow of those mountains, the United Fruit Company reigned on 300,000 acres of sugar-cane plantation run by expatriate Americans. The company’s managers pulled the Cuban government’s strings and oversaw, from the height of their prestige, a mix of Cuban and Haitian field hands considered good enough to harvest the crop but not to walk down the main street of the nearby American-run town.

And in that town were the wives and children of the managers and overseers, their isolated, insular life perfect for Peyton Place-kind of intrigues with serious overtones. The grownups hid scandalous pasts and adulterous presents; their teenage sons ran off to join the rebels and plot their fathers’ overthrow. Constantly, the elite looked over their shoulders, for they never know who was really working for Castro, and who was just looking out for himself.

Kushner’s mother grew up in the American enclave where this novel takes place, so it’s unsurprising — if a bit disappointing — that it tells the story of the key events of Cuban history almost exclusively through American eyes. Indeed, though other characters play their parts — a native-born cabaret dancer with pretensions to French style, a European agitator with a Nazi past — neither has much of an inner life. Instead, the narrator of much of the tale is an American boy growing to become a young teen, as uncertain as his parents of what is really happening.

Kushner tells and retells the story from several points of view, so that main events in one account pop up again later in passing. But Castro and his brother Raul are glimpsed almost always from afar, the subjects of gossip — Fidel is so handsome! Raul seems effeminate! — rather than real people. The book’s one excursion into the mountains with the rebel forces is flat, notable only for the insurgents’ growing brutality.

Well, they say you should write what you know, and Kushner has done that much with panache. Her Americans are vividly drawn, and when at the end the narrator looks back from a half-century’s distance, there’s a nice sense of the passage of time, and what that means to him and those he’s talking about.

The book is far heavier on description than on dialogue, so it’s no knock on Lloyd James’ performance that he can’t do much in the way of disting- uishing the characters through a reader’s usual vocal tricks.

The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman, read by Gaiman. Unabridged, 7½ hours. Harper Children’s Audio, $29.95.

Imagine a boy — a toddler, in fact — who wanders away from the house where the rest of his family has just been murdered. He’s only a few steps ahead of the killer, who wants the little boy dead, too.

Now picture the boy in the neighboring graveyard, where the inhabitants take him to their deceased bosoms and decide to raise him as their own. They gently shoo the murderer away, and over time they teach the child the tricks of the trade, things like fading from the view of the living and slipping between the cracks of a building or a tomb.

All of which will no doubt come in handy when the killer returns, years later, to make one last try to carry out his mission.

Gaiman is the author of successful science fiction, fantasy, graphic novels and comics for adults, as well as several books for children. (This one seems aimed at kids age 10 and up, though grownups are likely to enjoy it, too.) So he brings considerable storytelling skills to the tale of the boy, whose ghostly adoptive parents name him Nobody Owens — Bod, for short.

If a bit other-worldly, Bod is also appealing. You’re likely to find yourself rooting for him as he grows to young adulthood, trying to understand and explore life beyond the graveyard while staying safe from those who mean him harm.

And if Gaiman’s ultimate explanation of how all this came to pass seems a little contrived … well, that’s a small price to pay for the pleasure that has come before.

Gaiman, as in last summer’s excellent adult audio book Neverwhere: The Author’s Preferred Text, is an agile reader, his voice full of menace or innocence as the need arises. Listening to him is a treat, part of what makes audio a different –– and, often, a better — experience than reading the same material.

Alan Rosenberg is a Journal editor.

arosenbe@projo.com