Newcomers to a culture often experience a kind of intoxicating ignorance that can be mistaken for boldness. Andrea Levy’s Orange Prize-winning “Small Island” (Picador, 448 pages, $14) is an epic of cultural assimilation, the story of Jamaican immigrants who move to England in the aftermath of World War II.

Hortense follows her husband Gilbert, whom she hardly knows yet, to London after a six-month interval. “Is this the way the English live?” she demands, again and again, as she inspects the small attic room where Gilbert has made his home. Hortense put on airs even as a child in Jamaica, but despite her arrogance, there is something legitimate in her dismay at the Empire’s capital.

Gilbert’s reasons for moving to London are no less conceited: After he returned from wartime service in “the mother country,” he felt he was too good for Jamaica: “I was a giant living on land no bigger than the soles of my shoes.” The compromises he makes in order to maintain his morale in London are hardly more convoluted than those of his white neighbors, who complain that an influx of Jamaicans is not what “we fought for.”

Hortense’s ignorance is profound. Although cockney shopkeepers can hardly understand her English, Hortense presents herself to the education authority in full confidence that she will be hired as a teacher, based on her Jamaican teacher’s certificate. Something in Hortense’s rejection by the education authority will flatter the reader, who will understand the power dynamics of modern life so much better than Hortense. Hortense has taken modernity, in its punctiliousness, too literally, and it is only after Gilbert can convince her that “not everything the English do is good,” that Hortense can begin to live as a Londoner.

Ms. Levy’s book is crowded with voices. Besides Hortense’s guarded observations, there is Gilbert’s lovable griping and a usefully straight commentary from landlady Queenie. Her absent husband reappears, delivering an overlong wartime novella toward the book’s end, but it ultimately pays off as he returns to precipitate a bedroom farce that nicely undermines the heaviness of the book’s racial themes.

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Sometimes blundering ignorance is an outsider’s best weapon. In “Mimi and Toutou’s Big Adventure” (Alfred A. Knopf, 241 pages, $24) novelist-historian Giles Foden tells the story of Britain’s hapless victory on Lake Tanganyika. The British commander, Goeffrey Spicer-Simson, is a buffoon. His body covered in snake tattoos, he is rotting in a naval office in Whitehall as World War II begins. When a big-game hunter arrives with a plan to take Tanganyika – the lake at the strategic center of Eastern Africa – from the Germans, the quixotic mission is relegated to Spicer. It is a vainglorious man’s last chance to become a hero.

Mr. Foden reads Spicer’s adventure as an essay in the genius of amateurism. Recalling the Homeric concept of nous, “that quality of cunning which brings Odysseus home to Ithaca and saves the fox from the hounds,” Mr. Foden reflects that Spicer “showed nous not by design but by mistake.” His mission comes to resemble a gigantic game of telephone, in which an odd squeak in London becomes a roar in Africa.

Spicer’s German counterpart laughs at rumors of a plan to transport light motorboats – the Mimi and the Toutou – overland from Cape Town; thus the English have the advantage of surprise when they finally attack. Only a braggart would claim he could capture Tanganyika with two mahogany speedboats, and Spicer is one. When he cannot hit an ox at three yards, it turns and charges and he finally kills it at point blank range. “It’s just the same with buffalo,” he explains. “You’ve got to face up to them. It’s only when they lower their heads to charge that they expose the vital spot!”

Mr. Foden worries that “the oral tradition in Africa is in crisis,” because of progress and AIDS. In Europe and America, however, the oral tradition is obviously quite healthy. Spicer’s mission succeeded, perhaps, on the merit of his skills of exaggeration. When his boats had their first victory, Spicer was pragmatic: “Only ignorant people talk about luck,” he said. “This was a case of successful mystique.”

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Tash Aw’s adventurous debut, “The Harmony Silk Factory” (Riverhead, 378 pages, $24.95) is the rare English language novel to emerge from Malaysia. A tripartite study in perspectives, it centers on Johnny Lim, a troubled peasant who makes it big. Johnny’s son Jasper compares him to a pirate; his account, which opens the book, takes the tone of a Western, but his message is bitter.

Jasper believes his father, a local hero, collaborated with the Japanese during World War II and murdered his communist allies. Jasper imagines the assembled communist leaders, already doomed, awaiting Johnny in a dark cave: “A steady, heavy tread, confident, afraid of nothing. No man had a walk like that. No man except Johnny.” These phrasings sound surprisingly wholesome in context, and Jasper’s bitter respect for his father’s evil seems studied. But in the second section, comprising the diary of Johnny’s wife, he becomes a quiet man, and in the third section, related by Johnny’s English friend, Peter, Johnny is “poor wonderful Johnny,” a sulky dreamer who worries that he cannot understand Dickens. Jasper’s account now seems not absurd, but terribly filial.

As a series of related documents belonging to different genres – adventure, romance, memoir – Mr. Aw’s book resembles David Mitchell’s much-touted but pointless “Cloud Atlas.” Mr. Aw is a much more original author, and has been careful to stitch his three narratives closely together. He does create some inconsistencies between the three voices, to develop their prejudices, but more importantly, he allows them to strangely agree. It is wonderful to see Johnny Lim from three different angles but still not know him. He is a Gatsby, a man who can’t realize what kind of books his wasted life has inspired.