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Virginia Woolf may have overshadowed her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, in popular cultural history, but Vanessa was a talented artist, wife, lover and mother in her own right. In her novel Vanessa and Virginia, author Susan Sellers—co-editor of the Cambridge University Press edition of Woolf’s works—artfully presents Vanessa, not as a frame to further explore and enhance her more famous sister, but through a full and authentic portrait of a woman whose life has been shaped by tragedy as well as a creative freedom remarkable for her time.

Sellers crafts her novel in short vignettes, beginning with cohesive and specific memories of the sisters’ childhood, and eventually becoming more abstract and dreamy as the girls age. The sisters survived the deaths of several family members and went on to create unconventional lives as founders of the famed Bloomsbury Group, a collective of artists, critics, economists and writers. Those meetings are not explored head-on in Vanessa and Virginia, but many of the relationships they spawned are, including the open marriage of Vanessa and art critic Clive Bell. Vanessa’s subsequent love affairs with painters Roger Fry and Duncan Grant are responsible for many of the novel’s most poignant passages.

While Vanessa and Virginia remain devoted to each other through tragedies, romances and depressions, sibling rivalry is never under the surface for long. As their individual careers rise and fall, Sellers never flinches in maintaining obvious tension in their relationship. While a working knowledge of the sisters’ lives might enhance and deepen the reading experience, it is by no means necessary, and that in itself is no small achievement.

Houses, lovers, wars and even children come and go, but the two constants in Vanessa’s life—Virginia and art—remain. Even after Virginia fills her pockets with stones and wades into the water, Vanessa seems to absorb her sister, rather than let her go, and it is, perhaps, that extra bit of strength that enables her to continue to paint, to create and, ultimately, to survive.

Kristy Kiernan is the author of the novel Matters of Faith.

Set aside your spring chores and cancel the rest of your plans when you pick up The Winter Vault. Thirteen years after her first novel, Fugitive Pieces, Canadian writer Anne Michaels unfolds the unforgettable story of Avery and Jean, who meet near land flooded by the St. Lawrence Seaway project. After their marriage, they live in Egypt, where Avery is an engineer responsible for rescuing the temples at Abu Simbel from the floodwaters of the Nile, as part of the Aswan High Dam construction in the mid-1960s. In both projects, lives and memories are uprooted with the landscape as entire communities are relocated. Michaels uses the structure of the novel to portray this displacement and this dislocation, juxtaposing water against desert, flow against flood, showing some of the ways people respond to emotional and physical dislocation.

In Egypt, Avery works with old sandstone and modern plans, while Jean observes the locals and tries to understand their lives. When their first child dies in utero, their relationship breaks. Their loss is the stone in the river that a Nubian friend describes as the one that splits the waters.

Back in Canada, Avery does not know how to help Jean—or himself—grieve, and leaves her. She becomes involved with Lucjan, an older man who survived the war as a Jewish orphan in Warsaw, and is now known as the Caveman because of the paintings he creates on Toronto fences late at night. He draws Jean, and they become lovers. It is Lucjan’s stories—and his challenges—that help Jean start to return to life. A year after their daughter’s death, Jean and Avery meet, unplanned, at her grave, and begin to walk back to each other.

Michaels is the author of three books of poetry, and her phrases and images echo back and forth through the novel. The title refers to the buildings where bodies wait until the ground thaws and graves can be dug, a metaphor for the temporary holding place we all visit in our lives, but rarely name. The Winter Vault requires close reading, but when you finish, you’ll want to turn back and read it all again.

Leslie Budewitz lives and writes near Flathead Lake in western Montana.