There’s a certain joy in opening a Kate Atkinson novel—a feeling that every element matters and that each surprise and delight will ultimately make perfect sense. Her latest novel, Shrines of Gaiety, takes us to London in 1926. The shadows of the Great War and the 1918 flu pandemic weigh heavily on the world. In response to these recent horrors, London’s nightlife is alive, well and effervescent. 

Enter Nellie Coker—club owner, mother, notorious schemer—who is just about to be released from prison. Everyone is curious to see her, though she rarely lets people get close. London’s Soho neighborhood serves as the backdrop for Nellie’s life, as well as for the lives of her sons and the people who work for her and against her. Each chapter shifts focus, showing a bit of a character’s story, a glimpse of an encounter, a fragment of a person trying to exist in a complex world. We even get a fascinating look at characters who work in law enforcement. 

Slowly, these moments overlap. Secrets, stories, debts and more come to the surface. As the fragments of the novel coalesce, readers witness interconnection, reverberations and consequences. Patience is required to see this puzzle through to its end, but the long game pays off, and there’s magic in seeing the whole unexpected picture. 

There’s also pleasure in how Atkinson seamlessly integrates historical figures and moments into her story. Nellie Coker is a fictionalized version of “Night Club Queen” Kate Meyrick, but the novel moves beyond its inspiration, allowing the imaginative possibilities to guide the tale. Other cultural and literary figures are bandied about in conversation, which firmly establishes the novel’s time and place.

The history and setting add nuance to Shrines of Gaiety, but Atkinson’s characters and their choices, curiosities and corruptions keep the story unfolding, making the resolution worth every second. 

CORRECTION 10/25/2022: An earlier version of this review listed the incorrect year for the flu pandemic, which occurred in 1918.

Mr. Wilder and Me by Jonathan Coe (Middle England, The Rotters’ Club) isn’t so much a work of fiction as a fictionalization of some true events. The book covers the period when Billy Wilder, one of the greatest screenwriters and directors in old Hollywood, helmed one of his final films, Fedora (1978), about a Greta Garbo-esque former movie star. (One thing about reading not-quite-novels is that they inevitably send you down rabbit holes on Wikipedia and IMDb.) The book is narrated by a Greco British woman named Calista Frangopoulou, who serves as an assistant during the shoot and, later, earns renown as a film-score composer herself. She doesn’t have a Wikipedia page, so perhaps we can assume she’s fictitious. 

When the book opens, middle-aged Calista is living with her husband and one of their twin daughters in London. Her daughter is going through a bit of a crisis, and this jogs Calista’s memory of a time when she was about her daughter’s age. In the late 1970s, Calista was carefree, so much so that she and her friend swanned into a swanky Hollywood restaurant to have dinner with the eminent director while wearing cutoff jeans, T-shirts and flip-flops. Calista even yawns in the middle of the meal, which Wilder finds charming and inspiring.

But Coe’s book isn’t so concerned with capturing a side of Hollywood or the process of moviemaking as it is with summing up a life and a fading era. The studio system under which Wilder and his peers have flourished is dying, and though he will live many more years after making Fedora, his glory days are over. But bitterness isn’t part of Wilder’s makeup, which is especially remarkable when you know that he barely escaped the Nazis, who slaughtered the rest of his family. Coe emphasizes the director’s kindness, humility and graciousness, such as in one of Calista’s most vivid memories, when Wilder allows himself to be persuaded by their driver to pause at a humble farm on their way to a film set; once there, they happily sample some of the farmer’s brie. 

Wilder may be famously hard on his actors, but he’s also hard on himself. Through middle-aged Calista’s perspective, we hear about him wanting to show up the “kids with beards,” like Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola, but when Spielberg directs Schindler’s List, a film Wilder wanted to make himself (this is true!), the older man acknowledges it as a masterpiece. 

Beautifully written and filled with compassion, humor and an abundance of knowledge about old Hollywood, Mr. Wilder and Me sheds light on lives that aren’t perfect but still well lived.

Long before she was the iconic Jackie Onassis, and more than a decade before she glamorized the role of first lady, Jacqueline Bouvier was a shy student at Vassar College. She’d grown up with extraordinary privilege—she was named “Queen Debutante” in 1947—yet she was already scarred: by her parents’ messy, public divorce; her mother’s rigid expectations; her stepfather’s varying fortunes; and her father’s depression. At 20, Jacqueline set off to Paris for a yearlong program. She lived with a genteel but threadbare French family in the 16th arrondissement, spoke only French, studied at the Sorbonne and Sciences Po, attended lectures and performances, and frequented Montparnasse cafes.  

Jacqueline’s transformative French year is the subject of Ann Mah’s Jacqueline in Paris. Narrated by an older Jackie, it’s a coming-of-age novel structured around the four quarters of the school year, beginning with Jacqueline’s six-week stay in Grenoble for immersion classes to prepare her for Paris. 

Once she gets acquainted with Paris and her French family, Jacqueline is quickly enchanted. Still, it’s only been a few years since World War II, so deprivation and shortages are widespread, coffee and sugar are still rationed, and political uncertainty lingers as the Cold War gets underway. And WWII had a serious effect on her host family: Her French mother, the Comtesse de Renty, worked underground in the French Resistance. Late in the war, an informant turned in the Comtesse and her husband, and both were sent to concentration camps, where her husband died.

Though Mah mainly remains true to the historical timeline, she adds intrigue and fizzy romance with a speculative connection to a young American writer, Jack Marquand. Jack is a Harvard man, handsome, talented, writing for the Atlantic and working on a book, though he also seems to carry a secret, or maybe several secrets. Jacqueline struggles to sort out what these secrets mean for him, and for her.

The novel’s narration is intimate, full of layered interiority about Jacqueline’s loneliness, her changing understanding of the world and her possible place within it. If Mah’s Jacqueline sometimes feels a little too perfect—sensitive to everyone around her, to Paris’ beauty and class details, and a little too witty for a 20-year-old—it’s a small quibble. The older Jackie’s narration also helps to make the younger more believable.

Jacqueline in Paris beautifully evokes postwar Paris. The details are exquisite (for instance, the lacy appearance of thinly sliced roast beef that’s been spoiled by worms), and Mah’s writing shines in its close attention to place and sensory details. In bringing Jacqueline Bouvier’s transformative Paris interlude to the page, Mah offers readers a lovely, immersive visit to a vanished city. 

CORRECTION: September 28, 2022
A previous version of this article misconstrued the amount of time between Jacqueline’s year abroad and her marriage to John F. Kennedy. They were married four years later, in 1953.