Lady Tan’s Circle of Women is an immersive tale about an elite woman who becomes a physician in spite of societal restrictions during China’s Ming Dynasty.

From a young age, Tan Yunxian understands her place in the world as a “proper Confucian woman”: “When a girl, obey your father; when a wife, obey your husband; when a widow, obey your son.” However, after Yunxian goes to live with her grandparents, her grandmother introduces her to hereditary medicine, especially related to women’s illnesses. Yunxian also meets beautiful Meiling, a midwife in training. Meiling becomes Yunxian’s only friend and gives her a glimpse of the world outside the confines of her privileged life. 

Despite Yunxian’s knowledge and desire to learn about medicine, she cannot escape gendered societal expectations. After getting married, her controlling and traditional mother-in-law bans her from helping the women in her new clan. She is also forbidden from seeing Meiling.

Lisa See’s spellbinding historical novel, inspired by Miscellaneous Records of a Female Doctor by the real-life Tan Yunxian, vividly depicts 15th-century China with artfully woven details, rich characters and descriptive language. See captures a world of propriety and cruelty as she ruminates on the disparity between the lives of men and women, and how women—no matter their class—are treated as possessions of the men around them. But through her strong-willed characters, See also emphasizes how women can act as the anchors of society.

Yunxian is immediately likable, with a palpable commitment to persevering amid struggles and taking care of both herself and the circle of women that depend on her. Yunxian describes the world around her—the practice of foot binding, the marriage of girls at a young age and the duties expected of women—with a balanced, objective tone, one befitting a physician who must observe and diagnose. Yunxian’s shrewdness, a reflection of her grandmother’s interpretation of a Chinese aphorism (“Be a hidden dragon. Do not act.”), helps her strike that delicate balance between conforming to a woman’s role and pursuing her personal goals. 

Poetic maxims about life are smoothly incorporated into the narrative, imbuing Lady Tan’s Circle of Women with an element of mysticism, while references to medicinal formulas and theories reflect the cultural beliefs of 15th-century China, many of which are still practiced today. For fans of historical fiction, this is an emotional and illuminating epic.

The Midnight News is a tense, atmospheric thriller that’s unlike any World War II novel you’ve read before. British author Jo Baker has written a number of novels, including A Country Road, a Tree, set in Paris in 1939, and The Body Lies, a psychological tale of a woman recovering from a physical assault. Baker’s latest combines elements of both these novels, focusing on its 20-year-old heroine, Charlotte Richmond, who is fending for herself in London during the Blitz but feeling increasingly wary of a male stranger who seems to be stalking her. 

As the novel opens, Charlotte’s beloved brother has been killed in the war, and she misses him terribly. Her mother is dead, she’s estranged from her father, sister and stepmother, and she’s supporting herself by working as a typist for the Ministry of Information. She lives in the attic of a walk-up apartment, from which she watches bombs drop over the city at night. Baker’s historical details convey the dreary dread that has taken over everyone’s life, especially Charlotte’s, during the Blitz, as bodies pile up, buildings fall down, and air raid sirens never seem to stop. 

It becomes apparent that Charlotte has mental health issues: As her godmother explains, she “did a spell in the loony bin a while ago.” Charlotte entertains suicidal ideations, especially after several people she’s close to die in air raids. In fact, she becomes suspicious that these women were actually killed in some other way, probably by the ominous man she keeps seeing in the streets. She also hears a chorus of voices in her head; they are the people she has lost, and they give her advice and even talk to one another, often in highly amusing ways. It’s a narrative choice that is hard to pull off, especially in a sustained fashion, but Baker does so with panache. 

To investigate the deaths, Charlotte enlists the help of a young man whose family runs an undertaking business. Tom has some physical challenges with his gait and one hand, and the war has made his university coursework uncertain. His family life is much less opulent than Charlotte’s was, and Baker explores these class differences, especially as the war exacerbates them. 

The plot grows more and more tense, even wild, with few hints as to how things will play out—whether a serial killer is on the loose, or whether Charlotte is simply out of step with reality. Throughout, however, Baker is firmly in control, and voila, she pulls it off, wrapping up plotlines in surprising ways while returning The Midnight News to a war story, a love story and a commentary on social mores that remains relevant today.

There should be a special word for when readers become so thoroughly engrossed in a book that they can hardly put it down—and are jolted, even bereft, when it comes to an end. Captivated comes close but doesn’t completely convey the experience of reading The Postcard from French writer and actor Anne Berest. Already an international bestseller, it’s a unique piece of autofiction that unfolds like a thriller while seamlessly addressing a number of hefty social issues past and present.

Like the author, the novel’s Anne Berest is the great-granddaughter of artist Francis Picabia and French Resistance fighter Gabriele Buffet-Picabia. But Anne knows little about her maternal grandmother Myriam except that she was Jewish and lost her family in concentration camps. The topic is rarely discussed, and Anne doesn’t think much about it until one day when her young daughter remarks, “They don’t like Jews very much at school.” 

Shaken to her core, Anne can hardly address the subject. Instead, she suddenly remembers a strange, anonymous postcard that her mother had received years earlier, in 2003. The front showed a photo of the Opéra Garnier in Paris; the back contained the names of Myriam’s parents, Ephraim and Emma, and siblings, Noémie and Jacques, all of whom died at Auschwitz in 1942. 

Anne becomes determined to find out who sent the postcard, though she’s uncertain whether the sender’s intentions were honorable or menacing, “waiting, as they had been for decades, patiently, for me to come looking for them.” She partners with her chain-smoking mother to investigate, hopping into her mother’s messy car, and little by little, their efforts pay off and details emerge, which Berest shares in fictionalized scenes, creating dialogue and details while sticking to the facts as closely as possible. As her mother says, “It’s incredible how much is still there in the archives, like an underground world, a parallel world, still alive. Like the embers of a fire . . . all you have to do is blow on them to rekindle the flame.”

The rekindling is unsettling, and Berest’s moving storytelling brings her ancestors’ story to life in dramatic, artful ways, often interspersing historical events with running discussions between mother and daughter. They uncover an epic, tragic tale that spans the globe, including Russia, Latvia, Poland, France, the United States and Palestine. Although Ephraim had taken note of the growing dangers to Jews in Europe, he was determined to become a French citizen, and in so doing, “He’d allowed himself to become inextricably entangled in a situation from which there was no escape, trapped by rising waters while he simply stood there and watched them rise.” 

As Anne and her mother explore their past, the author notices a number of coincidences and parallels to her own life while acknowledging the extent of the inherited trauma. “I carry within me,” she concludes, “inscribed in the very cells of my body, the memory of an experience of danger so violent that sometimes I think I really lived it myself, or that I’ll be forced to relive it one day.” Readers of The Postcard will be left with similar feelings and much to ponder, especially after these words from Anne’s mother: “Indifference is universal. Who are you indifferent toward today, right now? Ask yourself that. Which victims living in tents, or under overpasses, or in camps way outside the cities are your ‘invisible ones’?”