There is no institution in the United States more powerful, more mysterious, more impenetrable than the Supreme Court. It’s rare when we get to see the nine sitting justices as mere mortals—whether in moments of horror and disappointment, such as the sexual misconduct case against Brett Kavanaugh, or in moments of levity, as when Ruth Bader Ginsburg dozed off during the 2015 State of the Union.

In Elizabeth L. Silver’s engrossing and thought-provoking novel The Majority, we meet Justice Sylvia Olin Bernstein, aka “the Contemptuous S.O.B.” A flinty and aging justice, she decides it’s time to tell her life story—messy relationships, heartbreak and all. While The Majority is a clear homage to Ginsburg, Silver (The Execution of Noa P. Singleton) paints a full portrait of Sylvia, whose life unfolds during some of the most consequential events in American history. 

Sylvia’s mother dies when she is young, leaving her in a loving but bleak home in New York with her devout Jewish father and a cousin who fled the Nazis after her entire family was killed. Sylvia gets her chance to move on when she’s one of only nine women admitted in 1959 to Harvard Law School. With her vast intelligence and force of will, Sylvia ascends to the highest levels of the United States legal system.

As is so often the case for trailblazers, her success comes with significant sacrifice, both personally and professionally. When she takes on a landmark case involving a woman who lost her job when she became pregnant, Sylvia realizes she has been preparing for this case for most of her life. “My mother told me when I was twelve years old that we—women—were close to being the larger group in America,” she tells the plaintiff. “Well, now women are the majority, and yet we hold almost no power at all. In some small way, perhaps this is a slight chiseling away at that. And if successful, it’s a legacy you can pass on to more than [your child]. It’s a legacy to pass on to an entire country.”

The Majority is more than an entertaining read, although it is certainly that. It’s a profound contemplation of how women are treated by the law and how they administer the law. The Contemptuous S.O.B. is both a brilliant jurist and an all-too-human woman fighting against a system stacked against her. 

Any new novel by the acclaimed British writer Zadie Smith (Swing Time) is cause for celebration, but her first foray into historical fiction will garner fresh admirers with its detailed 19th-century narrative, while also satisfying fans who have long enjoyed her on-target observations and richly drawn characters.

Witty and incisive, The Fraud is based on actual events in Victorian England surrounding the Tichborne trial, in which a lowly butcher claimed to be the heir to a wealthy English family. The case quickly divided British citizens over the very notions of truth and entitlement.

Scottish housekeeper Eliza Touchet is cousin and employee of William Ainsworth, a prolific novelist whose books once outsold Charles Dickens’ but who, by 1868, is wallowing in obscurity. William recently married a housemaid named Sarah Wells, who is obsessed with the man claiming to be Sir Tichborne, inheritor of a family fortune who reportedly drowned in a shipwreck. Quite likely a local butcher from East London, the “Claimant,” as he is called, is passionately defended by many working-class Londoners who regard him as a true man of the people being treated poorly by the elite.

Eliza’s interest in the trial is piqued by Andrew Bogle, who was formerly enslaved by the Tichborne family in Jamaica and is called to testify. A Catholic and an abolitionist (and the secret lover of William’s first wife), Eliza relates to Andrew as a fellow outsider, although she is often unable to see beyond her privilege.

Smith writes eloquent, powerful and often quite humorous novels with social issues at the fore, and The Fraud is no exception. As with Lauren Groff’s Matrix or Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait, the novel’s firm grounding in the past offers a rich reflection of the present—and the ways race and class impact our understanding of ourselves and our complicated history.

After Matrix, her vivid feminist novel starring a medieval nun, Lauren Groff returns with another historical novel, The Vaster Wilds, about a young Colonial-era woman’s journey out of a sick and starving Jamestown, Virginia.

As the novel opens, the girl (the narrative refers to this teenage main character only as “the girl”) has fled the Jamestown fort for the wilderness, aiming north to find a French colony that she’s heard about. She’s managed to steal a few key items—an ax, a pewter cup, two coverlets, leather boots, gloves—and now she runs through the late-winter night, aware of danger from wild animals, the Jamestown men sent out to find her and “the people of this place,” her phrase for Native Americans.

The novel’s omniscient narration recounts the girl’s journey in language that’s by turns earthy and visceral (she suffers repeated bouts of “hot liquid shits” after eating whatever she can gather), and poetic and visionary. Groff closely follows the girl’s intrepid, remarkable efforts to stay alive—building fires, hunting for food, creating makeshift shelters. As the girl travels, she remembers scraps of her past: her childhood in the London poorhouse where she was called Lamentations; the years with her wealthy mistress, who named her Zed; the hair-raising voyage across the Atlantic Ocean; and days spent with the mistress’s mentally disabled little daughter, Bess, the one person who ever loved and was loved by the girl. The girl is illiterate, but she knows her Bible, and her existential questions about the world run deep as she walks and ponders. The narration also lets us in on the stories of the few people the girl passes, like a hermit who fled his colony years before, and two Native American girls.

The Vaster Wilds is propelled by the girl’s struggle to survive, but also by her interiority and what her memories reveal about her previous life in London and that dreadful year in the Jamestown colony. Groff romanticizes neither English colonists nor Native Americans, and the brutality that the girl remembers and encounters can make for hard reading. But there’s also natural beauty at almost every turn, and the novel’s descriptions of rivers, ice storms, waterfalls and vistas are gorgeous and haunting, sometimes almost hallucinatory.

Though brief (272 pages), The Vaster Wilds is a layered, dense novel, one that can be read as an allegory about the follies of the American experiment and humans’ planetary depredations. While it’s often a dark story with only slivers of hope, Groff’s inimitable style and language makes it a memorable, immersive reading experience.

With novels like The Wonder, The Pull of the Stars and Haven, Emma Donoghue has proven herself a masterful storyteller of historical worlds populated with deeply imagined characters. Though the universes she creates seem like they could expand infinitely, she builds small, confined spaces at the center from which grow rich possibilities. This is all especially true of her latest biographical novel, Learned by Heart, a story of risk, love and two young women discovering themselves by way of each other.

In 19th-century York, England, Eliza Raine is an orphan heiress living at an all-girls boarding school. When Anne Lister becomes her roommate, Eliza’s world shifts—and along with it, her understanding of herself and who she might become. The story moves between the year they meet at school and a series of letters that Eliza writes to Anne some years later. In these shifts, the reader witnesses the ways that the past shapes and haunts the present, that stories are made and unmade, and that love surprises and overwhelms.

The language here—of deep friendship and longing, text and subtext—is captivating. Sentences sing, and details shine. Donoghue has a remarkable ability to hold you in a moment, allowing you to see as a character does, knowing the questions each breath contains. Throughout, she keeps the narrative intimate while still allowing for commentary on wider considerations of societal constraints and expectations.

After reading this wonderful story with its countless discoveries, perhaps the greatest surprise of all is in the author’s note, in which Donoghue shares how she meticulously researched and reimagined this true tale. While Anne Lister’s story has been brought into our contemporary awareness, most recently through the HBO series “Gentleman Jack,” Eliza Raine’s story—and their story together—has not. Donoghue investigated their personal histories for years, focusing on Lister’s secret journal and Raine’s letters (the ones she was able to find). This rich saga gets its bold and dazzling moment at last.

There’s a bit of the trickster in William Boyd’s delightfully engrossing 17th novel, The Romantic, which purports to be the biography of a real man named Cashel Greville Ross (1799–1882), drawn from an oddment of journals, letters, sketches and maps (some of them reproduced herein). With a wink, Boyd writes in his author’s note that Cashel’s story is best told as fiction.

And what a story it is! Orphaned as an infant when his parents’ ship sank, Cashel is raised by his loving aunt, a governess in County Cork, Ireland. He leads a downstairs childhood until the revelation of his true parentage so upsets him that he runs away from home. At 15, he becomes a drummer boy and is gravely wounded in the Battle of Waterloo. That experience gives Cashel cachet with the infamous Romantic poet and wannabe soldier Lord Byron, with whom Cashel strikes up a friendship some years later in Italy, along with Percy and Mary Shelley. The sharp-eyed chapters about this poetical crowd—their privilege, dalliances and tragedies—are some of the novel’s greatest pleasures.

When the self-regarding Byron throws a party for Cashel (a fete that turns out to be a celebration for Byron himself), Cashel meets Contessa Raphaella Rezzo. They share a this-is-the-one moment, but unfortunately, she is married to a wealthy man almost 50 years her senior. With the help of a conniving servant, Cashel and Raphaella carry on an affair, which is eventually brought up short by a lie Cashel is foolish enough to believe. For him, she is the touchstone of love, but he will not see Raphaella again for 40 years. Cashel, it turns out, is unlucky in love but mostly fortunate in adventure.

Cashel goes on to live a Zelig-like existence, standing at the edges or unseen in the midst of historical moments. A sprightly comic element recurs: For every success, there is a disaster, and after every disaster, Cashel eventually lands upright. When Cashel writes two bestsellers—a travel book and an anonymous roman a clef—his publisher steals his royalties. Cashel ends up in debtor’s prison, out of which grows an idea to found a Utopian colony in Massachusetts. And so it goes.

Cashel’s life spans most of the 19th century, and Boyd is both interested in and very knowledgeable about the period. Humming beneath the exuberant plot are fascinating details ranging from the life of a military drummer boy to the class privileges available in debtor’s prison. Issues of money, power and privilege also reverberate. And of course there is Cashel, a good-hearted innocent whose luck and haplessness make The Romantic such an enjoyable read.