In Sister Mother Warrior, her second historical novel following the success of Island Queen, Vanessa Riley brings the Haitian revolution to life through the perspectives of two real-life women: one a soldier, the other the future empress of a fledgling nation.

Gaou Adbaraya Toya’s fighting spirit is forged in fire. She is 12 when her peaceful home in West Africa is destroyed by Dahomey warriors. A week earlier, the elders had conferred on Toya the “sanctified” status of being a grown woman, but the catastrophic loss of her village is the true turning point of her childhood, as she gains a terrible understanding: “The rumors must be true. The Dahomey sold their vanquished enemies to the white devils.” 

In the midst of all this chaos, Toya decides she will become a fighter. The likelihood of being sold into slavery motivates her to join the Dahomey people and serve the conquering ruler, King Tegbesu, as a member of a select group of female soldiers. But in a horrible twist of irony, Toya’s path leads her into enslavement in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. She eventually becomes a renowned healer with an unofficial protected status throughout the colony, a warrior who fights in the rebellion and the adoptive mother of a boy who will become one of the rebellion’s most vaunted leaders (and ultimately Haiti’s emperor), Jean-Jacques Dessalines.

The second revolutionary, Marie-Claire Bonheur (later Dessalines), lives a relatively privileged life in Saint-Domingue. She and her family occupy a specific place in the colony’s stratified society. Her father is a respected free Black man who works as a fisherman; her mother is an “affranchi,” or free person of color; and her grandfather is a “Grand Blanc,” or white elite plantation owner. Darker skinned than her mother and sister, 13-year-old Marie-Claire sacrifices her precarious status—and entwines her fate with Toya’s—when, rather than solidify her family’s standing by marrying a white man, she falls in love with an enslaved boy: Jean-Jacques Dessaline. Their enduring and imperfect love is a key throughline of the narrative, bringing softness and dimension to the story.

To her credit, Riley never shies away from gray areas when depicting these incredible public figures and events. Her heroes are fallible. Toya pledges (and maintains) her undying loyalty to a king who sold her brethren into slavery; she believes that it was his divine right to do so, even after she recognizes slavery for the “slow death” that it is. Jean-Jacques grows up to become a great man, but he’s also unpitying and vengeful as a leader, and in his personal life he’s unfaithful, repeatedly breaking Marie-Claire’s heart.

The complexity of Sister Mother Warrior suits this complicated, difficult history, and Riley is successful in portraying the roles of African people within a unique and racialized system they didn’t foresee without diminishing the reality of the unspeakable atrocities committed by Europeans. Fair warning, though: The story’s complexity is at times compounded by uneven writing, which can be dense and expository, choppy and impressionistic. Riley uses first-person perspectives to place readers in the heads of her lead characters, immersing us in their thoughts and feelings. It’s effective and engrossing, especially when there’s chaos roiling outside and within, but both the subject matter and Riley’s writing style make for challenging reading. At its most opaque, the narrative mirrors the unruliness of turbulent events.

Still, Sister Mother Warrior is captivating. I sank into this one, and it motivated me to learn more about a subject I have long avoided as a Black person descended from slavery in the former West Indies. I recommend others take the same leap.

To the 21st-century reader, Joan of Arc may feel faraway and quaint, like a figure in an ancient stained-glass window. And yet the martyr’s name calls up an array of familiar mythic images: a pious, perhaps delusional 15th-century French maiden visited by visions and voices, a young woman with a sword in her hand, in a time of endless war between France and England.

Katherine J. Chen’s second novel, Joan, leaves behind the pious maiden and her visions and voices. Chen’s reimagined Joan is hungry, earthy and scrappy—a natural fighter. What drives Joan isn’t the voice of God but the destruction of her village by brutal English soldiers, along with an intensely personal loss. The novel follows Joan’s trajectory from lowly peasant to confidant of Charles VII (the Dauphin and dispossessed heir to the French throne) to leader of the French army and sudden folk hero.

When we first meet Joan, she’s a child observing other children fight in her tiny village of Donrémy. Joan is brutalized by her physically abusive father, but she has the love of her elder sister, Catherine, and best friend, Hauviette, and an easy friendship with her uncle, Durand Laxart. Durand, “a thinker, a teller of stories, a wanderer,” teaches Joan about the larger world, equipping her for life beyond her village.

By 17, Joan is strong, taller than most men and a quick study. As word of her abilities spreads to the French court, Yolande of Aragon, the Dauphin’s mother-in-law, offers Joan a kind of patronage, dressing her in a man’s velvet doublet. “This suits you,” Yolande says. “One must wear the clothes for which one is built. And you must put on the mantle of God.” Thus attired, Joan sets out to meet the Dauphin and persuade him that she will lead an army to take back the city of Orléans.

Joan traces the woman’s quick rise and sudden fall, propelled by battles in which she shows almost supernatural powers. Chen’s often-gorgeous prose moves smoothly from Joan’s village to the luxurious, treacherous French court. Throughout, Joan’s musings on the hampered roles of women and peasants in a disorganized, beleaguered France are progressive yet still historically believable.

The novel features a large cast of characters, listed at the book’s opening, and occasionally I had to turn to the list to remind myself about a character. For readers who love Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy or Lauren Groff’s Matrix, Joan offers similar pleasures with its immediacy and somewhat contemporary tone. It’s an immersive evocation of a character whose name everyone knows, all these centuries later, but whom, perhaps, none of us knows at all.

Post-World War II London was a grim place, despite the Brits’ nominal victory: The skies seemed forever gray, rationing made life difficult, and rubble from the London Blitz needed to be cleared away. Still, some things persevered, like the monarchy and even quirky little bookstores. One such bookshop is the setting for Natalie Jenner’s captivating second novel, Bloomsbury Girls.

Something else that survived the war was unrepentant male chauvinism. It’s in just about every move made by Herbert Dutton, general manager of the century-old Bloomsbury Books. It is the reason Evie Stone is working at Bloomsbury Books instead of at Cambridge University, despite being one of the first women to earn a degree from that institution. It’s why Grace Perkins, Herbert’s secretary, has to rush home to make tea for her lousy layabout of a husband, and it’s what’s driving Vivien Lowry, who works in the store’s fiction department, out of her mind with rage.

Fortunately, the bookstore owner is a genuinely kind man despite his lofty status as an earl, and the head of the store’s science and naturalism department, Ash Ramaswamy, has a gentle demeanor as well. However, Ash is from India, so his mildness might be a defense mechanism against English racism, which is just as bad as English sexism. Ash and Evie strike up a sweet relationship, but in this world, men make the decisions, and women, as Evie says, “abide ’em.”

Until they don’t.

Jenner boldly mixes real history with her fictional creations, and readers who enjoy the “nonfiction novel” genre will find pleasure in parsing facts from embellishments. In particular, Evie’s great passion for cataloging books leads her to the rediscovery of one of the rarest books in the world, a science fiction novel titled The Mummy! This real-life prescient work was published in 1827 by 17-year-old Jane Webb, who went on to write more anodyne books on gardening. The Mummy! might be the way out for the downtrodden women of Bloomsbury Books. It might even be a vehicle for revenge.

Jenner, the bestselling author of The Jane Austen Society, draws readers into her tale with a genial, matter-of-fact style that’s exactly what’s expected for a novel about a humble London bookstore. Each chapter begins with one of Herbert’s many ridiculous rules, most of which are broken over the course of the book. But Bloomsbury Girls’ surface coziness puts the tumult of its characters in relief, giving the novel unexpected depth and complexity.

The undeniable warmth that permeates Kim Michele Richardson’s fiction is rooted in a love for her home state of Kentucky, her characters and, it seems, the art of writing itself. Her narratives are immersive exercises in character development and world building that are wholly capable of enveloping readers, pulling us deeper with each page until we are happily lost.

The Book Woman’s Daughter, Richardson’s companion novel to The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek, does this from the very beginning, whether you’ve read the original novel or not. Through the eyes of Honey Lovett, daughter of legendary blue-skinned “Book Woman” Cussy Mary Carter, Richardson tells a rewarding story of determination and hope set in the Kentucky woods of a bygone era.

In 1953, Honey’s mother and father are imprisoned for miscegenation, and the 16-year-old girl is left to scrape by on her own, running from the law while attempting to build a life for herself with the few resources she has left. She and her trusty mule, Junia, take up Cussy’s former route as a packhorse librarian, and in doing so, Honey not only honors her mother’s legacy but also begins to carve a path for herself through a world that continually pushes women aside. Honey discovers that her community’s thirst for knowledge is vast, often dangerous and full of big questions she’d never expected to ask.

Throughout The Book Woman’s Daughter, Richardson pushes Honey forward into new states of evolution, desire, grit and spirit while constructing a beautiful vision of 1950s Appalachia in all its natural splendor and complicated humanity. Honey starts out as someone who knows where she belongs, but as she begins to encounter setbacks and challenges, her story transforms into a meditation on womanhood, literature, resilience and freedom. It’s a spellbinding tale.

Like a tower of gifts waiting to be unwrapped, Trust offers a multitude of rewards to be discovered and enjoyed, its sharp observations so finely layered as to demand an immediate rereading.

The second novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Hernan Diaz (In the Distance), Trust consists of four distinct but related parts. Like Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life or the Netflix series “Russian Doll,” each section contains a compelling perspective that builds upon the one that came before, beginning with a 124-page novel titled Bonds by Harold Vanner. Bonds tells the story of financial tycoon Benjamin Rask, a poor little rich boy who grows up to make a killing in the stock market in the 1920s, and his gifted but unstable wife, Helen. Their biographical tale unfolds in engaging period prose that’s reminiscent of Henry James and Edith Wharton.

Next comes 60-odd pages of an unfinished memoir by Andrew Bevel, the magnate upon whom Bonds is based. Bevel wants to set the record straight, emphasizing his belief that his accumulation of wealth has been very much for the public good. He also wants to put a stop to the speculation that his days of financial wizardry have ended. And finally, Bevel wants to carefully curate the image of his late wife Mildred, a generous philanthropist whom he insists was not mentally ill, as portrayed in Vanner’s novel.

After a slow, steady build, Trust shifts into high-octane gear in part three, an engrossing memoir by noted journalist Ida Partenzan. The daughter of an anarchist Italian immigrant, Ida was hired by Bevel to take dictation and help him craft the memoir of section two—a job that launched her writing career. Now in the 1980s, as Ida turns 70, the Bevel House has become a museum, and she begins to explore the mansion and reconsider her role there.

Read more: Hernan Diaz investigates the joys and mysteries of the framed narrative.

Ida’s memoir offers riveting details about the creation of Bevel’s autobiography as well as her impoverished background, which she portrays in stark contrast to the “cool rush of luxury” that surrounds her employer. During her time in Bevel’s employ, Ida felt “as if I were a displaced earthling, alone in a different world—a more expensive one that also thought itself better.” Her memoir is also a quest for the truth about Mildred, and it reads like a detective story, heightened with moments of potential danger. As she ponders the way she and Bevel characterized Mildred, she writes, “I cringe at the trivial scenes I made up for her. . . . He forced her into the stereotype of ill-fated heroines throughout history made to offer the spectacle of her own ruin. Put her in her place.”

If this series of interconnected narratives already sounds complicated, don’t worry: Each section flows easily into the next in Diaz’s supremely skilled hands, with increasing momentum and intrigue. Throughout, he examines the wide disparities between rich and poor, truth and fiction, and the insidious ways in which these divides have long been crafted. The fourth and final section, pages from Mildred’s diary, contains a startling twist to this literary feast—a wonderfully satisfying end to Diaz’s beautifully composed masterpiece.

In a note at the end of her masterful second novel, Vanessa Hua (A River of Stars) writes that “fiction flourishes where the official record ends.” Imagination fills in the details.

Forbidden City, the story of an impoverished peasant girl caught up in the tumult of Chairman Mao Tse-tung’s China, comes to life through the fullness of Hua’s imagination. In 1965, the novel’s narrator, Mei Xiang, is approaching 16 years old when a government official ventures into the countryside in search of young girls to join the chairman’s dance troupe.

Mei is not the prettiest girl or the best dancer in her desperately poor, rural town, but she is the smartest, wiliest and most ambitious, with dreams of becoming a revolutionary icon. She blackmails the town headman and is soon ensconced in the Lake Palaces, Mao’s residence in Peking, along with other comely young dancers recruited from across China.

Mei seizes the attention of the 72-year-old chairman with her aggressive intelligence and peasant wisdom. She becomes his confidant and relishes her special status. Mao teaches her to swim. He has an interest in ballroom dancing, foreign music and books. He is sometimes funny and appreciates her jokes. Except for the sex, she enjoys his company.

Mao also falls into fugue states. Mei witnesses his impassive lack of empathy for others and his depression about his semi-retirement. For a while, Mei believes she is cunning enough to avoid losing his interest. His affection for her incites envy from the other girls and concern from Madame Mao, his wife.

Hua brilliantly conveys the emotional and physical reverberations of the rivalries among the girls, who are more vulnerable and less worldly than they understand. Similarly, Hua keenly portrays the discord among Mao’s underlings, who fear, adore or loathe him. It is apparent that, soon enough, shivers of turmoil will burst forth in the brutal Cultural Revolution.

For her part, Mei eagerly participates in Mao’s plan to humiliate an important political rival, and this becomes the slow-burning match that ignites the national conflagration. It is Mei’s highest moment and just two steps away from her lowest.

By its end, Forbidden City has brought the reader into the beating heart of human history. It is literary historical fiction at its finest.