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Our 5 favorite witches from literature

Feature by BookPage staff

Throughout history, female healers have been cast out, feared and labeled as witches, even though their work in herbalism and midwifery helped shape medicine as we know it today. In fiction, the witch—that wise, rebellious female character—can be even more disruptive, her healing gifts even more supernaturally powerful.

Nettle & Bone 

T. Kingfisher’s dark (but still extremely funny) fantasy novel is full of female characters who carve out power for themselves: protagonist Princess Marra, who cherishes the peace of her convent home; the Sister Apothecary at Marra’s convent; and two frighteningly powerful fairy godmothers. But the only witch of the bunch is the dust-wife, and folks, she is an icon. A necromancer who tends a graveyard, the dust-wife can talk to the dead, keeps a demon-possessed chicken as a familiar, and agrees to help kill Marra’s sister’s abusive husband even though she believes their quest will fail—because wicked men should be held accountable. Despite her ruthlessly realistic view of the world, the dust-wife values the optimism of other characters, even Marra’s fairy godmother, Agnes, a sweet older dear who gives only good health as a blessing and frets over baby chicks. The dust-wife and Agnes bicker their way to becoming ride-or-die besties, and I would read an entire series about their adventures. 

—Savanna, Associate Editor

Little Witch Hazel

If you look up charming in the dictionary, I’m pretty sure you’ll find the entry illustrated with a portrait of the titular hero of Phoebe Wahl’s delightful picture book, Little Witch Hazel. In four short tales—one for each season of the year—Wahl captures the close-knit forest community to which Little Witch Hazel belongs. In “The Blizzard,” we see Little Witch Hazel make her rounds, visiting a chipmunk with a toothache, a mole with an injured paw and Mrs. Rabbit and her four new kits. Wahl also conveys how the residents of Mosswood Forest care for Little Witch Hazel: Her friends Wendell and Nadine encourage her to take a much-needed break from her errands on an idyllic summer day, and later in the year, Otis the owl rescues her from a fierce snowstorm. With a classical tone, Wahl offers a still-revolutionary portrayal of a female healer and the difference she makes in her community.

—Stephanie, Associate Editor

Year of Wonders

Geraldine Brooks’ Year of Wonders fictionalizes the true story of a small English village that was nearly overcome by the bubonic plague in 1665. When the local rector convinces the town to close their gate to prevent the plague’s spread, young widow Anna Frith finds herself quarantined with a few hundred of her neighbors, watching their numbers dwindle over the course of an extraordinary year. Among those neighbors are Mem and Anys Gowdie, an aunt and niece whose extensive knowledge of herblore gets them accused of, then executed for, witchcraft. When Anna visits the Gowdies’ abandoned house shortly after, she realizes that all of their dried herbs and foraged weeds, their tinctures and potions—the very things that had gotten them killed—are what had kept the pair from catching the Black Death before their violent ends. As Anna learns the Gowdies’ trade and brings their healing knowledge to the rest of the town, the novel becomes a moving portrait of women’s community-centered heroism in the face of unjust persecution.

—Christy, Associate Editor

A Discovery of Witches

Tenured professor Diana Bishop is a brilliant woman—a formidable entity in her own right—but she is also a witch with impressive magical powers. The hero of Deborah Harkness’ bestselling All Souls trilogy turned away from the magical community after her parents’ untimely death, swearing off her family legacy and instead creating a name for herself in academia. But her worlds crash together when she discovers a long-lost enchanted manuscript, which awakens an enormous power within her. Diana is the first person to have seen the manuscript in 150 years, and suddenly the whole magical community is after her. A centuries-old vampire named Matthew Clairmont becomes her protector as she navigates a dangerous world that she had purposely avoided for most of her life. Hunted for her power and knowledge, Diana realizes that she can no longer hide from her destiny. She must embrace her power, her magical legacy and herself—her whole self.

—Meagan, Brand & Production Designer

Red Clocks

Human interdependence is at the heart of Leni Zumas’ 2018 novel, which shifts among the stories of four adult women and one girl, all living in a small Oregon fishing town. But this is no gentle sisterhood novel, as Red Clocks finds female characters pitted against one another in an America where reproductive freedoms have been severely limited and single-parent adoption is outlawed. Gin Percival, a reclusive healer who’s feared as a witch by superstitious fishermen, lives firmly outside the expectations placed on women: She’s messy and smells like onions, prefers animals over people and is “uninterested in being pleasing to other persons.” She also provides herbal remedies and menstrual care for the women who visit her, which means she’s operating outside the law. Through Gin’s story, which culminates in her arrest and subsequent trial, Zumas draws a connection between the 17th-century practice of blaming women for any misfortune and our contemporary society’s concern with women who buck social norms and don’t care one bit what you think about it.

—Cat, Deputy Editor

All hail the menders, rebel healers and witchy women.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Shrines of Gaiety

Review by Freya Sachs

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.

Patience is required to see Kate Atkinson's latest puzzle through to its end, but the long game pays off, and there's magic in seeing the whole unexpected picture.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Mr. Wilder and Me

Review by Arlene McKanic

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.

In Mr. Wilder and Me, bitterness isn't part of Billy Wilder's makeup, as Jonathan Coe emphasizes the director's kindness and humility.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Jacqueline in Paris

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

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. 

Ann Mah
Read more: Author Ann Mah takes us to Jackie’s 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.

In bringing Jacqueline Bouvier's transformative Paris interlude to the page, Ann Mah offers readers a lovely, immersive visit to a vanished city.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Following an American icon on her year abroad

Behind the Book by Ann Mah

In 2019, Ann Mah published an article in the New York Times about 20-year-old Jacqueline Bouvier’s year in Paris as a college junior. As Mah traced Jacqueline’s days up and down the streets of Paris and into its museums and cafes, she revealed a new side of both the American icon and the postwar city. The article was the inspiration for Jacqueline in Paris, Mah’s novel about this formative year.

Mah shares a closer look at the process of fictionalizing this story—and the incredible moment when Jacqueline’s own voice began to come through.

A couple of years ago in Paris, I walked by a stately art nouveau building in the 16th arrondissement. On the wall hung a plaque that proclaimed: “Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis née Lee-Bouvier (1929–1994), widow of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th president of the United States of America, lived in this building as a student from 1949 to 1950.” It stopped me in my tracks.

By this point I’d lived in Paris off and on for a few years, and I had a pretty good sense of the famous Americans who had lived in and loved the City of Light—but I hadn’t realized they included the former first lady. As I gazed at the apartment building, which was large and elegant, with a limestone facade that blended seamlessly with its neighbors, I tried to imagine her as a student, 20 years old, pushing open the heavy wooden front door, buying a newspaper at the corner kiosk, dashing down the steps of the metro. Suddenly I was overcome with a desire to know more about this young woman who had decided to study in France only five years after World War II. What had drawn her to Paris? With whom—and how—did she live? And how had her junior year abroad affected the rest of her life, if at all?  

I began writing a travel article, retracing Jacqueline’s footsteps in Paris. At the library, I checked out a stack of biographies, scouring them for details about her year abroad, which were few and far between. I re-created some of her adventures: sipping cocktails at the Ritz Bar, riding horses in the Bois de Boulogne and visiting Reid Hall, the Parisian center of American study abroad since the 1920s. 

“The bright, adventurous young woman I had gleaned through snippets had her own voice, and in this novel I have tried to let her speak.”

I interviewed Jacqueline’s French host sister, Claude du Granrut, who spoke of the bitter cold of the winter of 1950, describing the earmuffs, scarves and sweaters they wore at home to keep warm. Their rambling apartment lacked heat: “It was broken,” she said. “Jacqueline put on gloves to study. I remember her always being covered up.” She told me that she and Jacqueline never spoke a word of English together, which I found especially touching, because it illustrated how deeply Jacqueline cared about learning the French language. 

In du Granrut’s memoir, Le piano et le violoncelle, I read more about her mother (and Jacqueline’s host mother), the Comtesse de Renty. She and her husband had been Resistance spies during the war; in the final days before the liberation of Paris, they were captured and sent to concentration camps, where her husband died. The war left her widowed and impoverished, with two daughters and a grandson to support, and as a result she had taken in boarders, including Jacqueline and two other girls studying abroad through Smith College. 

Piecing together these details of Jacqueline’s time in France felt both thrilling and painstaking. And yet my original questions about her still lingered. It occurred to me that the story of Jacqueline’s junior year abroad in Paris reached far beyond the scope of a travel article. How could I learn more? Famously guarded, Jacqueline did not grant many interviews, and most of her personal letters remain private. As a result, her story has largely been told through the memories and observations of others. But the bright, adventurous young woman I had gleaned through snippets had her own voice, and in this novel I have tried to let her speak.

At first I heard her voice like a whisper, perhaps her famous little half-whisper. But after listening to the French radio interviews she gave as first lady—in which she spoke fluent French with clear precision—I realized she must have deployed that girlish tone as a guise, a protective cloak. Perhaps such subterfuge was necessary for a young woman of her milieu, one socially poised but financially precarious, dependent on her looks, charm and ability to please. Her self-assured voice in French challenged the caricature of Mrs. John F. Kennedy and allowed me to glimpse a quick, clever side of her. I couldn’t forget it, and in the end it guided me, even in moments of doubt and frustration, until Jacqueline seemed to be talking to me directly. 

Jacqueline in Paris
Read our review of ‘Jacqueline in Paris.’

Much of this book was written during the early days of the pandemic, which meant I couldn’t visit France—my family and I barely left home—but every afternoon I retreated to my car, which was parked in the underground garage of my apartment building, opened my laptop and traveled to Paris. I tagged along with Jacqueline to museums and jazz nightclubs, country chateaux and cafes, and on long brisk walks through narrow cobblestone streets, until history started coming to life on the page and in my senses. I smelled the heavy smoke of her cigarettes, swallowed the icy brine of a raw oyster at Christmas, soaked up the delicate warmth of an early spring day in the Jardin du Luxembourg. I wept with her, too, when she left Paris and came to accept that she would never live there again.

Yes, Jacqueline left France in the end. I don’t think that’s a spoiler, right? Most of us are familiar with the triumph and tragedy of the rest of her life, playing out as it did upon a global stage and recorded in history. But it was her year in Paris, the academic year of 1949 to 1950, that she called ‘the high point in my life,’ and it has been an honor and a privilege to accompany her there and allow her voice to guide this story. I don’t pretend to know the woman who was Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, but I do feel a kinship with the 20-year-old American student in Paris named Jacqueline—and she is young, and happy, and carefree.

Walk the streets of postwar Paris with travel writer and novelist Ann Mah, whose new book reveals a transformative year in the life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
FictionHistorical FictionFamily Drama

A new groove for Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

Interview by Langston Collin Wilkins

Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s third novel, On the Rooftop, is a welcome disruption, both to literary trends and in her own publishing career. In a time of immense social upheaval, when many African American writers are foregrounding issues of race, economics and oppression in their books, Sexton chose to write a novel that centers on Black ambition and resiliency.

“With [my previous two novels], it felt like most of my interviews were sociological conversations,” Sexton says from her California home, “but I wanted to be talking about the work.” So for On the Rooftop, she didn’t have a rigid agenda. Instead, her novel emphasizes “the endurance and the joy of a community . . . while also drawing attention to the history of the issues and the fact that they still continue to exist.”

Set in 1950s San Francisco, On the Rooftop focuses on the multifaceted yet endearing Vivian, who has complicated relationships with her three daughters, Ruth, Esther and Chloe. The widowed Vivian dreams of stardom for her musically gifted daughters, who sing together as the Salvations. The young women are popular performers at a local spot called the Champagne Supper Club, and Vivian has hooked the attention of an enigmatic talent manager. 

However, just as the Salvations are on the cusp of fame, Vivian’s aspirations are challenged by personal trauma and their neighborhood’s changing landscape. Her daughters are also beginning to prioritize their own desires over their mother’s prescribed plan. Loosely inspired by Fiddler on the Roof and told from multiple perspectives, On the Rooftop is a masterful examination of family and community that celebrates the legacy of Black dreams and determination.   

“The music really exemplified the endurance of this community. They came here with so much optimism.”

Readers of Sexton’s previous historical novels will recognize On the Rooftop‘s exploration of the often-complex relationships between mothers and daughters. “I can’t escape it,” Sexton says. “There is just so much to be mined. They are such primal relationships, and even the best ones are fraught.” 

In the novel, Sexton describes Vivian’s feelings about motherhood with care and nuance, successfully avoiding tropes and instead creating a character who embodies very specific personal and cultural dynamics. Vivian is a Louisiana transplant who lost her husband, Ellis, long ago, and whose own musical dreams were stunted by her difficult life. This is not, however, your typical parent-living-through-their-child story. “I feel like Vivian has some challenges around when to let go, but I think she ultimately does learn to do so,” Sexton says. “At her best level, she has learned when it’s time to step aside, and I think that’s what parenting is—surrendering to the child’s metamorphosis into an adult.”

The distinct relationships between Vivian and each of her daughters reflect their divergent personalities, histories and ambitions. Vivian puts much of her faith in Ruth—the eldest, the quintessential rock, the de facto leader of the sisters. Ruth has a strained relationship with middle sister Esther, who dreams of making an impact but has conflicting ideas about how to do so. Chloe, the youngest daughter, yearns for her mother, sisters and community to recognize her gifts. 

Sexton notes that despite their differences, all four women are ultimately searching for the same thing: security. “I love that through each of the girls, you get a different window into what security means,” she says. “The goal is for all of them to feel safe in their own separate worlds.” 

On the Rooftop book cover
Read our starred review of ‘On the Rooftop.’

The past is ever-present for each of them, and nodes of memory function as creative forces, influencing the women as they navigate generational trauma, interpersonal violence and grief. Vivian, for example, grapples with recollections from her Louisiana homeland and the aftermath of Ellis’ death. As Sexton notes, these memories catalyze Vivian’s goals for her daughters, her self-esteem and her ability to love again. 

“I feel like honoring the memories that you hold is a symbol for the entire book,” she says. “For Vivian . . . she has these painful memories of segregation in the South, of humiliation in the South and of her father’s tragic death in the South. She can’t forget those memories. She can’t erase them, and she can’t bury them. She has to somehow continue to hold those memories and almost transform them into something educational for herself in order to allow this new world to enter into her space.”

Vivian’s memories were also an important factor in Sexton’s writing process. After setting her previous two novels in her hometown of New Orleans, the author wanted to explore the Bay Area, her home of 15 years. The former lawyer, who has a degree in creative writing from Dartmouth College, was cautious, however, feeling that she had yet to possess the cultural authority to imagine her adopted home. “It made sense to me to make Vivian someone who had been born in Louisiana, so we were both coming from the same place,” Sexton says. “She was basically a visitor. Her lens and my lens are not any different.”

During the 1950s, San Francisco’s Fillmore District was considered the “Harlem of the West,” a nod to its similarity to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s. The Fillmore’s Black community began to emerge during what is known as the Great Migration, a national trend of northern and western movement as many African Americans left the South in search of new residential and occupational opportunities and to escape the horrors of Jim Crow. The predominantly Black neighborhood became the center of San Francisco’s vibrant jazz scene, where transcendent legends collaborated with local musicians in the many clubs that lined the streets. 

 “Our ancestors have done it, and our descendants will do it. We’re not all alone in this.”

Sexton has a personal connection to the Great Migration. Similar to her characters, members of her own family moved from Louisiana to California in the 1940s and ’50s. When Sexton arrived in the area decades later, these family members welcomed her with open arms, allowing her to immediately feel a sense of community in her new home. She inscribes this sentiment into On the Rooftop. 

“I love that they brought Louisiana to the Bay Area,” Sexton says, “and that they created this mini-community that was an echo of their own that they had left back home, [where] they could access all of the sources of comfort. . . . They founded the same churches that they would have gone to back home.”

In the novel, Vivian and her daughters dream of musical stardom as a way to secure liberty in the face of racial and economic oppression, and as the Salvations channel their existential angst into jazz and blues numbers performed at Black-owned Fillmore clubs, they share stages with iconic musicians such as Dinah Washington and Lena Horne. While brief, these cameos ground the story in very real historical dynamics. From blues to jazz to gospel and hip hop, music has been the lifeblood of Black people in America, conveying emotion, building community and offering pathways to freedom. Music feels like its own character in On the Rooftop, a vibrant entity that seems to breathe, occupy space and impact social activity.

Margaret Wilkerson Sexton author photo
Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, author of ‘On the Rooftop’

“Setting [On the Rooftop] in the jazz era really enlivens the book,” Sexton says. “The music really exemplified the endurance of this community. They came here with so much optimism and so much hope, you know, to work in the shipyards. They had more money than they ever had before. They re-created this community so it felt like home. And this musical scene was part of this.”

In the book, the community’s camaraderie and stability are undermined by white businessmen who begin buying up property in the area. For these businessmen and their partners in government, the Fillmore was a blight, despite being a strong Black residential and business base. Some property owners sold out for a quick windfall, while others resisted until the seemingly benevolent offers turned into harassment. Some continued to fight, as Esther does in the novel.

This process, known as “urban renewal,” affected African American communities across the country in the 1950s and ’60s and is an antecedent to present-day gentrification. While some Black neighborhoods were wiped out through this process, others were able to persist and still exist in some form. With On the Rooftop, Sexton hoped to present a portrait of community resiliency for contemporary neighborhoods resisting gentrification. 

“I want people to be aware of the fact that it’s been around for a long time and that it continues,” Sexton says. “We need to start having conversations, and we need to start creating policies that preempt it, right, that abolish it. And I want people to experience the joy and the endurance of a community that has undergone it and still continued to flourish.” 

Sexton’s work entertains and inspires at the same time, and with On the Rooftop, she urges us to find comfort in the triumphs of our past. “I hope that it will relay the security of knowing that we’re not all alone in this,” she says. “Our ancestors have done it, and our descendants will do it. We’re not all alone in this. We kind of have a blueprint for how to fix it and how to heal ourselves in the process.”

Photos of Margaret Wilkerson Sexton by Smeeta Mahanti

In the third novel from the author of A Kind of Freedom and The Revisioners, the sweetest song comes from the heart of San Francisco's 1950s jazz scene.
FictionInspirational FictionHistorical Fiction

Two inspirational novels seek to warm readers’ hearts

Feature by Edith Kanyagia

From the Greek isle of Corfu to Washington’s Whidbey Island, hope can always be found in friendship.

★ Where the Wandering Ends

The latest novel from bestselling author and three-time Emmy Award-winning producer and journalist Yvette Manessis Corporon is a work of incredible depth, brimming with turmoil, compassion and remarkable historical detail.

Set on the gorgeous Greek island of Corfu, Where the Wandering Ends is a multigenerational, decades-spanning story that begins in 1946, when Greece appears to be on the verge of civil war. Despite the brewing unrest, life in Katerina’s village of Pelekito remains calm. She even has the opportunity to go to school, unlike provincial girls in older generations. 

As the conflict between communists and monarchists escalates, the war eventually reaches Pelekito, and the villagers are forced to flee. Katerina is separated from her best friend, Marco, but they both promise to someday return.

Corporon’s characters are indelible and authentic. Katerina’s father, Laki, is horrified by the divisions in his country: “Greek killing Greek. Cousin killing cousin. Brother killing brother. . . . Laki never would have imagined that his own people would turn against each other the way they had.” Meanwhile, Marco’s mother, Yianna, holds fast to the stories told by her own mother, who was a maid to Princess Alice, wife of Prince Andrew, both of whom were exiled from Greece after the Greco-Turkish War of 1922.

Written with a perceptive eye, Where the Wandering Ends considers the challenges faced by people during wartime and highlights the determination to survive despite painful circumstances. Corfu’s beauty, which Corporon describes in sumptuous detail, is juxtaposed against the turbulence and devastation caused by war. Fascinating historical facts and references to mythological Greek tales intertwine with moving scenes, tension-building plot points and surprising revelations to create a powerful, soaring story. This is a spectacular novel about the enduring devotion of family and the steadfast loyalty between friends.

★ Heirlooms

Bestselling author Sandra Byrd blends romance, laughter, community and family secrets in her novel Heirlooms, a delightful story of uplifting female friendships.

After her husband’s death, Choi Eunhee, a Korean woman living in the United States, turns to Helen Devries for help. It’s 1958, and both women are Navy widows. While living together in Helen’s farmhouse on Whidbey Island, Washington, the women assist each other through their losses and develop a lifelong friendship. 

In the present day, Helen’s dying wish is that her granddaughter Cassidy Quinn will pack up the attic at the Whidbey Island house with help from Eunhee’s granddaughter Grace Kim. While going through Helen’s hope chest, Cassidy and Grace discover a family secret. 

Meanwhile, Cassidy must work to save her grandmother’s property from foreclosure, so she turns to her ex-boyfriend Nick for help. Helen’s house was the setting of many beloved summers for Cassidy, and she dreams of reinstating her grandmother’s garden to its former glory. 

Helen and Eunhee’s friendship is much like the garden, tended with loving care over many years. As the women draw faith and strength from each other, their bond becomes akin to sisterhood. From this foundation grows Cassidy and Grace’s own connection, and the two young women learn to lean on each other throughout Cassidy’s fight for her grandmother’s house and garden and as Grace begins to doubt her chosen career path.

With warmth and sensitivity, Heirlooms examines the challenges faced by immigrants living in the United States, and the difficulties for women seeking health care and financial security for both themselves and their children throughout American history. As friends become family, readers will marvel at the strength found in community and the deep connections that can exist between generations.

Authors Yvette Manessis Corporon and Sandra Byrd intertwine past and present in two stories of love, courage and survival.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The House of Fortune

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Jessie Burton returns to the world of her atmospheric novel The Miniaturist with a sequel, The House of Fortune, set in 1705 Amsterdam.

First, a little about The Miniaturist, which introduces readers to Nella Brandt when she’s 18 years old. Recently married to a trader named Johannes, Nella is a country girl who feels out of place in Amsterdam, a powerful international trade center with a gossipy, moralistic core. Nella finds Johannes and the rest of her new family—sister-in-law Marin, servant Otto and cook Cornelia—to be confusing and distant. As a distraction, Johannes gives Nella a cabinet house, a miniature version of their home, which she furnishes by ordering from a miniaturist. The miniaturist, in turn, conveys that she knows secrets about Nella’s new family, a menacing development.

The House of Fortune picks up the story nearly two decades later, opening on the 18th birthday of Thea, daughter of Otto and Marin, who died in childbirth. By now, Thea’s aunt, Nella, is a longtime widow, and Otto is the head of the household. Thea is obsessed with the theater, spending as much time as she can at the city’s playhouse with her actor friend Rebecca and new love, Walter, a set painter. 

But the Brandt household is in trouble: Otto has lost his job in the Dutch East India Company—as a Black man, he was never allowed to rise to a decent position—and Nella must sell off the house’s paintings and furniture to pay expenses. Nella believes the family’s best hope is for Thea to marry a man with a fortune, but as a biracial young woman in white merchant-class Amsterdam, Thea’s marriage prospects are uncertain. Rounding out the cast are botanist Caspar Witsen, socialite Clara Sarragon and the mysterious miniaturist, who once again watches the Brandt family, this time focusing on Thea.  

The story alternates between Nella’s and Thea’s perspectives. Nella worries about Thea’s future while considering her own past, particularly when she left home for the city. Thea schemes to follow Walter wherever he may be heading next, but she also yearns to understand the broodings of her secretive father and aunt, and their reasons for never talking about Marin or Johannes.

Throughout The House of Fortune, Burton beautifully evokes golden-age Amsterdam. It’s as though she has seamlessly incorporated aspects of memorable Dutch still lifes, portraits and landscape paintings into the narrative. If The House of Fortune doesn’t feature quite the same level of sinister gothic atmosphere and suspenseful plotting as The Miniaturist, it’s still a satisfying family drama.

Jessie Burton beautifully evokes golden-age Amsterdam in her sequel to The Miniaturist.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The Marriage Portrait

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet hit at the right moment; her 2020 novel about the tragic death of William Shakespeare’s son from the bubonic plague made for compelling reading as many of us quarantined during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Her next novel, The Marriage Portrait, is a vivid depiction of the harsh manners and rigid expectations for women within ducal courts in 16th-century Italy.

The Marriage Portrait is based on the life of Lucrezia de’Medici, born into one of Italy’s most illustrious families. With parents eager to strengthen ties to other noble Italian houses, Lucrezia’s older sister Maria is betrothed to Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara. When Maria dies of an unspecified illness just days before the wedding, 15-year-old Lucrezia is offered in her place. Less than a year later, Lucrezia is dead, probably from tuberculosis—but at the time, it was alleged that she was murdered by her husband. This long-lasting rumor became the basis of Robert Browning’s dramatic 1842 poem “My Last Duchess,” which begins, “That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall, / Looking as if she were alive.”

As imagined by O’Farrell, Lucrezia is a free spirit and artist, attuned to the natural world and accepted, if not warmly embraced, by her large Florentine family. Once married, she is out of her league in the tense, gossipy Ferrara household, where she is frightened by her husband’s mercurial moods and his sisters’ cagey secrets. Lucrezia quickly realizes that the longer it takes her to produce an heir, the more danger she is in. As she sits for a formal marriage portrait and cautiously makes a connection with the artist’s apprentice, she remains not only on the periphery of the court but also fearful for her life.   

O’Farrell is a marvelous stylist, and The Marriage Portrait is full of the same kinds of intense details that made Hamnet come alive. Her characters are captivating and believable, and the landscape of Renaissance Italy is a veritable gift to the senses, so powerfully does O’Farrell evoke the sights, sounds and smells of forest, castle and barnyard. 

From Lucrezia’s early encounters with a tiger in her father’s menagerie to her final days in a wooded fortress, The Marriage Portrait will please readers who relish good historical fiction as well as anyone looking to the past to better understand the present.

Maggie O'Farrell is a marvelous stylist, and The Marriage Portrait is full of the same kinds of intense details that made Hamnet come alive.
FictionHistorical FictionFamily Drama

On the Rooftop

Review by Langston Collin Wilkins

Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s third novel, On the Rooftop, is a creative exploration of family, community and resilience set in San Francisco’s historically Black Fillmore neighborhood in the 1950s. 

Told from multiple perspectives, the novel centers on Vivian, who came to San Francisco from New Orleans after the death of her husband, the father of her children. She works a good job as a medical assistant, but past traumas and current precariousness prevent her from feeling true comfort. She puts most of her energy toward shepherding the singing careers of her three daughters, Ruth, Esther and Chloe, who perform as a group called the Salvations. Vivian dreams of more for her daughters and tirelessly pushes them to practice on their building’s rooftop in preparation for their shows at the Champagne Supper Club.

September cover image
Read more: Our September issue’s cover feature on Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, author of ‘On the Rooftop.’

Vivian’s daughters have their own dreams, however. Their mother believes the eldest, Ruth, has the most star potential, but Ruth’s hopes are a bit more modest. Middle daughter Esther is searching for her own voice while grappling with past traumas. Chloe, the overlooked youngest, is grasping for recognition in both her professional life and personal relationships. Amid all this, their Fillmore neighborhood is being threatened by an urban renewal program that would dismantle the physical and symbolic community. 

Loosely inspired by Fiddler on the Roof, On the Rooftop is a refreshing work of historical fiction that provides a window into Black life outside of the direct prism of racist oppression. While the specters of racism are present in the story, Sexton chooses to center themes of motherhood, memory, music and hope. She has carefully imagined a compelling social world built on the very real cultural dynamics of the legendary Fillmore neighborhood, known as the “Harlem of the West” for the vibrant Black community within its borders. 

On the Rooftop is a quiet page turner that can serve as a beacon of hope in any trying time. 

On the Rooftop is a quiet page turner that can serve as a beacon of hope in any trying time.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Haven

Review by Melissa Brown

How do you discern whether a vivid dream is a holy vision or just someone’s own desire? Haven, the latest novel from celebrated Irish Canadian writer Emma Donoghue (The Pull of the Stars, The Wonder), hinges on a monk’s ascetic dream of an island set apart for God’s glory. 

Artt, a famed traveler and scholarly priest, selects timeworn and experienced monk Cormac and an awkward young monk named Trian to sail west and establish a new community for Christ. Their trinity seeks a place far from civilization and temptation, since Artt plans to withdraw from the world entirely. 

Finding two remote islands after a week’s journey fills Artt with zeal and confirms God’s call upon him. But as Artt intones early in the novel, “Monkish life is one long war against the devil.” As he leads his two reluctant followers in an increasingly erratic and unyielding manner, questions abound: Will this haven be a true refuge? Did Artt hear God rightly? Or has he lost his way?

Inspired by the true history of an early Christian monastery founded on Ireland’s Skellig Islands, Haven explores the mix of superstition, lore, faith and basic need that accompanies humanity on a mission. As in her hit bestseller, Room, Donoghue’s powers of description expand small, confined spaces until they contain worlds of universal depth. 

Haven sensitively considers hubris, humility and selfishness, who God is and how he might interact with his creation. Artt, Cormac and Trian grapple with this relationship as they face hourly trials in a new world that’s as solid and real as it is mysterious. Much of the action takes place in the hearts of these men, so the story’s pace is a slow, intriguing burn, building enjoyably until a somewhat jarring climax and disappointing denouement. Shock-value shift aside, Donoghue’s talent for storytelling captivates. 

Thoughtful and thought-provoking, Haven captures the gulf that can grow—especially during times of hardship—between what we say we believe and how we live.

Inspired by the true history of an early Christian monastery founded on Ireland's Skellig Islands, Emma Donoghue's Haven explores the mix of superstition, lore, faith and basic need that accompanies humanity on a mission.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Anthony Marra is lookin’ at you, kid

Interview by Alice Cary

“One of the great things about writing a book about 1940s Hollywood is that you can watch a bunch of old movies and call it research,” Anthony Marra says about Mercury Pictures Presents, a sprawling, bighearted tragicomedy set in Hollywood during World War II, with additional storylines in Italy and Germany. It took six years to write. “So yeah, I did a lot of research,” he says, laughing. “I’m in my sweatpants watching Humphrey Bogart, saying, ‘Don’t worry, this is work.'”

Marra, author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena and the story collection The Tsar of Love and Techno, speaks from his home in New Haven, Connecticut, with a voice that’s full of humor, passion and compassion, just like his prose. After previously setting books in Chechnya and the Soviet Union, he says he wanted to set this novel a little closer to home.

Initially, he was toying with two seemingly separate ideas, the first being a story set in Los Angeles, the author’s former home. “Frank Lloyd Wright supposedly said that if you tip the world over, all the loose pieces will land in Los Angeles,” Marra says. “That was never more true than it was during the ’30s and ’40s, when you had thousands and thousands of European refugees landing there.”

The other idea focused on southern Italy, the home of Marra’s great-grandmother and her family. But during a trip to the island of Lipari, the author noticed a plaque commemorating anti-Fascists, artists and intellectuals who had been exiled there during Benito Mussolini’s regime. 

“It seemed so strange,” Marra recalls, “that this island paradise to which I could trace my own roots had once been Mussolini’s Alcatraz. It occurred to me that a number of European refugees would refer to LA as ‘sunny Siberia,’ and I thought the same term could have easily been applied to a place like Lipari.” Marra realized that he could weave his two story ideas together into one, “about two Siberias on either ends of the world, and this one family divided between them.”

“Frank Lloyd Wright supposedly said that if you tip the world over, all the loose pieces will land in Los Angeles. That was never more true than it was during the ’30s and ’40s, when you had thousands and thousands of European refugees landing there.”

Mercury Pictures Presents is the story of Maria Lagana, who flees Rome with her mother after Fascists condemn Maria’s activist father to confino (internal exile) in a Calabrian village. Devastatingly, it was 12-year-old Maria’s actions that accidentally led to her father’s betrayal—a theme that Marra explores in similar ways in The Tsar of Love and Techno. “Totalitarian ideology invariably undermines the family as an institution by turning each member into a potential betrayer,” the author explains. “The people you’re closest to have the power to take away your freedom, or even your life, simply by saying the wrong thing to the wrong person.”

Mercury Pictures Presents cover
Read our review: “It’s full of passion, energy and exuberance, just like the Hollywood world it portrays.”

Fifteen years later, in 1941, Maria lives in Los Angeles with her mother and works as a producer at Mercury Pictures International. Maria’s boss is Artie Feldman, described in the novel as a fast-talking, “middle-aged narcissist whose bald spot had outpaced his toupees.” This is where Marra’s movie watching comes in handy, particularly in the way he mirrors the screwball-comedy dialogue of the era’s films. It’s apparent that His Girl Friday was a big influence, and Maria will remind readers of Rosalind Russell’s character, just “a lot more Italian,” Marra says. It’s easy to see why Maria was the first character that came to him when he started crafting the novel. “I really just fell in love with her.”

Despite the abundance of World War II novels and movies, Marra was surprised to find this chapter of Hollywood history to be “a little hidden.” As he plunged into researching the 1940s world of madcap moviemaking, he meticulously explored more serious subjects with equal fervor, including wartime challenges, xenophobia and immigration. For example, immigrants were subject to curfews, so Hollywood studios frequently adjusted shooting schedules to ensure workers could get home on time. Immigrants like Maria had to register as “enemy aliens,” confine their movements to a 5-mile radius and surrender certain items like flashlights, radios and cameras—anything that might be used to communicate with the enemy. 

Such restrictions are particularly problematic for another central character of the novel, Italian immigrant and photographer Vincent Cortese. As he complains to Maria, “You travel halfway around the world just to end up in confino again. How does an itinerant photographer make a living if he’s prohibited from being an itinerant and a photographer?”

Elements of photography and filmmaking are all over Mercury Pictures Presents, to the extent that Marra considers his role to be as directorial as it is authorial. “I tried to draw upon the grammar of cinema as I constructed this world,” he says. At times, the narrative zooms in and out, cutting from present day to the future and back again. Other scenes have an undeniably cinematic quality, such as when Vincent and another character step outside to discover that it’s snowing in Los Angeles, which really happened on New Year’s Day in 1942. Even the process of editing out unnecessary scenes was informed by filmmaking. “If you look at Dostoevsky,” Marra says, “where people are ranting for pages at a time, you can tell that clearly Dostoevsky was a man who had never seen a movie.”

“I tried to draw upon the grammar of cinema as I constructed this world.”

Marra is especially intrigued by the machinations of fantasy, escapism and propaganda in this period, particularly as the government turned to Hollywood “to use the tools of cinema to mobilize the country for war,” he says. “I was interested in exploring how the camera—and more broadly, art—can be this source of witness and documentation, but also a source of deception. And how we as viewers are asked to tell the difference.”

But for every element of darkness and wartime despair, the novel also contains just as much joy, particularly in moments of comic relief. Marra considers this his “most comic work yet,” and found that humor “collapses the distance between character and reader in a way that nothing else really does. A good joke is really powerful in terms of bringing the reader to care about a character.” 

Familial bonds provide some of the most buoyant opportunities for comedy. Most memorably, a lively trio of aunts, inspired by the author’s own great-aunts, provide a lifeline for Maria and her mother in LA. “In their black dresses and sunglasses,” Marra writes, “they looked like Grim Reapers going as Greta Garbo for Halloween.” He even gave them his great-aunts’ real names: Mimi, Lala and Pep. 

“Even though I initially began working on this book some years ago, it was only during [COVID-19] lockdown that it took off,” Marra says. “I felt like I was drawing more and more on relatives and friends, if only to have the opportunity to keep company with those people again. . . . Obviously, staying inside during COVID is a lot different than experiencing confino, but I think just the sense that you’re isolated from your loved ones and limited in what you can do informed how I approached the characters and their stories.”

As Marra writes in an early scene, “So much of a movie’s meaning came down to who it deemed worthy of a close-up, a perspective, a face.” With Mercury Pictures Presents, he fits a multitude of memorable personalities into his frame, transforming the novel into something quite like an epic film. After all, he says, novels are most like movies in their power to “transport a reader to a place far from their daily life that nonetheless speaks to them in a deep way.”

Photo of Anthony Marra by Paul Duda.

Comedy and tragedy collide in the author's second novel, set amid the highs and lows of World War II-era Hollywood.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

Briefly, a Delicious Life

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

In 1838, the French novelist George Sand (pen name for Aurore Dupin) decided that a winter away from Paris would be good for her, her two children and her ailing lover, Frederic Chopin, who had tuberculosis. The group landed on the island of Majorca, taking rooms at a defunct monastery, the Charterhouse, in the remote village of Valldemossa. (Sand wrote about their stay in a travel memoir titled A Winter in Majorca.) 

This is where Briefly, a Delicious Life, the debut novel from Nell Stevens (author of the memoir Bleaker House), begins. “Of course, it wasn’t the first time I’d seen two men kissing,” narrator Blanca says in the novel’s first line, describing when George arrives at the monastery dressed in her usual men’s suit and kisses Chopin. “It was 1838 and I had been at the Charterhouse in Valldemossa for over three centuries by then.” 

Blanca is a ghost, a 14-year-old girl who died almost 400 years earlier. She has lurked in Valldemossa, and in particular at the Charterhouse, ever since, pestering badly behaved monks and trying to protect her long line of granddaughters and great-great-great-granddaughters. But her descendants have almost died out, the monks have gone, and Blanca is lonely. When the Parisian group arrives, Blanca instantly falls in love with George. 

Blanca has a very long memory, but her voice is fresh. She’s often funny, sometimes enraged, full of longing—an all-too-human ghost. She can insinuate herself into people’s heads and bodies, experiencing sensory pleasures like the taste of an orange or the feel of a kiss. She can access people’s memories and see their futures, which helps to give the novel its structure, as the story moves between past and present. 

Throughout their haphazard sojourn, George stays up late into the night writing and smoking cigars, and Chopin lingers at the piano, coughing and working on his preludes. But unlike George and Chopin, Blanca knows that the conservative Valldemossan villagers are suspicious of the Parisian visitors’ unconventional ways, and that their visit may end badly. Along the way are sections from George’s memories, as interpreted by Blanca—a youthful crush, an early marriage, attempts to find her way as a female writer in a man’s world—and from Blanca’s own past, her short life and doomed teenage romance in the late 15th century. 

Briefly, a Delicious Life is an inventive, imaginative approach to historical fiction, full of comic moments but also sorrow, violence and beauty. If the novel’s narrative drive is sometimes uneven, that’s a small quibble. Blanca, though a ghost, is full of life, a wonderful guide to another time and place.

Nell Stevens offers an inventive, imaginative approach to historical fiction, full of comic moments but also sorrow, violence and beauty. Her ghostly narrator is full of life, a wonderful guide to another time and place.

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