In spring 1943, Ava Harper is perfectly happy with her job in the Rare Book Room at the Library of Congress, where she spends her days among “fragrant, yellowed pages.” But as World War II rages on, Ava is pressed into service for a covert government operation that involves information-gathering from newspapers, magazines and other texts published in neutral territories. Eager to do her part to end the war in which her brother is fighting, Ava resolves to get to work. 

However, when she arrives in the neutral country of Portugal, Ava learns that her job entails so much more than promised. She finds Lisbon filled with refugees, “their arms laden with sacks of belongings, battered suitcases, and children. Languages from all over Europe rose from the crowd, blending French, German, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, and many more into the cacophonous hum.” Desperate for passage to the United States, the refugees are all scrambling to secure visas and tickets on ships that may or may not arrive. 

Among the publications Ava gathers is an issue of Combat, a periodical printed by resistance fighters in Lyon, France. Within its pages is a coded message about a Jewish mother and son in hiding. Deeply affected by the anguish she sees in Portugal, Ava connects with the Frenchwoman responsible for printing Combat, and together they race to save the family. 

It feels strange to describe a book about the miseries of World War II as entertaining, but The Librarian Spy is a truly captivating read. Bestselling author Madeline Martin (The Last Bookshop in London) is known for her deeply researched historical fiction and romance novels, and as Ava’s story unfolds, readers can practically smell the bica, a Portuguese coffee drink, and feel the hunger, terror and cold afflicting the French as they endure the Nazi occupation. It is a delight to be carried through these experiences by Ava, an endearing, quiet bookworm who finds her purpose despite the odds.

In a searing early scene of Mercury Pictures Presents, 12-year-old Maria Lagana and her father enjoy the coolness of the cinema one Sunday morning in Rome. As father and daughter watch The Monster of Frankenstein, Benito Mussolini’s Black Shirts storm the theater and set it on fire. Soon after this terrifying event, Maria betrays her anti-Fascist father during a misguided attempt to protect him, and he’s sent into exile. 

Maria’s misstep and guilt define her life and the lives of her family, setting the stage for the rest of this cinematic sweep of a book. Over time, the Frankenstein story becomes symbolic for Maria, who sees herself as “a monster at the window of a house where she did not belong, trying to find her way to the lighted room within.” 

Anthony Marra (A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, The Tsar of Love and Techno) has created an energetic, wildly comical tale that’s bursting with copious historical details. Amid all the action and plot twists, it’s also a serious examination of immigration and xenophobia, identity and impersonation, and art, propaganda and censorship. As Maria and Artie make films and try to get them past the censors, readers learn a cavalcade of intriguing movie-making facts. Another major plotline involves Vincent Cortese, an Italian immigrant and photographer, and includes flashbacks to his daring, vividly described escape from Italy that will leave readers on the edges of their seats.

Marra glides effortlessly between a number of characters and their pasts, presents and futures, all of which are complicated by World War II. Maria and Vincent escape Fascist Italy only to find themselves classified as “enemy aliens” by the United States, with their movements and actions severely restricted. Maria’s boyfriend, Eddie Lu, is a Shakespearean actor who is typecast into roles of “Fu Manchu villainy,” his characters “either entirely emasculated or entirely predatory, living at the lurid limits of deviancy.” Hungarian American actor Bela Lugosi also makes several appearances, adding further real-world context to Marra’s exploration of immigration and impersonation through the lens of 1940s Hollywood.

While Marra’s many threads are intricately woven, they can occasionally be overwhelming, and the novel is at its strongest when focused on Maria, Vincent and their immediate families. Despite some meandering, Mercury Pictures Presents is full of passion, energy and exuberance, just like the Hollywood world it portrays.

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.