There’s nothing better than settling down to read a novel and immediately sensing that you’re in the hands of a gifted storyteller. Such is the feeling from the first pages of Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s illuminating third novel, Take My Hand, which was inspired by a 1973 lawsuit involving Minnie Lee and Mary Alice Relf, 12- and 14-year-old sisters who were sterilized without consent in Montgomery, Alabama. Their horrific, groundbreaking case eventually shed light on thousands of other impoverished, primarily Black girls and women who had been sterilized across the country under federally funded programs.
Perkins-Valdez fictionalizes this injustice through the narration of Civil Townsend, a 23-year-old Black woman who begins her first nursing job at the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic in 1973. Alternating between these memories and her present in 2016, Civil describes her privileged, educated upbringing in Montgomery, calling herself “five foot five inches of know-it-all.”
Civil’s boss, the clinic’s white director, assigns her to give birth control shots to 11- and 13-year-old India and Erica Williams, who live with their father and grandmother in a dirt-floor, one-room cabin. Perkins-Valdez describes Civil’s first visit to the cabin in visceral detail, as Civil fights off nausea at the stench and horror at the filth. Civil wants to help the family, who are grieving the loss of the girls’ mother to cancer and wrestling with India’s inability to speak, but she struggles with her role in overseeing the girls’ reproductive health: India and Erica aren’t sexually active, and the shots haven’t been proven to be safe.
In 2016, Civil is a doctor in Memphis on the eve of retirement, and she returns to Alabama to try to make peace with the ghosts of her past. This modern-day perspective deepens the novel, adding layers of context while contrasting young Civil’s youthful exuberance and confusion with her older, wiser, sharply honed ruminations. “I understood how a person could get so caught up in doing good that they forgot that the people they served had lives of their own,” she muses.
As reproductive rights continue to be at risk, Take My Hand could hardly be more timely. Perkins-Valdez offers an intriguing, detailed look at the way the government deals with such cases, with appearances by Senator Ted Kennedy, who establishes a committee “to investigate federal oversight of healthcare-related abuses,” and Caspar Weinberger, secretary of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Perkins-Valdez’s fictional characters are well rounded, although hints at romance between Civil and the sisters’ father seem somewhat contrived.
With plenty to ponder and discuss, this gripping story is particularly well suited for book clubs. Take My Hand tackles a variety of issues related to race, poverty, class and women’s rights while presenting a memorable, astute examination of boundaries: moral, personal, professional and governmental. It’s a challenging, enlightening novel that will stay with readers.
Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s illuminating third novel was inspired by a 1973 lawsuit involving sisters who were sterilized without consent in Montgomery, Alabama.
As she has consistently proven in historical novels such as The Alice Network and The Rose Code, Kate Quinn is a master at crafting an intoxicating, well-balanced blend of immersive period details and deft character work. With The Diamond Eye, she returns to the fertile storytelling terrain of World War II for a tale inspired by the extraordinary life of Russian sniper Lyudmila “Mila” Pavlichenko, known as “Lady Death.”
Mila becomes a mother at 15; six years later, amid an impending divorce, she promises her son that she’ll teach him to shoot. In between working on her dissertation at Kiev University and raising Alexei, she finds that she’s brilliant with a rifle. When the Nazis invade the Soviet Union, her elite skill becomes a key asset in the Red Army’s fight to defend the motherland. Mila sets off for war and marches into her own legend.
In each of her novels, Quinn displays an innate awareness of how history can be warped by time and power. In The Diamond Eye, we don’t just follow Mila’s journey into war; we see her actions in sharp contrast to what the Soviet government will later say she’s done. Mila’s perceptions of events are shown in relief to those of the men around her, and even to the perceptions of the American public, thanks to a 1942 press tour hosted by first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. That press tour forms the novel’s narrative spine, unfolding in sections that alternate with Mila’s larger wartime odyssey. This structure steadily ratchets up the suspense as it becomes clear that Mila is not as welcome in the U.S. as she was led to believe.
The Diamond Eye is a remarkable combination of immersive wartime storytelling, rich detailing and wonderful pacing. What really makes The Diamond Eye land, though, goes beyond Quinn’s mastery of her chosen genre. This is, first and foremost, an exceptional character piece, a study of a woman who is a killer, a mother, a lover and, above all else, a survivor.
Kate Quinn’s track record for delivering captivating historical fiction continues with the remarkable story of the notorious Russian sniper known as Lady Death.
Even aside from Sylvia Plath’s literary output, there’s always been intense interest in the writer’s short, tragic life, which ended in 1963 with her suicide at age 30. Debut novelist Lee Kravetz’s The Last Confessions of Sylvia P. is a fascinating fictional re-creation of Plath’s final decade, a paean to the allure of poetry and an investigation of the mysterious sources of literary inspiration, as told by three women close to Plath.
When Plath enters the coveted Boston poetry workshop run by famed poet Robert Lowell, her arrival ignites the professional and personal jealousy of Agatha Gray, a contemporary who publishes under the pseudonym Boston Rhodes. Plath is the Mozart to Rhodes’ Antonio Salieri, “a success in all the ways I was not,” as Rhodes bitterly summarizes it. As she describes in a lengthy, anguished letter to Lowell, Rhodes is convinced that Plath is the only thing standing between her and the status of “Major Voice” in the confessional poetry movement emerging in the 1950s.
Estee, a master curator at a struggling Boston auction house, also has her own personal connection to Plath’s story. In 2019, three spiral notebooks containing a previously unknown draft of Plath’s posthumous semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, are discovered in the attic of an abandoned home. As Estee supervises the sale of the notebooks in her final auction before retirement, she wrestles with her misgivings about allowing this literary treasure to pass into private hands.
In addition to the voices of these fictional characters, Kravetz introduces Ruth Barnhouse, the real-life psychiatrist at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts who treated Plath with several unconventional therapies following the poet’s first attempted suicide in 1953. Ruth describes her difficult work with Plath’s persistent depression in a series of candid journal entries: “Miss Plath is no longer chasing literary prizes, top marks, or perfection,” she writes. “I fear she is chasing death itself.”
Rotating between the three voices, Kravetz skillfully orchestrates a chorus of regret and longing that swirls around Plath. The women, each of whom has been touched by Plath in markedly different ways, try to make sense of their lives and their relationship to hers. Into this narrative Kravetz cleverly inserts a subplot that pursues the mystery of how Plath’s notebooks fall into the hands of a pair of aliterate Boston house flippers. The Last Confessions of Sylvia P. will intrigue admirers of Plath’s work and likely introduce her to a new group of readers.
Lee Kravetz’s novel is a fascinating fictional re-creation of Sylvia Plath’s final decade and a paean to the allure of poetry.
In pop culture, the women of the French Resistance often look as though they are poised to step onto a Chanel runway once they dispatch their current obligations. Think Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca or pop artist Roy Lichtenstein’s beret-clad cartoon sharpshooter, crying out, “Now, mes petites . . . pour la France!” Our war heroines are often portrayed as beautiful, camera-ready and hypercompetent—but available for rescue by our heroes.
In the cinematic sweep of Sisters of Night and Fog, Erika Robuck artfully upends this trope. Although Violette Szabo and Virginia d’Albert-Lake fill central casting’s ideal of la femme de la résistance, they come across as actual people. Because they were.
During her meticulous research for The Invisible Woman, her World War II-era novel about Allied spy Virginia Hall, Robuck encountered stories about Szabo and d’Albert-Lake. She initially intended them to be characters in the earlier book, then realized that each woman’s story needed more space, so a trilogy was planned. But when Robuck discovered that the arcs of Szabo and d’Albert-Lake intersected in an almost miraculous way, this novel was born.
In many ways, the structure of Sisters of Night and Fog parallels the narrative arc of Roberto Benigni’s 1997 Academy Award-winning film, Life Is Beautiful. When war breaks out, there are rumblings and stirrings, inconveniences and portents. Then, as the monster draws nearer, life takes a quantum leap into something worse but still bearable. In one scene, a woman who houses Violette in Rouen reacts with Gallic stoicism to a pre-bombing leaflet warning her to leave the city: “Petite, I’ve lived seventy years, through two wars. If I go out in a blast, that’s how I go.”
Violette and Virginia are not so lucky as that. They both fall into the hands of the Nazis and are moved from jail to concentration camp. Survival is a minute-by-minute endurance test, and Robuck wrings out every sweat-laden drop of emotion from their plight. You can almost feel your stomach growl when she describes the half-pint of thin rhubarb soup allotted to the prisoners each day. Horror pervades every corner of the camps, yet Robuck manages to keep humanity’s candle flickering at the gates of hell.
Violette and Virginia are two women whose stories needed to be told, particularly now that most of the people who fought in WWII are gone. Robuck has done their memory great honor.
The stories of real-life French Resistance fighters Violette Szabo and Virginia d’Albert-Lake needed to be told. Erika Robuck has done their memory great honor.
Several years ago, in Ford’s Theatre Museum in Washington, D.C., I found myself staring at the Deringer pistol that John Wilkes Booth used to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln. I stood there, transfixed, amazed that this small, surprisingly delicate and decorative weapon could change the course of American history. I felt similarly mesmerized as I devoured the 480 pages of Karen Joy Fowler’s triumph of a historical novel, Booth. I was torn by conflicting urges: to race ahead to see what happens next, or to read slowly and savor Fowler’s exquisite language and fascinating rendering of the various members of this legendary American family.
Many readers will begin Booth with the basic knowledge that John Wilkes Booth came from a famous theatrical family, but it’s unlikely that they’ll know just how celebrated and fascinating the Booths were, or that their lives were full of drama well before John Wilkes picked up that pistol. Think of Louisa May Alcott and her storied New England upbringing, and then pivot to something darker.
Fowler has previously written several short stories about the Booths and explains in an author’s note that she decided to write about them in novel form “during one of our American spates of horrific mass shootings.” She wondered about “their own culpability, all the if-onlys” and “what happens to love when the person you love is a monster.”
The Booths’ lives play out on their 150 acres of farmland in Bel Air, Maryland, in a mixture of 19th-century horror and family drama. John Wilkes was born in 1838, the ninth of 10 children, four of whom would die before reaching adulthood. They faced poverty, hunger and disease while patriarch Junius Booth, a famous Shakespearian actor, was on tour much of the year. He was an alcoholic with deep, dark secrets, which Fowler hints at with one simple sentence early on: “A secret family moves into the secret cabin.”
The story is told primarily by three of John Wilkes’ siblings—Rosalie, Edwin and Asia—all of whom are equally fascinating and well voiced. Early scenes narrated by Rosalie are particularly powerful and memorable. Fowler includes short passages about Lincoln and his family, ratcheting up the tension of what’s to come. With a master’s touch, she also incorporates vital depictions of racism through the lives of an enslaved family that works on the Booth farm, and shows how the issue of enslavement divides the Booth family through the years.
Like the very best historical novels, Booth is a literary feast, offering much more than a riveting story and richly drawn characters. It offers a wealth of commentary about not only our past but also where we are today, and where we may be headed.
A Ballad of Love and Glory rides the waves of war and the bloom of lovers’ passion, intertwining real events of the Mexican-American War with a vividly imagined relationship between a forlorn Irish immigrant soldier and a grieving Mexican curandera, or folk healer.
In her fourth novel, Mexican American author Reyna Grande explores a little-known aspect of the Mexican-American War. After the annexation of Texas in 1845, hostilities between the United States and Mexico approached a boiling point due to a land dispute near the Rio Grande. At the time, foreign-born soldiers, primarily from Ireland, Germany and Italy, made up nearly half of the U.S. Army. After the American invasion of Mexico, many of the soldiers deserted the army in favor of Mexico’s cause as they resisted further land takeover and domination by the U.S.
In Grande’s detailed and well-researched novel, Irish Catholic immigrant John Riley, who is based on a real figure, deserts the U.S. Army in 1846. Enticed by the promise of better treatment, more pay and acres of land, John joins the Mexican Army, leading a growing battalion of deserters under Saint Patrick’s banner. They become known as the San Patricios.
Meanwhile, after Texas Rangers murder her husband, Ximena Salomé uses all the healing skills her grandmother taught her to bring comfort and relief to the many soldiers felled by each brutal battle. Her fate becomes inextricably bound with John’s while saving the life of one of his fellow soldiers, and in time, longing leads them to each other’s arms.
Grande’s novel highlights the abuses that American immigrants suffered at the hands of Yankee soldiers, in addition to the atrocities of war and all the maddening political and military machinations that go along with it. Although A Ballad of Love and Glory lags in pace or falls into cliche at times, it also often excels at making history palpable and real, not dry and unimpassioned but lively and full of the emotions the people of the past surely felt.
A Ballad of Love and Glory lives up to its title as it pays tribute to the heroism of everyday people called upon to defend their honor as well as their lives.
A Ballad of Love and Glory lives up to its title as it pays tribute to the heroism of everyday people called upon to defend their honor as well as their lives.
By now, Karen Joy Fowler’s husband knows what to expect when his wife starts writing a book, like the bestselling The Jane Austen Book Club or the Booker Prize finalist We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. She will lament, “Oh, it’s never been so hard,” and he will remind her: “You did say that last time. And the time before that, you know.”
“Is it possible that every book is harder than the one before?” Fowler wonders, speaking from her home in Santa Cruz, California. “Or do you just not remember? I don’t have an answer to that question.”
As she does in her writing, Fowler laces her conversations with curiosity, humor and reflection. You can practically hear her good-natured wheels turning as she discusses her latest novel, Booth, an immersive, behind-the-scenes account of the years leading up to Abraham Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s Theatre in 1865, by way of an investigation into the family of assassin John Wilkes Booth. The Booths were a famous theatrical family celebrated for their Shakespearian performances, especially father Junius and brother Edwin, whose 1893 funeral was described as one of “the most remarkable ever held in New York City” by the New York Times.
“As much as I am trying to argue that he is not the most interesting person in this family, I know that the narrative tension in the book is all because of John Wilkes Booth.”
Despite such a wealth of source material, and despite her husband’s reassurances, writing this book was particularly difficult for Fowler. Her despair over gun violence in the United States prompted her to choose this topic, but she didn’t want to focus on the assassin. Instead, she was interested in exploring the culpability and guilt of the Booth parents and siblings. How to achieve this delicate balance, “from the words, to the conception, to the way the book was organized,” was something Fowler “grappled with on nearly every page.”
Now she passes that same conundrum along to her readers. “I would not have written this book if John Wilkes had not killed Abraham Lincoln,” she says. “As much as I am trying to argue that he is not the most interesting person in this family, I know that the narrative tension in the book is all because of John Wilkes Booth.”
Even the book’s title is problematic. “It actually should be Booths—plural,” Fowler says, “but that’s just so hard to say. I knew that at least in America, if you saw a book entitled Booth, you would think this is a book about John Wilkes Booth. Which is exactly what I didn’t want you thinking!”
This is one of the primary reasons why the novel doesn’t depict Lincoln’s shooting in real time. “I didn’t want to imagine what John Wilkes Booth was thinking [in that moment]. First of all, I can’t—my imagination doesn’t stretch that far. But it’s still very painful to see that turning point in our history, to wonder what might have been.”
One passage in the novel, in fact, enumerates the many close calls with death John Wilkes had throughout his life, even before he carried out his tragic deed. “It was something that really struck me when I did the research,” Fowler explains. “[His death] would have been devastating for his family, but so much better for everyone else.”
The Booth clan has long fascinated Fowler, and she has featured various family members in three short stories, including “Standing Room Only,” which is about time travelers who journey to witness Lincoln’s death. A science fiction fan, Fowler was frustrated by the many stories she read in which time travelers seem to go undetected by those they encounter. “I thought, obviously not, it won’t be that way at all,” she says. “They’ll just be like tourists everywhere. I live in a tourist town, and I can spot the tourists. And then I went from that to thinking, well, there will be destination holidays, and one of them, unfortunately, will be the Lincoln assassination.”
Research, she muses, “is probably the closest we will come to time travel,” and from the start of creating Booth, she had mountains to sift through. A godsend came in the form of biographer Terry Alford, author of Fortune’s Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth, which Fowler calls “magnificent,” and the forthcoming In the Houses of Their Dead: The Lincolns, the Booths, and the Spirits. Alford’s biography features unique details, so Fowler reached out to ask a few questions. “He’s been researching this family for 30 years, and he sent me piles of research that would’ve taken me months and months to find on my own, if ever,” she says. “It was just mind-bogglingly generous.”
John Wilkes Booth was born in 1838, the ninth of 10 children. In 1822, his parents, Junius and Mary Ann Booth, emigrated from England to Bel Air, Maryland, where they bought 150 acres and moved a small log cabin onto the property. Junius, an alcoholic who was at times mentally unstable, was often away on tour, leaving his wife—with the help of enslaved men and women—to tend to farming and maintaining the home. The family faced poverty, hunger and disease; four of the 10 children died. Fowler portrays these ordeals with startling immediacy, especially from the perspective of young Rosalie, who watches “the household collapse into madness” and communes with the ghosts of her dead siblings.
Karen Joy Fowler, author of Booth
“I’ve had dreams about the place,” Fowler says. “In my dreams, the barn is there, and the slave cabins are there. It’s clearly a metaphor for doing research. The property [in my dreams] was beautiful, but I had a sense of menace, that something was very wrong and that it was a dangerous place to be.”
Junius eventually had a larger home, named Tudor Hall, built on the property. It’s now a museum on a fairly small lot surrounded by other houses. “There’s a lovely group of people who maintain it,” Fowler says. “It seems the ghosts have been purged.”
The name Tudor Hall is something of a touchstone, since Fowler’s love of historical fiction was inspired by Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, about Thomas Cromwell and the court of King Henry VIII. “I blame Hilary Mantel for the fact that [Booth] is in present tense,” Fowler says. “Wolf Hall was so powerful that somehow Hilary Mantel has persuaded me that this is how you write a historical novel.”
Indeed, readers will feel as though they’re watching events transpire in real time, with different sections told from the perspectives of not only Rosalie but also brother Edwin and sister Asia. Information about Edwin was plentiful due to his acting career, but Asia also left behind a valuable resource. In 1874, she wrote a secret memoir about her infamous brother, though it wasn’t published until 1938, long after her death. Fowler calls Asia “an incredible woman, but hard to like. . . . I would probably have wanted to make her more likable if her own words hadn’t condemned her in certain ways.” (For instance, although Asia disapproved of John Wilkes’ crime, she blamed Lincoln for going to the theater that night.) Photographs of Asia, however, continue to bewilder the author. “Nobody talks about Asia Booth without mentioning what a beauty she was,” Fowler says, “and you look at the pictures, and you just think, what are they talking about?”
Rosalie, in contrast, remains a cipher, with few details available. She never married and had some sort of “infirmity,” widely commented on but never specified. “Every time Rosalie’s name comes up, you hear, ‘What an invalid she is, poor Rose,’” Fowler laments. But these gaps in Rosalie’s history proved useful. “There was a little more freedom to imagine who she might be. She’s pretty much made up, although the things that happened to her are not. I cannot tell you how delighted I was to discover that she had a romance with a lion tamer!”
“I blame Hilary Mantel for the fact that [Booth] is in present tense.”
Although Fowler says she is always on the hunt for such “small details that I hope will bring the world more to life,” she also keeps a bigger picture in mind. When she first began to write Booth, she was primarily focused on issues of gun violence, but the 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump caused a shift in the story’s significance. “I wasn’t really thinking about the Civil War, the ongoing legacy of white supremacy and the various ways in which that war has just never ended in this country,” Fowler says. “And yet, as I wrote, those things seemed more evident to me than the fact that John Wilkes Booth had a gun.”
By the time of the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, Fowler had completed her manuscript. “To watch the Confederate flag being carried into the Capitol was just terrifying and heart-wrenching, having just immersed myself in what that flag meant,” she says. “I couldn’t turn the television off. I sat and watched the footage in real time, and just couldn’t believe it.”
There’s a similar sense of horror in Fowler’s visceral descriptions of how various Booth family members react to the news of John Wilkes’ horrific act: “Edwin’s first thought is not a thought, more like a blow to the head, a sense of falling, the crashing of the sea in his ears. His second thought is that he believes it. He wishes he didn’t.”
There were several post-assassination details that Fowler had to omit from the novel—such as the fact that Ford’s Theatre collapsed during Edwin’s funeral, killing 22 people. “Maybe there needs to be a second book,” she says. “Something short—a slender, poetic novel dealing with their later lives.”
After all, Fowler says, “History is full of fabulous stories.” Fabulous, provocative, challenging and necessary—such is the story of Booth.
Photos of Karen Joy Fowler by Nathan Quintanilla
In her eighth novel, Karen Joy Fowler offers a wholly original perspective on American history through the story of John Wilkes Booth’s family.
Set in England during World War II, Jennifer Ryan’s The Kitchen Front follows four very different women as they compete in a cooking contest sponsored by “The Kitchen Front,” a BBC radio program. The winner will earn a slot as the first ever female co-host of the show. The contestants include war widow Audrey; her sister, Gwendoline, the wife of a wealthy older man; kitchen maid Nell; and Zelda, a skilled chef. Ryan’s excellent use of historical detail and gifts for character and plot development will draw readers in, and after they finish this heartwarming novel, they’ll be able to discuss engaging topics such as female agency and women’s roles during wartime.
Focusing on life at the fictional Beijing Duck House in Rockville, Maryland, Lillian Li’s Number One Chinese Restaurant is a sly, compassionate portrayal of the culinary world. Owner Jimmy Han, whose father made the Duck House a success, is making plans to move on to a flashier restaurant. The novel’s intricate plot involves members of Jimmy’s extended family, as well as a wide range of Duck House staff. Love affairs, back-of-house drama and a restaurant fire all figure into the entertaining proceedings, and questions concerning community, identity and class will inspire great reading group dialogue.
Donia Bijan’s The Last Days of Café Leila tells the story of Noor, who goes home to Iran after spending many years in America. In Tehran, her father, Zod, runs the family business, Café Leila. The return compels Noor to come to terms with her troubled marriage and reassess her life. At the heart of the novel lies Café Leila and the comfort it provides through food and camaraderie. Bijan’s nuanced depiction of modern-day Iran offers abundant subjects for book club discussion, including family ties, immigration and Iranian history.
In The Secret French Recipes of Sophie Valroux by Samantha Vérant, talented chef Sophie Valroux works hard in hopes of one day heading up a world-class restaurant. But when her culinary career falls apart and her beloved grandmother in France has a stroke, Sophie is forced to reevaluate her life, her values and her love for cooking. Brimming with delicious recipes, Vérant’s novel is a compelling tribute to food and family. Themes of female independence, foodie culture and the nature of the restaurant business make this a sensational selection for book groups.
Reading groups will savor these delectable food-themed novels.
There’s a saying you might have heard: Writing about music is like dancing about architecture. Fortunately, two authors—one veteran, the other new to fiction—have ignored this warning and written novels about classical music, and we readers are luckier for it.
The Great Passion by James Runcie, author of the acclaimed Grantchester Mysteries, is a beautiful coming-of-age novel set in 18th-century Germany. In 1726, 13-year-old Stefan Silbermann is mourning the death of his mother. His father makes arrangements for Stefan to attend a music school in Leipzig, an especially useful education for a boy whose family’s business is building and repairing church organs. At school, lonely Stefan is tormented by the other students, finding solace only in singing and in the presence of the demanding but empathic choir director, Johann Sebastian Bach.
Stefan’s heavenly singing voice and sensitivity endear him to Bach, who enlists Stefan as a soloist in many of his cantatas. But Stefan remains deeply unhappy, and when he runs away from the dorms, Bach invites him to live at the Bach family home. There, Stefan basks in the warmth of domestic life, assisting Bach’s children with chores and working as a copyist for the great composer.
When another tragedy strikes, this time in Bach’s family, Stefan is a firsthand witness to the way grief can be a catalyst for musical genius, watching and then performing in the work that will become one of Bach’s most celebrated compositions, “The Passion According to St Matthew.” Stefan’s exposure to Bach’s creativity, family and devotion to God is the restorative balm that the young man needs in order to move forward with his life.
On the other end of the spectrum is Brendan Slocumb’s debut novel, The Violin Conspiracy, a fast-paced thriller about a young Black violinist and his search for a priceless instrument, set against the backdrop of systemic racism within the world of contemporary classical music.
Ray McMillian has a dream of becoming a concert violinist, and nothing will stand in his way: not his unsupportive mother and uncles, his disinterested teachers or the industry’s inherent racial bias. When Ray’s beloved grandmother gifts him with her grandfather’s violin, it brings him a step closer to his dream, and when the instrument is revealed to be an extremely rare and valuable Stradivarius, his star really begins to rise.
Ray is on the verge of attending the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow when the prized instrument is stolen and held for ransom. Suspects range from members of Ray’s own family, eager to claim the insurance money, to his musical rivals in Europe. Even the descendants of the family who once enslaved Ray’s great-great-grandfather are claiming the instrument belongs to them. As Ray travels the globe, not sure whom he can trust, music remains the only constant in his life, supporting him no matter the situation.
Despite their differences in literary styles, locations and eras, these novels are connected by more than just their musical themes. Resilience is a powerful presence in both stories, whether in the face of personal pain and grief or against the constant pressures of embedded prejudices. Music is the conduit through which two young men learn to overcome loss and fight against insurmountable odds, offering not only a reason to live but also a way to thrive.
Classical music is a powerful force in new novels from James Runcie and Brendan Slocumb, inspiring their heroes and illuminating the way forward.
Imagine that countless statues all over New York City share the likeness of one young, beautiful woman. In The Magnolia Palace by Fiona Davis, that woman is Lillian Carter, who, after her mother’s death of the Spanish flu, ends up working at the Frick mansion, which is now home to the revered art museum of the same name. The novel moves between Lillian’s story and that of Veronica, a model who, nearly 50 years later, finds herself following a mystery via secret messages in the mansion.
In each of your novels, architectural history comes so clearly alive! Tell us a bit about your research process. Did this new book challenge or evolve your process in any way? Did it lead you anywhere especially surprising? When it comes to research, the first thing I do is get a good look inside the building and then interview experts on the subject and the era. For The Magnolia Palace, I was able to get a wonderful behind-the-scenes tour of the Frick Collection in January 2020, from the bowling alley in the basement up to the top floor where the servants slept.
Usually I’d make several return trips as I write the first draft, but the city went into lockdown, making that impossible. So I was thrilled to discover that the Frick’s website includes a wonderful floor plan with a 360-degree view of each of the public rooms. If I needed to check out what artwork was above the fireplace in the library, for example, I could find the answer with just a couple of clicks. Thank goodness, as otherwise I would’ve been really stuck.
When you pass by or enter an incredible old building, what’s the first thing you look for? I’m always curious as to what has changed over time. How does the building compare to the one that was originally constructed? How has the neighborhood changed over the decades? It’s those contrasts that help me decide what time periods might work best for a novel. As I walk by, I can’t help wondering about all of the people who walked its halls, all of the ghosts that remain.
Obviously a sense of place plays a huge role in your work, from libraries and hotels to mansions and museums—and of course, the whole city of New York. What details do you seek out to bring these spaces into such vivid relief? I’m always looking for the strange details, the ones that are fun to describe because they will surprise the reader. It might be the grimace of a gargoyle over a doorway or the catwalks that span the enormous windows of Grand Central that end up drawing my attention and making it into the novel. We New Yorkers often think we know these places so well, but it’s amazing how little we “see” as we wander the streets.
How did you decide on the title The Magnolia Palace? Titles are tough for my novels, as I’m looking for a title that’s not too on the nose but which describes the location nicely and has resonance within the plot. That’s asking a lot. Choosing titles for each book is a team effort involving my editor and my agent, and they’re often the ones who have the best ideas.
For this novel, I realized the gorgeous magnolia trees outside the Frick would be a nice touchstone, one that I could bring into the story with the search for the (fictional) Magnolia diamond. And Dutton’s art department came up with that gorgeous cover with the magnolia blossoms—it was perfect.
“I can’t help wondering about all of the people who walked its halls, all of the ghosts that remain.”
The art in this novel is impressively catalogued. How did you choose which pieces to highlight in the novel? What do you think they add to the story? The scavenger hunt scenes, with clues that lead to several pieces in the Frick art collection, were really fun to write. I tended to choose works of art that have interesting backstories, ones that further illuminate what’s going on with the characters on the page. For example, the woman who sat for the George Romney painting that’s included in the scavenger hunt led a scandalous life as a mistress and a muse. When Veronica comes upon it and learns the history, it deepens how she feels about being made into an object of art as well.
I love the dimensions of these women—Lillian and Veronica, as well as Helen Frick, daughter of Henry—and wonder how you built the complexities of each of them. Where did you find inspiration for these women? And more broadly, how do you choose what types of women will occupy and make their marks on the buildings at the heart of your novels? As I research, I’m looking for women from history who accomplished great things but have since been forgotten. The inspiration for Lillian came from the carving of a nude woman over the entrance to the Frick. The model who posed for it was Audrey Munson, who achieved great fame in the 1910s but met a tragic end. She was gorgeous and successful and then suddenly an outcast, and I knew I wanted to include her story in the narrative.
The more I read about Helen Frick, the more I adored her. She was acerbic and smart, yet she was mocked in the press for her eccentricities. As a writer, I wondered what would’ve happened if Audrey and Helen crossed paths in real life, and the plot developed from there.
Then, once I decided to set part of the book in the 1960s, I thought it would be fun to have a character who is also a model, as a way to compare and contrast how women’s roles have been valued (or not) over time, and Veronica bubbled up out of that.
“We New Yorkers often think we know these places so well, but it’s amazing how little we ‘see’ as we wander the streets.”
What is your process for writing braided narratives? How do you know when they’re working well together? Once I know who the main characters are, I brainstorm scenes and create each timeline separately. Braiding them together is the toughest part, as each novel contains an element of mystery, and I have to make sure I don’t give away a clue too soon in one timeline and thereby destroy the tension in the other.
It’s always a mess at first, but once I have it down on paper, I’m eager to start writing the first draft. I write one timeline first all the way through (usually the older one), then the other, and then do a read-through to see if they work together. There’s still a lot of tweaking to be done, but by then the structure is usually pretty solid.
What is your ultimate day in New York City? Which museums or special places are especially dear to you? I’ve called the city home for 35 years now, and it’s full of wonderful places. The Frick Collection is dear to me, to be sure. I also love grabbing a pastry at Café Sabarsky at the Neue Galerie, or heading to the Campbell Bar at Grand Central for a cocktail. Hitting all three in one day would be a dream.
What are you reading now? I’m excited to start Ann Patchett’s latest book of essays, These Precious Days. She’s such a champion of authors and booksellers and is masterful working in both fiction and nonfiction. She’s probably as close to an author superhero as there is.
Photo of Fiona Davis by Deborah Feingold
Bestselling author Fiona Davis transforms New York City’s architectural history into winning fiction, and her latest, The Magnolia Palace, builds upon the secrets of the Frick Collection in a delightful blend of emotion and adventure.
Whoever said that nonsense about girls being full of sugar and spice and everything nice couldn’t have imagined Marie Antoine and Sadie Arnett, the binary star at the center of Heather O’Neill’s When We Lost Our Heads. These perversely fascinating characters are filled with guile and bile and many things vile, and even though it’s virtually a certainty that they are star-crossed, it’s impossible to tear one’s gaze away.
Marie is the beautiful daughter of a Victorian-era sugar baron; her childhood friend, Sadie, was born the odd one out into a political family of social climbers. If anything, Sadie’s ambition is to be, in Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s words, “a social climber / climbing downwards.” The two girls form a peculiarly strong bond in the opening of the book, just before the act that will separate them for years: They accidentally murder one of Marie’s household maids.
Rich sugar barons’ daughters don’t go to jail, not in Montreal, not back then, so the equally culpable Sadie gets pegged for the crime and is sent off to England to a school for “difficult” girls. Over the next few years, the temporarily separated pair evolve into the bewitching sociopaths who will ignite the fuse for the book’s latter-half powder keg.
Bound inextricably by murder and money, the Antoine and Arnett families navigate an unsteady truce that ultimately leads Sadie’s brother, Philip, to become a suitor for Marie’s hand. Circumstances change rapidly, though, and it dawns on Marie that—for her, at least—marriage would be tantamount to slavery. “Freedom and power,” she realizes, “were one and the same and were interchangeable.” The interfamily schism seems irreparable, and scandal ensues. Rather than retreating from the gossip, Marie leans into it, while on the other side of town, the recently returned Sadie stokes the flames with an incendiary novel whose protagonists are loosely (and transparently) based on herself and Marie.
All this personal drama plays out against the background of women’s suffrage, workers’ rights and the economic inequality that characterized the Gilded Age. It comes as no surprise that society and the sociopaths are on a collision course, but O’Neill is sufficiently deft to keep the reader in suspense as to where and how that inevitable impact will occur.
With explicit echoes of Marquis de Sade and the French Revolution, this is not a book for the faint of heart or Victorian sensibility, but it does encompass a fair amount of sugar . . . and spice.
Heather O’Neill’s perversely fascinating characters are filled with guile and bile and many things vile, and it’s impossible to tear one’s gaze away.
ER’s handsome star, George Clooney is part of an all-star cast, including Sean Penn, Woody Harrelson, John Cusack, Nick Nolte, and John Travolta (who seems to be in everything), that will be seen in the Twentieth Century-Fox adaptation of James Jones’ The Thin Red Line. About the men of C-for-Charlie company, during and after the brutal, bloody battle of Guadalcanal, this book has long been hailed as a masterwork along with Jones’ From Here to Eternity. As movie lovers know, the latter led to the 1953 film which won eight Oscars, including Best Picture. Forever immortalized by its wave-swept love scene between Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr, it is also famous for its casting of Frank Sinatra as the scrappy soldier, Maggio. Sinatra whose career was then shaky wound up winning an Academy Award, and enjoying a career comeback. Proof that war is swell when it’s Hollywoodized.
ER's handsome star, George Clooney is part of an all-star cast, including Sean Penn, Woody Harrelson, John Cusack, Nick Nolte, and John Travolta (who seems to be in everything), that will be seen in the Twentieth Century-Fox adaptation of James Jones' The Thin Red Line. About…
When I was a kid, I had fantasies of what life must be like to live inside a museum. What stories and secrets of art might I discover? In The Magnolia Palace, Fiona Davis textures such imaginings, setting her novel inside the Frick mansion and alternating between two storylines in 1919 and 1966.
The novel opens in a moment of loss: A famous model named Lillian Carter, who has posed for countless sculptures that adorn New York City landmarks, loses her mother to the Spanish flu in 1919. While Lillian is trying to navigate the complexities of the world, she finds herself caught in an imbroglio, and she runs from the scandal straight to the Frick family home. There she becomes the private secretary to Helen Frick, the challenging daughter of the man who would later transform his mansion into a museum.
Lillian’s story unfolds alongside that of Veronica Weber, a British model in the 1960s who, during a photo shoot at the Frick Collection, gets snowed in and finds herself on quite an adventure.
Within this home and museum, Davis builds a whole world that’s rife with secrets and stories. The novel moves at an engaging pace, with questions waiting to be answered at each turn. Davis knows exactly how to structure a story and how to switch between timelines; even if sometimes you aren’t quite ready to make the jump, you must, in order to find out how it all connects.
A captivating story whose characters are richly drawn, The Magnolia Palace pays particular attention to those who might go unnoticed: the deaf private secretary, the museum intern, the organ player. We discover their private lives and public exposures, which reveal the daily messiness of human lives, the construction of the self and the truths we try so hard to hide.
Maria Ressa’s book is a political history of the Philippines and an intimate memoir, but it’s also a warning to democracies everywhere: Authoritarianism is a threat to us all.
Sean Adams has dialed down the dystopian quotient from his first satirical novel, The Heap, but that element is still very much present in The Thing in the Snow.
