Prolific Joanna Trollope, descendent of equally prolific 19th century novelist Anthony Trollope, publishes romances in England under the pseudonym Caroline Harvey. Her U. S. popularity stems largely from Masterpiece Theatre adaptations of contemporary novels published under her own name, like The Choir and The Rector’s Wife. Banking on name recognition to reach an American market already acquainted with Trollope, Viking plans to publish Harvey novels under the Trollope name, starting with The Brass Dolphin.

Trollope sets her tale of self-discovery on rocky, history-laden Malta. Its stony heights and its peculiar mixture of middle East and Europe, of ancient and modern cultures, intensify protagonist Lila Cunningham’s internal conflicts about status, social class, and her own sense of place. A hand-forged door knocker in the form of a brass dolphin serves first as icon for the island of Malta, later as symbol for young LilaÔs discovery of her genuine self.

World War II, with its heavy Axis bombardment of this tiny English outpost, intensifies Lila’s sense of isolation and self-pity. She despairs of realizing her dream of release from a life of poverty and dutiful care of a crippled father. Trollope, who was herself born during World War II, renders the fatigue and grief of wartime experience mingled with the stuff of high romance.

Dislocated by poverty from her dream of London ( because that’s where things happen ), unhappily chained to an eccentric father she sees as worthless, Lila holds the Maltese world at arm’s lengthÐdespite the attentions of a young Maltese nationalist, Alfonso Sabila. Then she goes to work for Count Julius of Tabia Palace in the Silent City, and meets his two handsome sons, Max and Anton. Trollope knows better than to leave a plot at the level of melodrama. Her characters have intricate inner lives. She permits them slow and organic unfolding. She has the gift of making readers like an unlikeable protagonist. She does her homework, rendering her fictional worlds real, based on responsible research. She creates convincing if inconclusive endings that feel like life. In The Brass Dolphin the war itself proves a testing ground for Lila. She must come to terms with her narrow resentments, her oblique snobbery toward Maltese peasants, her desire to retreat into a sheltered world of refinement. If Lila can finally hang the dolphin knocker at her front door, readers, too, should come to a keener understanding of painful modern issues of caste and class.

Joanne Lewis Sears profiles artists for the Montecito Journal in California and writes travel articles for Senior magazine.

Mark Twain Remembers is a fictitious account of a major American literary figure looking back at an incident which changed his life forever. It is a novel, but — as would be any book attempting to be a speculative biography — it is also opinionated. A substantial portion of the book and at least two complete chapters are devoted almost solely to the themes of slavery and God. The novel begins with Twain speculating about who will win a major boxing match after the turn of the century: A black man, or a white man. Twain is not sure who he hopes will win and it brings back the memory of a former slave. Twain then tells about himself, what the world was like when he was born, and the experiences that made him the man he is (although fictional in this particular case).

Mark Twain Remembers follows the adventures of Twain from a man who has never shaken hands with a black man to a man who owns one. Twain wins a slave in a poker game for the single purpose of setting him free, but the black man won’t take his freedom out of fear of what such freedom means. A friendship develops, and a lot of understanding as well.

If one has followed the unfair remarks against Mark Twain over the years, regarding his literary portrayals of minority characters set in the late 1800s (some people even suggesting that his books be banned from schools), one cannot help but think that Thomas Hauser wrote this novel in response to those allegations of prejudice. "To arrive at a just estimate of a man’s character, one must judge him by the standards of his time," Hauser writes in the voice of Twain. Mark Twain wrote America as he saw it then. The novel implies that if Twain wrote today, his subject matter would be different. The caricatures would probably be much worse, but we wouldn’t see it.

Clay Stafford is a writer and filmmaker.

Australian author Colleen McCullough is probably best known for her beloved bestseller, The Thorn Birds. But in the years since the release of that brilliant work, McCullough has concentrated on other topics, mainly her epic series, The Masters of Rome. Now, in her latest, Morgan’s Run, McCullough returns to her beloved down-under to tell the story of that nation’s birth.

At the center of this powerful narrative is the gentle Richard Morgan. The son of an English tavern-keeper, Morgan is a hard working and devoted son, husband, and father. However, after the devastating deaths of his wife and son, Morgan falls in with unsavory company and finds himself the victim of an elaborate set-up. He ends up a convict in some of England’s worst prisons.

By chance, he is chosen to board the infamous First Fleet, which transported over 500 males and over 100 females from England to the mysterious Botany Bay at the end of the 18th century. But this was not a pleasure cruise. After spending many anguishing months aboard the filthy prison vessels, Morgan and his fellow inmates found their worst nightmares were just beginning: they were expected to civilize the hostile land.

A man of quiet strength and strong moral convictions, Richard Morgan is one of Colleen McCullough’s most compelling characters. He stands out among the rest of the convicts due to his keen intelligence, common sense, and gentle willingness to help others. Throughout his trials and tribulations, Morgan remains dignified, even in horrible situations that would have broken a lesser man. In Morgan’s Run, McCullough has created an epic drama rivaled only by her own bestsellers. But she has also interwoven throughout the story a detailed and precise history of life in England during the American Revolution, as well as the beginnings of the foundling nation of Australia. And, amazingly enough, though much of the book dwells on the hardships endured by Morgan, there are also moments of joy and beauty. Romance can be found in the oddest places, and McCullough includes moments of passion among the grief and heartaches of life. In her author’s notes, McCullough explains that the real Richard Morgan is the four-times great-grandfather of her husband, and that she found his story fascinating. Readers will find themselves agreeing with her, as they follow his unforgettable journey in Morgan’s Run.

Sharon Galligar Chance is the senior book reviewer for the Times Record News in Wichita Falls, Texas.

Review By Sharon Galligar Chance Noted African-American author Connie Briscoe remembers as a child seeing two portraits of very light-complexioned women on her grandmother’s bureau and asking who the two white women were. She was told they were her great-great grandmother and great-great aunt. And they weren’t white ; both had been slaves up until the end of the Civil War. Being naturally curious, Briscoe set out to uncover the family history. From this research came A Long Way from Home. This emotional narrative is a multi-generational story of slavery, freedom, and the unbreakable bonds of family, as told through three unforgettable women. A Long Way from Home recounts the lives of Susie, her daughter Clara, and her granddaughter Susan. Born and raised as privileged house slaves on Montpelier, the Virginia plantation of President James Madison and his wife Dolley Madison, these women are united by love, a fierce devotion to each other, and, ultimately, a desire for freedom. For Susie, life holds no promise beyond the plantation. As a personal maid to Miss Dolley, she is content. Daughter Clara, however, longs to control her own destiny despite her mother’s words of caution: . . . You don’t know a thing about freedom, ’cause I don’t know anything about it. It takes money and know-how to live free. You don’t just up and do it. Life changes for both women with the death of James Madison and the departure of his wife for her town house. As a result of neglectful management, the plantation eventually falls to a series of owners, each posing a new threat to Susie and Clara and the other longtime Madison slaves. ÊAmid these devastating changes, Clara grows to womanhood and becomes a mother herself, giving birth to two light-skinned daughters, one of whom is Susan. She never reveals the identity of the girls’ white father, and raises them as slaves. Yet the threat of separation is forever lurking, becoming a terrible reality when the younger daughter, Susan, is sold to a wealthy businessman in Richmond. She must create a new life, and it’s in Civil War-torn Richmond that she finds love and the long-held dream of freedom. Briscoe vividly recreates her family’s history with dignity and honesty. This passionate tale pays homage to the African-American experience during the 1800s and to the ancestors, both black and white, whose lives and histories became forever entwined.

Sharon Galligar Chance is the senior book reviewer for the Times Record News in Wichita Falls, Texas.

1943 and all that The British long have boasted that their island nation has not been invaded by a foreign power in nearly a thousand years, not since William the Conqueror’s little expedition in 1066. It’s a pretty boast, and it’s almost true. They tend to overlook that Germany invaded the Channel Islands, off the coast of France, in 1940 and occupied them throughout World War II.

The story of the occupation has been told before, most succinctly in Alan and Mary Wood’s Islands in Danger. But that was historical fact. Tim Binding now tells it in historical fiction in Lying with the Enemy (Carroll and Graf, $24, 0786706570), a novel set on Guernsey in 1943 that combines war story and whodunit to thumping great effect.

There are understandable reasons for shoving aside the inconvenient fact of occupation, because it brings in its train the embarrassing issues of capitulation and, especially, collaboration. The embarrassment was as true then as today. For what were they now? What identity did they possess? thinks Ned Luscombe, Guernsey’s unwilling police-inspector-by-default. England kept quiet about the Channel Islands as if she were punishing the islands for letting the side down. Collaboration is the subject of Lying with the Enemy (seemingly expressed in the possible double meaning of the title, though the British title was Island Madness). Are you a traitor, the story implicitly asks, if you work for the occupiers in order to support your family? Are you more of a traitor if you’re a businessman whose enterprise supplies the work? Are you a greater traitor still if you operate, or buy from, a black market when people are on near-starvation rations? The story asks these questions not because the author has the answers or even necessarily believes in the concept of treason but because the questions are always on the minds of the populace.

Conquerors and conquered manage to get on, sometimes swimmingly. Marjorie Hallivand, doyenne of Guernsey’s pre-war smart set, is exhilarated by the war and the German officers, especially Major Lentsch, the island’s commandant: They were of the same class, after all. Even those not of the island’s petty aristocracy, like Veronica Vaudin, find it advantageous to be pliant. What surprised these men, still dressed in their once-feared uniforms, was how quickly the women had embraced their way of life. The sharpest expression of the collaboration is the relationship of Guernsey women to the German men. War in an insular backwater apparently having inflamed both the island’s inhabitants and the author’s imagination, there is copulation on a wholesale scale, though its distribution as always, whether in war or peace is unequal. Luscombe and Lentsch, however, have equally shared the favors of Isobel van Dielen, though at different times. Isobel is the daughter of a wealthy, widowed contractor who is helping the Germans with a monstrous construction project being built by 16,000 slave laborers, known as foreigns, who toil in brutish conditions, ignored by the islanders. Luscombe and Lentsch are enemies in love and war, until Isobel turns up dead, her mouth and nose filled with cement. Her death and the search for her killer bring them gradually closer together, though Luscombe initially suspects that Lentsch had something to do with the murder. Here the novel’s tight construction tightens still further, as it screws itself up to rush down the multiplying dark avenues of a proper and highly satisfying murder mystery. Why has Isobel’s father disappeared? Did he kill her, as many islanders believe? Was the charming and cruel Captain Zepernick, who likes to romp au naturel through the Victor Hugo house with Veronica, involved in some way? Or was Isobel killed by one of the foreigns? The murderer and motive, revealed at the very end, are more banal than anything suggested by those possibilities. By that time we have learned of the fundamental decency of Lentsch and of the supposedly sluttish Veronica.

We also learn that much of this activity has been driven behind the scenes by a possible visit to the island by Hitler, to whom, throughout the story, the author refers in capitals He, Him, His like a deity. Germany was His after all, like the world is God’s, and who knows? maybe the future will wipe out the distinction.

But by that point in history such a consummation was not in the cards, however devoutly some Germans and some others wished it. Ah, war who the enemy, who the friend? Is collaboration treason? It depends.

Roger K. Miller is a freelance writer in Wisconsin.

If the new millennium is the time of tofu and veggieburgers, then the 1940s would have to be represented by a thick, juicy T-bone steak. Life these days is cast in terms of political correctness, non-violence, and fashion from the thrift store; by contrast, the ’40s were for white men only, and you’d better have been packing some heat along with that $400 suit and fedora you were wearing.

Earl Swagger has just had the Medal of Honor bestowed on him by a beaming Harry Truman in the opening scene of Stephen Hunter’s new novel, Hot Springs. The war is over, silver jets fly in the sky, and a new invention called television is showing up in department store windows. Why then, is this Marine hero sitting in a White House bathroom pointing an auto-matic pistol to his head? The mental journey this bitter soldier makes to find inner peace is anything but peaceful. He is approached by the young, ambitious, and newly elected prosecuting attorney of Hot Springs, Arkansas. The city is lawless, run by a British born mob boss late of New York City, a hot spring of prostitution, gambling, entertainment, and booze. He’s been so successful that a certain Benjamin Bugsy Seigel is checking out his operation in hopes of transplanting the concept to an unknown desert town named Las Vegas. Earl, along with a retired FBI agent and a small group of young law enforcement officers, must take on this well entrenched and very well armed group of gangsters. Elliot Ness had it easy compared to these guys.

An experienced master of the high-testosterone thriller, Hunter does a great job of evoking the time period; the fact that the ’40s is a decade synonymous with tough guys on both sides of the law makes it easy for him. You expect his characters to be hard drinking, hard loving men’s men.

Stephen Hunter is a skilled storyteller, familiar with his settings, his characters, and his genre. If you like tough thrillers, you’ll like Hot Springs.

James Neal Webb has a gray fedora hanging on a hat rack in his living room. He hasn’t worn it in years.