“I guess you haven’t had your adventure yet,” 18-year-old Emmett Watson tells his 8-year-old brother, Billy, who responds, “I think we’re on it now.” And indeed they are, having set out in Emmett’s powder-blue 1948 Studebaker Land Cruiser, planning to head west on the Lincoln Highway, America’s first transcontinental roadway. In light of their father’s recent death, their unlikely goal is to track down their mother—who abandoned them years ago—at a July 4th celebration in San Francisco. 

After mesmerizing legions of readers with the story of Count Alexander Rostov, sentenced in 1922 to spend the rest of his life in an attic room of a grand hotel in A Gentleman in Moscow (2016), Amor Towles takes to the open road in his superb, sprawling, cross-country saga, The Lincoln Highway. Although this great American road trip is quite a change of pace and scenery, Towles continues to transport readers, immersing them just as completely in the adventures of the Watson brothers he did in the seemingly claustrophobic lives of Count Rostov and his young sidekick, Nina. 

Like Nina, young Billy is a creative, intelligent and essential companion to his older brother, and like Rostov, Emmett has had his own brush with the law. As the novel opens in June 1954, Emmett has just been released from an 18-month sentence in a juvenile work camp, having landed on “the ugly side of luck” in a manslaughter case involving a teenage bully. Soon after the Watson brothers start their quest, however, their grand plans are upended by two friends of Emmett’s from the work camp, Duchess and Woolly, who “borrow” the Studebaker and head to New York—forcing Emmett and Billy to stow away on a freight train and head east in hot pursuit.

Packed with drama, The Lincoln Highway takes place in just 10 days, with chapters narrated by a variety of characters. Towles’ fans will be rewarded with many of the same pleasures they’ve come to expect from him: a multitude of stories told at a leisurely pace (the novel clocks in at 592 pages); numerous endearing and sometimes maddening characters; and pitch-perfect plotting with surprises at every turn.

As if that weren’t enough, the novel is chock-full of literary references: a Ralph Waldo Emerson quotation that sets the brothers off on their journey; allusions to The Three Musketeers (Emmett, Duchess and Woolly); a memorable Black World War II veteran named Ulysses; and scenes reminiscent of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Ultimately, The Lincoln Highway is Towles’ unabashed love letter to books and storytelling. 

Late in the novel, a character tells Billy, “There are few things more beautiful to an author’s eye . . . than a well-read copy of one of his books.” Towles has created another winning novel whose pages are destined to be turned—and occasionally tattered—by gratified readers.

War is hell, as we all know, but the last word on that still hasn't been said. Now Joanne Harris gives us a book that exposes the ugliness of war from the viewpoint of three neglected children living in a German-occupied French village during World War II. In Five Quarters of the Orange, narrator Framboise Dartigen unfolds a chilling tale in which she and her two siblings find themselves collaborating with Nazis, trading secrets about their neighbors for chocolate and comic books. The great strength of Five Quarters of the Orange is Harris' unflinching honesty about childhood its capacity for treachery and cruelty. Graphic images of Framboise's war against the life of the nearby river underline this theme. After a village girl is bitten and killed by a venomous snake, Framboise nets a dozen snakes, crushes their skulls and leaves them to rot on the riverbanks.

At the heart of the novel, as in the author's earlier work, Chocolat is a complicated relationship between mother and daughter. Framboise's mother Mirabelle mistakenly applies the same techniques to child rearing that she applies to growing fruit trees: prune them severely, and they will flower. She discovers too late that children don't respond well to constant scolding and deprivation. Mirabelle is also plagued by olfactory hallucinations. Prior to her terrible migraines, she thinks she smells oranges. The scenes in which Framboise takes revenge on her mother by planting a cut-up orange near the stove so that the scent fills the house are among the best in the book. Harris reveals her true genius in these episodes of nine-year-old vindictiveness.

Five Quarters of the Orange isn't just another war novel. It's also a mystery. Why does Framboise disguise her identity when she returns to her childhood village after an absence of 50 years? A scandal hangs over her head from that earlier time, a scandal so flagrant she is sure she will never be accepted back into her community if the people there know exactly who she is. This unknown scandal, gradually revealed to the reader through flashbacks, provides most of the novel's suspense.

To dwell only on the horrors of Five Quarters of the Orange would be to do the book an injustice. Though Harris' genius shines most truly in her portrayal of the ways in which war compromises even the innocent, this book is also rich in charm and whimsy the same kind of graceful good humor that made the author's previous book Chocolat such a big hit. Scenes of the grotesque give way to moments of gentle slapstick. People who are tired of conventional treatments of the elderly in literature will especially enjoy the episode in which the elderly Framboise and her aging neighbor get the better of a 20-something hoodlum terrorizing Framboise's creperie. Their shared triumph sparks an autumnal romance that cannot fail to delight the most cynical readers. Even for someone with skeletons in her closet like Framboise, it's never too late to make a clean breast of things, never too late to fall in love.

Lynn Hamilton writes from Tybee Island, Georgia.

There are two heroines in Karen Joy Fowler's new novel Sister Noon. One is the city of San Francisco, the other a plain, unmarried society woman living there in the 1890s. In a cityscape of wildly unscrupulous tycoons, and women ranging across the entire spectrum of respectability, Lizzie Hayes carries on her quiet but intense struggles against society's oppressive efforts to confine her activities and define her being.

The special topography and architecture of the city on the bay, and the ups-and-downs of its even more unruly moral landscape in a famously decadent era, become the catalysts for the awakening of the novel's unlikely heroine, Lizzie Hayes. Passionate reader, repressed dreamer, fearful fussbudget and moth to the flame of the city's darker side, Lizzie oversees the finances of an orphanage filled with the throwaways of the merciless empire of capital that was California a century ago. She observes both the magnificence and the tawdriness of her metropolis with an absence of judgment and a desperate longing that mark her as a child of her time.

Only the San Francisco of the Gilded Age could have produced both the eccentric Teresa Bell, a prostitute-turned-millionaire's wife, or the formidable Mary Ellen Pleasant, a former slave who passed for years as a white woman but became wealthy only after she revealed her "true" identity (the quotation marks are a necessity for an inveterate chameleon like Mrs. Pleasant). And only by the Golden Gate could two such women live together in the same house and haunt Lizzie Hayes with their inscrutable histories and their thrilling, terrifying suggestions that "you don't have to be the same person your whole life."

The magic of Fowler's portraiture frequently lies in its contradictions: "Mrs. Hallis was a Methodist with the face of a Botticelli. She believed in culpability, which was not the philosophy of most people with such lips."

Karen Joy Fowler is culpable in only one regard, and that is in conjuring the city and citizens of her novel with such concreteness that her readers gladly take her fable of Lizzie Hayes, spinster of San Francisco, as true (no quotations marks necessary).

Michael Alec Rose is a professor of music at Vanderbilt University.

Like any other institution devised by human beings, slavery had its inconsistencies. Lalita Tademy's saga, Cane River, highlights the peculiar way this peculiar institution was practiced in the Louisiana of her ancestors. One hesitates to say that slavery was more benevolent in this part of the Deep South, but the Catholic slaveholders of Louisiana did believe their slaves had souls that should, at least minimally, be tended to. Thus, Tademy's ancestress Suzette is given First Communion, and later her daughter Philomene is allowed to be married (to the extent that a slave could be married) by a priest. These episodes, among many, give Cane River a thrilling sense of newness for the reader that is missing from many grim slavery and post-slavery narratives, such as Toni Morrison's Beloved, that take place in other areas of the South.

Cane River is a novelization of stories Tademy gleaned from years of research about the generations of strong, dedicated, passionate and sometimes wrong-headed women who labored, in all senses of the word, through slavery and beyond. The book begins with Elisabeth, who was sold from Virginia to Louisiana, and one of Tademy's many brilliant touches is her description of the matriarch's difficulties with the Creole French spoken by the slaves and their masters. Tademy proceeds to recount Elisabeth's female descendants' difficulties with the men who owned them or thought they did. As if a metaphor for society itself, the relationships between Suzette and Philomene and Emily and the white fathers of their children evolve from flat-out rape, to distrustful financial arrangements cemented by childbearing, to real, if forbidden and dangerous, love.

Tademy's writing is gripping, whether she's describing the drudgery of day-to-day slave life, the dread felt by slaves about to be sold away from their loved ones, or the joy of an ex-slave finally getting her own house and gathering in the sundered parts of her family.

Tademy doesn't stint on the long-term damage slavery inflicts; the women, identifying with those who aggressed against them, value long straight hair and fair skin above all in their children. But most of the women emerge with their sanity and human dignity intact, and this, along with the fact that Tademy, a former Silicon Valley exec, is here to tell the tale, is the miracle of Cane River.

Arlene McKanic writes from Jamaica, New York.

In 1846, a small group of settlers who flocked to golden California to seek their fortunes met disaster instead. While the westward trek bore many hazards that claimed their share of lives, the group known as the Donner Party has become synonymous with a doom brought on by ill fate and ill planning—doom, and a fate more gruesome than death. Trapped in remote mountains by paralyzing blizzards and desperately short of supplies, some of the group resorted to cannibalism to survive.

Now the story of that perilous journey is retold in James D. Houston's sensitive, moving and compassionate novel, Snow Mountain Passage. Houston's prose vividly recalls the settlers who banded together to trek across the empty plains, and who would wind up depending on each other for survival. Houston tells the story from two perspectives the experiences of James Frazier Reed, who traveled with the Donner Party along with his wife and children, and the recollections of his daughter, Patty, as an elderly woman. Houston skillfully weaves the two timelines and perspectives he tells Reed's story as events unfold, but presents Patty's memories 50 years after the fact. Reed's experiences on the trail serve as a metaphor for the entire settler experience. Enthralled by the prose of a self-appointed prophet of westward migration, he leaves in search of better land and a healthier climate for his ailing wife. Forced to defend himself when a trailside argument turns violent, Reed learns that frontier justice is different from his civilized expectations, and he is expelled from the party. Riding ahead, he becomes the party's only hope when he crosses the mountains just ahead of the storm.

Having encountered former traveling companion Charles Stanton heading with supplies to the party's relief, Reed believes they are safe. But as Patty recalls, the small group of rescuers arrives only as more savage weather engenders an equally savage struggle for survival.

Houston reveals the tragic consequences arising from a combination of prosaic decisions, such as which fork of a trail to take and the unpredictable nature of the elements. In this notable book, the reader shares the lives and experiences of a group which has become a tragic footnote in history.

Gregory Harris is a writer and editor in Indianapolis.

Emily Jenkins had every reason to distrust the electrical crews building their massive steel high-tension towers on a right-of-way purchased from her family's mountain farm. She suspected that the company got her family's land for less than they should have paid. Her father and brother had been killed in a mine explosion all too common in the West Virginia of the 1920s and she and her mother needed the money. Even worse, a tentative friendship she struck up with a handsome company executive had taken a very wrong turn. So it was with great suspicion that she greeted a crew of linemen bearing a severely injured comrade who plummeted from a tower one stormy evening.

Much to her surprise, though, the arrival of this stranger proves to be a turning point in Emily's life. Her story is told in captivating fashion in Lick Creek, a noteworthy debut novel by Brad Kessler. Already an award-winning children's author, Kessler masterfully expands his range by weaving the story of Emily's young womanhood with the experiences of Joseph, a Russian Jewish immigrant who discovers magic in the wires lacing the big cities. Lick Creek conjures the mystery and tranquility of the deep West Virginia mountains, an area so remote that the continent's second-oldest river was dubbed the "New" because the gorge through which it flows lay unexplored for so long. Kessler relates the hazards of coal mining in the offhand manner in which the miners accept the risks, so that when dozens of lives end with a blast that reverberates throughout the valley, it comes as a shock but not a surprise. Kessler draws the reader eagerly toward a conclusion reminiscent of the great novel Cold Mountain, in which the events of decades past are connected with people living decades later. This superb first novel adds to the laurels Kessler has received for his children's books.

Gregory Harris is a writer and editor in Indianapolis who enjoys whitewater rafting on West Virginia's New River.

Ever since Chris Adrian's acclaimed short story "Every Night for a Thousand Years" appeared in the New Yorker in 1997, readers have waited for the release of the author's first novel. In Gob's Grief, their wait is rewarded with a visionary book that builds on the Civil War-era story first introduced some four years earlier.

In the original tale, American poet Walt Whitman watches over the deathbed of a child soldier suffering his final days in an Army hospital. Whitman's despair drives him to near madness. In Gob's Grief, Whitman makes the acquaintance of George Washington Woodhull, better known as Gob, the fictitious son of real-life feminist and presidential candidate Virginia Woodhull. Raised in the Ohio countryside by a quirky extended family, Gob apprentices himself to the man-beast Urfeist to unlock the secrets of death. Gob has suffered relentless anguish since his 11-year-old-brother Tomo ran off to fight in the Civil War and was killed. Now he is driven to build a machine that will bring his brother and thousands of other Civil War dead back to life.

Now studying to become doctor (as is author Chris Adrian) Gob constructs a mechanical device that eventually spreads throughout his New York City townhouse. Guided by the drawings of Gob's wife, the machine becomes a gruesome manifestation of his madness.

Part history novel, part science fiction, Gob's Grief delves into the depths of passion that motivates the unique collection of characters. Well researched and vividly imagined, the novel details Virginia Woodhull's quest for women's suffrage and free love with excerpts from actual speeches. Some of Whitman's writings are used with poignant effect, too.

Through it all Adrian's descriptive writing marries madness and reality. As Virginia confers with her muses and Whitman waxes poetic, the line between fact and fiction blurs. Gob's Grief is a memorable exploration into the mind of madness.

Amber Stephens is a freelance writer in Columbus, Ohio.

If, as Virginia Woolf said, the novel is an art form essentially about character, this one sure meets the quantity test. Kneale tells his story from the standpoint of 20 or so Victorian narrators: a Manx sea captain, a half-breed Tasmanian aborigine, his homicidal mother, a proto-Nazi physician, several demented evangelical clergymen, hardened convicts and their guards.

The tale begins near the Isle of Man during a smuggling run that goes enough awry and sends the Manx sailors on a charter to Tasmania. Accompanying them on the voyage is a barmy parson looking for the Garden of Eden and his surgeon fellow explorer who is doing his unwitting best to anticipate the philosophy of Mein Kampf. Meanwhile, the aborigines of Tasmania are chased by murderous rapist convicts across their homeland, setting the two plot strands of the novel to coincide in the mountains of Tasmania.

There is a lot to like about this novel. Kneale shows his erudition in a number of fields like Tasmanian history, the Manx dialect, aboriginal psychology, and the crackpot racist theories of a mid-19th century physician. His handling of tone, too, is deft. The unrelenting tragedy of the aboriginal genocide is considerably lightened by the perfect absurdity of the Englishmen seeking the Garden of Eden in Tasmania. Think Patrick O'Brian meets A Confederacy of Dunces.

The book is so colorful and sweeping, it is easy to overlook some of its deeper underpinnings. The English colonizers, including the convicts, are without exception cruel and arrogant (at least until they lose their sanity). So here, at the high tide of the British empire, are the despised conquerors. But look deeper: Dr. Potter is on the expedition because he is interested in the racial determination of history, an alternative view to the economic determination theories Marx was propounding about the same time. These two views, of course, have been the miserable standards under which so much blood has been shed in the 20th century. The irony of the novel is that Kneale tells his tale, too, with a historical determination. Just about everything that can happen does happen, but none of it seems outlandish or unlikely. This is the mark of a skilled writer who knows his stuff. Tell us more.

John Foster is an attorney in Columbia, South Carolina.