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.

George MacDonald Fraser's hero in this latest history-as-novel entry is Tom Molineaux, a freed slave-turned-pugilist from New Orleans whose skills as a boxer during England's pre-Regency era both captivated and infuriated the "Fancy" (the British boxing and sporting establishment). In 1810, Molineaux, the "Black Ajax," fought and lost a legendary bout against Britain's champion Tom Cribb; in the re-match, in 1811, Cribb again bested Molineaux. There was never a third encounter, but those two titanic battles set both Cribb and Molineaux "aloft and apart; it was a case of Cribb first, Molineaux second, and the rest nowhere."

Cribb retired undefeated in 1822 the first superstar in the history of the sport. Molineaux died in 1818, a broken-down, drunken, prize-ring cast-off ; his chief claims to fame today are the two celebrated fights with Cribb and the fact that he was the first (and, according to Fraser, perhaps the best) in a long succession of great black heavyweight boxers.

Employing a variant of William Faulkner's use of multiple narrators, Fraser gives us the rise and fall of Tom Molineaux through the statements (as recorded by an unidentified interviewer) of 16 witnesses real, fictitious, and anonymous. The entire spectrum of society is represented, from Prinny (H.R.H. the Prince of Wales) to Senora Marguerite Rossignol (lady of fashion and independent means). Even Captain Buckley ("Mad Buck") Flashman, late of the 23rd Light Dragoons, makes his bow, with a spate of rodomontade and gossip reminiscent of the performances of his more famous offspring, Harry (the notorious centerpiece of Fraser's Flashman Papers).

The most moving witnesses, however, are those members of the Fancy who were closest to the Black Ajax–the retired pugilists and trainers and instructors and managers and promoters whose statements transform the story of Tom Molineaux into a drama with tragic dimensions. The voice of Bill Richmond (former slave, retired pugilist, and fight promoter) foreshadows this tragic element. Before the second fight with Cribb, Richmond comments, he had told Molineaux that, even when black people are free, they "will always think like slaves until one of them wins . . . some thing which the white man believes belongs to him alone. The Championship of England is such a thing . . . and I tell you, when a black man wins it, he will have changed the world."

Tom Molineaux lost that second bout, and during the remainder of his brief life, he lived out the doom that the voice of Paddington Jones (retired pugilist and former light heavyweight champion of England) pronounced for him: "There never was a pugilist with greater gifts, or one who squandered them so foolishly. He could have risen to the heights . . . why, for a moment he did. But there were two fighters he never could beat. One was Tom Cribb, and the other was Tom Molineaux."

The year is 1837. The streets and back alleys of London teem with squalid poverty. Jack Maggs, the title character of Peter Carey's arresting new novel, has returned furtively to England, from the penal colony in Australia to which he has been deported for life. An accomplished thief from the earliest days of childhood, the fugitive Maggs easily slips back, unnoticed, into the city. But why, and for whom, has Maggs risked his life to return?

Maggs arrives at his destination, a grand house in Great Queen Street, and finds it vacant. Its master, a young man named Henry Phipps, has dismissed his household and disappeared into the night. But, while lurking on the property, Maggs is mistaken for an applicant for a footman's job by Mercy Larkin, the maid at a neighboring house. He accepts the position, seeing it as an opportunity to wait for Phipps's return in relative secrecy.

Installed in the house of Percival Buckle, a grocer who has become a gentleman through inheritance, Maggs is recruited unwillingly as a subject in some experiments in mesmerization. This early form of hypnosis is the obsession of an up-and-coming novelist named Tobias Oates, who wants to uncover the phantoms he believes are haunting Maggs. Indeed, Maggs has a number of dark secrets and one grand objective, all of which unravel in due time.

From these mysterious beginnings, Jack Maggs takes readers on an unexpected trip into an 18th-century world of privilege and privation, of preconceptions and misapprehension. It would spoil readers' enjoyment of this ambitious novel even to hint at the strange directions in which Carey takes them. I'll only divulge that lost loves, old scores, tragic deaths, and surprise progeny all play a hand in the intertwined fates of Maggs, Oates, Buckle, Phipps, Mercy, and a number of others.

The most remarkable thing about this engrossing book is the novelist's achievement in bringing to life the historical setting. The authority of the work's narrative voice belies its late 20th century origins. In scope, in tenor, and in narrative inventiveness, Carey writes with the seeming ease of a true Victorian master—a Dickens, say, or a Thackeray. Yet, unlike them, he is able to infuse this uncanny 19th-century sensibility with modern psychological insight.

A book that should take its place proudly alongside the other works in Carey's impressive opus, including the Booker Prize-winning Oscar and Lucinda, Jack Maggs is, above all else, a good and challenging read. Which is just what Carey's fans have come to expect.

In Company of Liars, British author Karen Maitland makes her U.S. debut with a novel that tips its hat deeply to The Canterbury Tales, executed with stunning skill and precision. Her medieval world is full of the fantasy and mystery you'd expect from the genre, but it also parallels our own culture more than we might expect.

It's 1348, and the Black Plague has begun its malignant spread across England. Our narrator, an itinerant relic peddler, has reluctantly allowed two minstrels to travel with him as they flee from the disease. From that trio, the company grows to nine (if we count the horse), among them a magician with an ax to grind, a gifted storyteller who just might be half swan and an eerily prescient child rune-reader. All have stories to tell—and something to hide. As they outrun the plague, it becomes apparent that they're being hunted by something else as well. But which one's secret threatens to destroy the whole group?

Maitland holds a doctorate in psycholinguistics, and she has crafted a smart, historically informed novel, effectively portraying an era dominated by faith and superstition. But the novel is an aesthetic treasure as well as an academic one. The characters are human and fascinating, and the excellently paced storyline is spooky and thrilling. Company of Liars would look delightful on stage or screen. But it's so vivid, so enchanted that it needs no visual aid.

Jessica Inman writes and reads in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

In his fifth novel, The Whiskey Rebels, David Liss delves once again into the financial intrigues of an earlier century and the effects they had on his cast of characters, both fictional and real, in post – Revolutionary War America.

In Philadelphia in early 1792 we meet Capt. Ethan Saunders, whose military career ended in disgrace in the weeks before Yorktown. Documents found in his belongings and those of his older friend Fleet indicated they were British spies, and both were branded as traitors. Fleet was later somewhat mysteriously killed; Saunders' life—including his relationship with Fleet's daughter, Cynthia – was ruined by those totally false allegations. Now Cynthia is asking for Saunders' help: her husband, Jacob Pearson, is missing. All she knows is that his disappearance is somehow related to Alexander Hamilton's new Bank of the United States. As Saunders investigates, he discovers that Pearson's disappearance is merely the tip of the iceberg in a plot that threatens Hamilton's bank and extends to the Pennsylvania frontier, where Duer, an associate of Hamilton, is selling land under false pretenses. Saunders also learns that Pearson is the man who betrayed him and Cynthia's father . . . and the plot begins to take nearly unfathomable twists and turns.

Meanwhile, in the woods of western Pennsylvania, the settlers of Duer's "wondrous fertile" land, which turned out to be "wild forest" have made the best of things and begun making a superior brand of whiskey. Their profits are steadily increasing. When they hear of the new whiskey tax being pushed by Hamilton, the "architect of American corruption"; and Duer, his principal agent, a scheme is hatched to "restore the goals of the Revolution"—a scheme which quickly becomes a full-blown rebellion.

Liss deftly ties together these two elaborate plots, displaying his familiarity with 18th-century financial history, and offers a fascinating look at the factions vying for power in the early years of this country's existence.

Deborah Donovan writes from La Veta, Colorado.

In the 1930s, Franklin County, Virginia, held a dubious distinction: nearly 100 percent of the population was illegally trading in liquor. Sherwood Anderson called it "the wettest section" of the United States, positing that even after Prohibition had ended, the moonshine continued to flow. These facts are the starting point for Matt Bondurant's gritty novel based on the lives of his grandfather and great – uncles, who were notorious bootleggers in Franklin and who also testified in the county's most infamous federal trial. For his fictionalized account, Bondurant listened to family stories and combed through archives, news clippings and court transcripts to get the details, but as he points out in the afterword, it was his job to explore the emotional truths behind the action.

Bondurant imagines that the devastating loss of their mother and sisters in the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 had great impact on the Bondurant sons – Howard, Forrest and Jack – who within a decade had become active in the illicit manufacture and transporting of liquor. The novel's action sweeps from a violent attack against Forrest in 1928 to an unsolved crime six years later when two men were hospitalized, one castrated, and the other with legs shattered from hip to ankle. The crime attracted the American writer Sherwood Anderson, who came to the area in hopes of writing an article about a mysterious female bootlegger and the upcoming federal trial. Stymied by the overwhelming silence of the community, Anderson took to the county roads, trying to find the Bondurant brothers and break the secrecy surrounding the violence.

Bondurant has immersed himself in the sights, smells and sounds of rural Virginia, and the novel has almost a documentary feel. His rich descriptions of the county landscapes and the hardscrabble lives of its inhabitants invoke the small – town streets and struggling characters of Anderson's best known novel, Winesburg, Ohio. At the same time, the action builds with the tension of a good thriller.

One caveat to the more sensitive reader: The Wettest County in the World is extremely graphic, with multiple descriptions of physical injury, brutality and sadistic behavior. There are tender moments, however, all the more lovely for their infrequency.

Ahab's Wife is bound to be remembered as an epic. At almost 700 pages and spanning roughly the first half of the 19th century, the novel follows the life of a rather atypical woman named Una, whose curiosity and native intelligence push her beyond the bounds of her family, her region, and her gender.

The novel begins with white knuckles: the adult Una is freezing to death in the midst of childbirth during a blizzard which has just killed her mother. Despite this, she unflinchingly deflects a posse headed by a dwarf on the trail of a runaway slave (who has hidden in Una's bed). The slave helps deliver Una's child, who dies upon birth.

And that's just the first 10 pages. Una's predicament causes her to reflect upon the circumstances that brought her to that point, which begin with her mother sending her off to live with an aunt in Nantucket because of her insane father's physical brand of religious zeal. With a keen eye for a child's interest in the natural world, the author portrays Una's upbringing among her loving, if isolated, cousins. Her reintroduction to the outside world comes in the form of two sailors who fire her mind with newfound scientific knowledge.

Donning a man's name and appearance, she joins the sailors aboard a whaler and has the bad luck to meet a foul-tempered whale that sinks her ship. After a harrowing period of deprivation at sea laced with finely wrought accounts of cannibalism, dementia, and the dogged will to survive Una is rescued and winds up aboard Ahab's Pequod. And it is there that another adventure begins.

Rich in historical detail and clever hat-doffing to other great books, Ahab's Wife nevertheless is capable of standing alone. Much of its appeal (as with Moby Dick) lies in its characters' journeys toward self-knowledge, bravery and cunning during bad times, and humor, love, and wonder in good ones. Mostly, however, the novel is a surprisingly sentimental description of the trickle-down of Enlightenment ideals to the scurvy masses, a progression away from the shackles of religious dogma to a more empirical, pragmatic approach to life.

Adam Dunn writes reviews and features for Current Diversions and Speak magazine.

Shades of the Duke, the King and even Fagin: Benjamin Nab spins stories that have them all beat. Wanted on 17 separate charges, he can usually come up with the necessary lie to get out of the fix. Even when he can't, it's not for want of trying, but because the real truth is even more creative.

Ren is the pawn in this 19th-century chess game, a 12-year-old boy who is struggling to grow up in the hardscrabble reality of a monastic orphanage in small-town New England. Despite having lost a hand in infancy, one of the survival techniques he has learned is petty theft: "Ren was responsible for most of the lost things being prayed for at the statue of Saint Anthony." So when Benjamin drops by the orphanage one day to adopt Ren with the idea of training him to assist in the ongoing con game of his life, it's not quite the stretch it might be for other orphans. And if adopting Ren means Benjamin has to say the boy is actually his brother, well, it's no worse than any other lie he's told.

Hannah Tinti was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Animal Crackers, her collection of short stories. She's also the co-founder and editor-in-chief of One Story magazine. Her first novel, The Good Thief is in several places a stark, dark shark of a story that will make the reader gasp, but the tale eventually ends up in relatively calm and healing waters, where hope seems to be a possibility after all.

One of The Good Thief's strengths is its world of one-of-a-kind characters: the dental comedian; the chimney dwarf; the affable, though murderous, former "corpse"; the corporate malefactor. They are strange, weird and often lovable, as long as the reader can suspend judgment in favor of the general idea that all God's children have their good points. This quirky crew of thieves and grave robbers might be Ren's only hope for discovering the truth about his heritage. For all its hijinks, The Good Thief minces no words, and hides no happenings. Still, somehow it manages to leave the reader with a smile.

Maude McDaniel writes from Maryland.