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.

The book jacket of Jerome Charyn’s imagined life of Emily Dickinson depicts a demure young lady captured in a Victorian silhouette. The thing is, the woman’s hoop skirt is transparent and beneath it there are long legs, a hint of hot pants and booties. This image gives us the first hint that, no—Charyn’s Emily isn’t the recluse we’ve all heard about. Though she calls herself a "mouse” (among many other things), she’s not. She’s obsessed with, enraptured by and completely stupid about men, beginning with her father, the loving but overbearing and eccentric Edward Dickinson, the Squire of Amherst, Massachusetts. Indeed, given her fascination with the human male, you wonder how this version of Emily managed to stay unmarried all of her life, and a virgin (at least in the book) ’till she was about 52, if this reviewer read that scene correctly. And then you wonder how she found time to write her strange, sublime, deathless poetry. Biographers suggest that Emily was passionate, intemperate even. What she wasn’t was a ninny.

The novel begins with Emily at the women’s seminary at Mt. Holyoke, where she is a restless and skeptical teenager. She falls in love with the only male creature around: Tom the handyman, a blond, impoverished near mute who lives in a shack. When he comes down with a fever, she jumps at the chance to nurse him, elbowing aside the girl who becomes his lover in the process. Tom, in this rendering, will be the secret love of Emily’s life; she never gets over him even as she fixates on depressive preachers and other sad sacks. None of these chaps can possibly compete with her father, an otherwise powerful man who can’t seem to function without her and is much closer to her than he could ever be to his neurasthenic wife. The men who breeze in and out of Emily’s gaze aren’t up to par with her handsome Yalie brother Austin, who comes close to thrashing one of them for luring his “wild sister” into a rum joint.

This fictional Emily Dickinson may exhibit a surprising amount of indiscipline, although Charyn displays an eye for detail and an understanding of human inner turmoil that will draw in the reader. Of note in the book are echoes of the poetry that made Emily famous, as in the time she sees that fabled snake in her family’s orchard. Scenes that combine fantasy and poetry are the novel’s greatest success.

Six years after the end of the Civil War, Union veteran Jacob Hansen and his wife and baby daughter have settled into the small prairie town of Friendship, Wisconsin, where Jacob works at three jobs: constable, minister and undertaker. Jacob's enjoyment of the bright languid days of summer is quickly interrupted by the discovery of a corpse that of a stranger, another Union veteran, lying in a field outside of town. Almost immediately, Jacob encounters another stranger, a sick woman, writhing on the ground. Is she from the Colony, the cult group in the woods back of town? Doc Guterson's diagnosis is diphtheria, and so begins a tale told in spare, terse prose that finds Jacob's three professions demanding his leadership. This obligation will remind us of Job, and Camus, as death strikes Friendship again and again, yielding only to a forest fire that threatens to cleanse the horror of pestilence with its searing flames.

O'Nan metaphorically reflects Jacob's Civil War experiences in the present plague and quarantine: "The fire doesn't come in a line, a front of troops . . ." We are brought to identify with Jacob, past and present, as he questions his decisions and his relationship to God. As in his ministry, Jacob is ambivalent. Early on he observes, "It's when you're happiest, sure of your own strength, that you need to bow down and talk with God." You wonder if that is lax or fanatic. Later, things have to get better for Friendship. They're not idle wishes, not desperate yet . . . Surely at the very least there is mercy. And much later, "Is it true, after all you've preached, that you'd rather live a sinner than surrender to Him and be forgiven?" Your empathy for Jacob is also reinforced by O'Nan's use of the second-person point of view "you."

The author's economy of description is especially effective: "You go out on the sidewalk and squint into the afternoon. Take your bike and fly between the high fields. Hawks, sun, blue." A Prayer for the Dying is a demanding, breathtaking experience that you will finish reading with respect and appreciation.

Dennis J. Hannan lives in Wappingers Falls, New York.

The bibliography tucked at the tail end of Philippa Gregory's The Other Queen might come as a surprise to those who assume that only nonfiction writers are rooted to the rigors of scholarly research. For this best-selling author of novels such as The Other Boleyn Girl, The Queen's Fool and The Virgin's Lover, a passion for historical accuracy is the cornerstone of her abundant story-telling gift. Deftly weaving fact and fiction into a lyrical, literary tapestry that transcends the boundaries of the too-often predictable genre of historical fiction, Gregory has once again crafted a mesmerizing novel that will keep readers turning pages deep into the night.

Gregory's legions of loyal fans are already well aware of the author's aptitude for capturing the timeless pathos of 16th-century Englishwomen, royals and peasants alike. Perhaps never before has Mary, Queen of Scots, been portrayed in such a contemporary, complex manner: a beautiful, charming, headstrong and spoiled young woman who is both maddeningly self-absorbed and overwhelmingly courageous. The same is true for the novel's anti-heroine, Bess of Hardwick, who transcends her hardscrabble childhood via a trail of calculated betrothals and consequent widowhoods. Proud and pragmatic, Bess harbors no illusions about romantic love, and instead, sets her heart on the comforts of rank and financial security, a coup she achieves with her final marriage, to George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury.

Nonetheless, after Bess and George Talbot are asked by Queen Elizabeth to provide "sanctuary" for the beleaguered Mary, Queen of Scots, the couple's companionable marriage is jeopardized, with poor George smitten by the young queen's winsome ways, and his once implacable wife reeling with jealousy and, worse, the discovery that she is once again on the brink of poverty.

In the end, which arrives after a series of riveting chapters alternating between the voices and perspectives of Mary, Bess and George, nothing is what it seems. This spell-binding tale of Elizabethan England adds up to a novel as sweet and thorny as a wild English rose.

Karen Ann Cullotta is a freelance writer and journalism instructor in Chicago.

In her very first words in Josephine Hart’s The Stillest Day, Bethesda Barnet states simply to her readers, to those who would judge her that for the first 30 years of her life she led a pious and steady life. Then one day she turned her back on piety, acting on some primeval urge that even 30 years of steadiness could not snuff out. The novel follows a path backward from this starting point. We learn that Bethesda Barnet is an art teacher in a small English town at the turn of the century who cares for her ailing mother, allows herself to be courted by a respectable man, and paints in her spare hours. She is a woman who knows the confines of her limited role in life and stays within them.

Then one day during a rain shower, Bethesda glimpses the school’s newest teacher, Mathew Pearson. That one glimpse is enough to unmoor her. Obsessed, she paints Mathew’s face upon mirrors and gazes into those mirrors so as to join her image with his. The arrival of Matthew’s pregnant wife, Mary, does not quell Bethesda’s passions; she simply hides her unhinging in more clever ways. Mary, cheerful and maternal her thoughts as transparent as Bethesda’s are hidden strikes up a friendship with Bethesda’s ailing mother. And it is during one of Mary’s visits to the Barnet household that Bethesda commits the act that will alter her life forever. It’s an act that’s essentially merciful; yet in the eyes of the town, it infringes upon the powers reserved for God. How dare Bethesda Barnet a woman take the powers of life and death into her own frail hands?

Like Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, Bethesda will be scorned and feared the rest of her life for her actions. Unlike Hester Prynne, though, Bethesda’s act leaves her free to be the woman she becomes, for better or for worse. Less and less a teacher and daughter, Bethesda becomes fully a painter, her canvasses evolving from still lifes of church and town to the surreal. In her love for Mathew, she grows fierce and hard. In short, Bethesda Barnet becomes a dangerous woman. So she is sent away to an island, where both she and the book turn haunting and strange.

The Stillest Day is a mysterious, challenging novel. On a theoretical level, it has plenty to say about women’s issues. Purely on a visceral level, it’s a moving story. Bethesda is one of the more interesting narrators to surface in a long while. As she says of herself on the book’s first page: Nothing in my past could have prepared me for what it is that I became.

Laura Wexler is a reviewer in Athens, Georgia.