Timothy Schaffert’s sixth novel has so much going for it that it’s hard to pinpoint only a few reasons why you will love it, but let us try nonetheless. Set in the German-occupied Paris of 1941, The Perfume Thief is the story of a queer American expat named Clementine who, after a life of notorious thievery all over the globe (think Robin Hood meets Indiana Jones), has retired in Paris and become a perfumer for the ladies of Madame Boulette’s cabaret.

At 72 years old, Clementine, or Clem, believes she is too old to pull off any scams, especially one that involves fooling the Nazis. But that is exactly what she gets roped into doing when Clem’s friend Zoé St. Angel recruits her to steal the infamous diary and recipe book of the Parisian perfumer Pascal, who has gone missing. Not only does this diary reveal Zoé’s identity as a Jew, but it also might include concoctions that could be used as biological weapons by the Nazis. And so, Clem sets out to enchant and fool Francophile Nazi bureaucrat Oskar Voss in order to retrieve the sought-after book.

It’s a thrill to be in Clem’s mind, to follow along as she sinks deeper and deeper into this mystery, as she worries about how to keep her loved ones safe, as she describes the City of Light crawling with Germans and as she reminisces about a long-ago love that still strikes a chord. With a healthy dose of romance, fashion and espionage and a glimpse of the lives of openly queer artists under Nazi occupation, The Perfume Thief is a reminder that Paris, even in the pages of a book, always makes for a great escape.

Yona, born Inge, doesn’t remember much about her parents or the world outside the forest. The day before her second birthday, Yona was stolen from her German parents by an elderly Jewish woman named Jerusza. Jerusza was driven by intuition; she knew she must take the girl from her family and into the forest.

Yona’s childhood is unconventional, as she learns not only survival skills but also multiple languages. Jerusza’s care is practical, never maternal. The girl doesn’t know love, but she knows how to survive.

Not long after Jerusza’s death, Yona encounters other people in the forest. They’re Jewish, and they’ve fled their villages to escape persecution by the Germans. Yona knows how to help, but by sharing her skills, she’s inviting human connection like she’s never known—and risking her heart in the process.

Although Kristin Harmel’s The Forest of Vanishing Stars is fiction, the bestselling author’s research contributes richness and authenticity to this captivating tale. During the Holocaust, Jewish people escaped from ghettos and created forest settlements, banding together to survive both genocide and the wild.

In addition to showcasing her exceptional historical research, Harmel’s novel explores the frailty of human connection. Yona finds joy and sorrow in bonding with others, and in the process, she learns more about the world she was born into. Yona knows she is German, and as she tries to protect the people she’s met, she begins to question whether she truly belongs in the encampment.

“In the times of greatest darkness, the light always shines through, because there are people who stand up to do brave, decent things,” says one of the men Yona meets in the forest. “In moments like this, it doesn’t matter what you were born to be. It matters what you choose to become.”

In a world where facts are questioned but truth still matters, Francine Prose’s latest novel, The Vixen, raises questions of what we know, how we know it and whose stories get told.

Newly graduated from Harvard, Simon Putnam isn’t sure how to make his way in the world. After a harrowing evening with his parents, watching the execution of his mother’s childhood friend Ethel Rosenberg and her husband, Julius (American citizens convicted of spying for the Soviet Union), Simon finds himself with a new job at a major New York publishing house. Once there, he is handed a challenge: to prepare for publication a salacious, pulpy, vaguely terrible novel about the Rosenbergs.

As Simon works to uncover the story behind the novel, he discovers more secrets than he could have imagined. While the plot of The Vixen is rich and surprising, Simon’s narrative voice carries the novel. As he goes along, he tries to make sense of how individual and collective histories interact with stories, and how they complicate and contradict each other. His engaging inquiry asks the reader to invest in this world, one that is both far from and adjacent to our own.

Simon takes us through New York restaurants and lush lunches, from Coney Island amusement rides to his childhood home, from the swanky publishing office to his roach-ridden apartment. In each moment, Prose evokes a sense of place that feels crucial to Simon’s process of discovery. This is, in many ways, a novel of New York in a particular moment.

The Vixen doesn’t take itself too seriously, and it’s a lot of fun to read. Prose is a master of language, and her captivating words are all the more striking in contrast to the novel’s intentional profanity. Good fiction entertains and asks questions, gesturing to truths beyond the novel itself. The Vixen does just that, with an extra note of fun.

“Your act goes against everything I stand for and everything I’ve worked for,” Richard T. Greener tells his wife in The Personal Librarian. Despite the fact that Richard is a civil rights activist and Harvard University’s first Black graduate, his wife claimed their family was white on the 1905 New York state census. 

The act tears the family apart. Richard eventually leaves his wife and children, who change their surname to “Greene,” and his daughter Belle adds “da Costa” to her name, claiming Portuguese ancestors as a way to explain her complexion and still pass for white. Belle da Costa Greene grows up to become J.P. Morgan’s personal librarian and one of the most influential librarians in America.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Discover the origin story of Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray’s co-authorship.

Belle’s unlikely rise to fame forms the heart of this engrossing, dramatic novel, and co-authors Marie Benedict (who is white) and Victoria Christopher Murray (who is Black) do an admirable job of trying to imagine whether her achievements were worth the sacrifices. Despite the fact that Belle burned her personal papers before she died, no doubt to protect her secret, the authors succeed in bringing her elusive, charismatic personality to life, highlighting her attention-grabbing style, her witty quips and her rich, complicated relationship with Morgan.

Although the novel may have benefitted from a more sharply focused narrative arc, the authors take full advantage of the treasure trove of intriguing historical detail at their disposal. The Personal Librarian explores high-stakes art auctions; Belle’s long-lasting love affair with art critic Bernard Berenson, who had his own secret (his Jewish Lithuanian roots); friendships and encounters with the likes of dancer Isadora Duncan; and an art show featuring the works of Auguste Rodin and Henri Matisse. As Belle grapples with her ongoing fear of having her secret discovered, she realizes she can’t have children at the risk of having a dark-skinned baby—although it’s hard to imagine how a husband or child would have fit into her busy, globe-trotting lifestyle.

There is much to enjoy in The Personal Librarian, as well as much to consider, especially the tragic central dilemma of Belle’s life: “While Papa held beautiful dreams of equality for us all, Mama saved me—and all my siblings—from the segregation and racism in America, freeing me to fulfill that early promise Papa saw in me.”

Radical thinker and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft died less than two weeks after giving birth to her second daughter, a baby girl who would grow up to become the author of Frankenstein. Samantha Silva’s Love and Fury uses the last 11 days of Wollstonecraft’s life as a frame, allowing her to tell her life story to her infant daughter. 

Wollstonecraft’s childhood was shaped by a dissolute father and a withholding mother. A young woman of remarkable intelligence and precociousness, she formed many of her theories about marriage and the evils of patriarchy early on. She set out to change opinions, first by running a small school with Fanny Blood, a botanical illustrator with whom she shared a passionate friendship, and then by writing, most significantly A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792). Wollstonecraft’s uncompromising romances with Swiss artist Henry Fuselli and American businessman Gilbert Imlay (father of Wollstonecraft’s first daughter, Fanny), though unsuccessful in the long run, led her to friendships with some of the 18th century’s most notable intellectuals and radicals, including Thomas Paine, William Blake and Abigail Adams.

Hers was a peripatetic life, spent traveling all over England with a short stint in Ireland as a governess. Living in Paris during the French Revolution inspired many of the ideas that found fruition in A Vindication of the Rights of Women. In 1797, she married William Godwin, Mary Shelley's father, after a long friendship, though their relationship is barely alluded to in the novel.

After the birth, when it becomes clear that Wollstonecraft has a life-threatening infection due to a male doctor’s procedure for delivering the placenta, midwife Parthenia Blenkinsop is called to the house to tend to mother and daughter during their only days together. Love and Fury is told in a series of short chapters, alternating Wollstonecraft’s memories with Parthenia’s experience of caring for the ill woman and new baby. Silva’s attention to period detail creates a heartbreaking novel of compassion and grace, as well as an elegy to one of the world’s most influential thinkers.

Did you know that the mother of Johannes Kepler, the 17th-century German scientist best known for his laws of planetary motion, was accused of being a witch? Rivka Galchen’s Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch is the fictionalized story of Katharina Kepler, who was accused of this crime at the same time her son was struggling to get his astronomical theories written and accepted.

Katharina is an easy target for the preposterous charge of witchcraft. She’s considered a widow, since her feckless husband hared off to join a war—any war would do, and there were a number going on at the time—when their children were young. Katharina does not suffer fools, and she refers to her enemies by such nicknames as the Cabbage, the Werewolf and the False Unicorn. She’s a bit of a busybody who doesn’t hesitate to press advice and herbal remedies on people who may or may not want them. And while she’s not a highborn lady, she owns property that some folks would like to get their hands on.

But she’s also tenderhearted and capable of great devotion. One of the first things we learn about her is her affection for her cow, Chamomile. When the powers that be finally come for Katharina, the moment is wrenching.

Most contemporary stories about witch hunts take a swipe at the patriarchy, and Galchen’s novel does, too. To plead her case, Katharina needs a male legal guardian, even though she’s a mature woman of sound mind and body. Guardianship is provided by Simon, her town’s somewhat forlorn saddler, and then by the put-upon Johannes.

Galchen, author of Atmospheric Disturbances (2008), scrutinizes the corrosiveness of town gossip as the tales about Frau Kepler grow more and more ridiculous: She scratched a young girl she passed in the road; she rode a goat or a calf or some beast backward, then killed and ate it; and a mere glance from her will cause people to sicken and livestock to go mad and die. It doesn’t help that Katharina’s illustrious son has been excommunicated by the Lutheran church.

Written with a surprising sense of humor for such a grim topic, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch shows what happens when a crowd is taken over by delusion, bigotry and grievance.

From age 13, Marian Graves is determined to fly. “Her belief that she would fly saturated her world, presented an appearance of absolute truth,” Maggie Shipstead writes in her epic and exciting novel Great Circle. As a girl in 1920s Montana, Marian’s dream seems nigh impossible, but she bargains and sacrifices her way into procuring precious flying lessons—and so discovers an all-consuming, lifelong love of the sky.

Marian’s insatiable thirst for flight, her desire to transcend societal constraints and see as much of the world as possible, drives Great Circle. Shipstead, bestselling author of Seating Arrangements and Astonish Me, sweeps readers from earth to sky and back again, across 600-plus pages and throughout multiple eras and locales, from Prohibition-era Montana to World War II Europe to present-day Los Angeles.

Maggie Shipstead offers a marvelous pastiche that explores what it takes to live an unusual life.

Tragically, like Amelia Earhart before her, Marian goes missing—in 1950, during her attempt to fly around the world over the North and South poles. Her mysterious disappearance becomes the stuff of legend, another adventurer lost to the skies. Decades later in 2014 Hollywood, Hadley Baxter also yearns to soar. When the opportunity to play Marian in a biopic comes along, Hadley sees it as a chance to reignite her creative spark, dampened by years of squeezing herself into others’ ideas of who she should be.

As the two women’s stories unspool—rife with ambition, desire, triumph and failure—numerous other characters come to the fore with fully realized tales. The book’s level of detail is considerable and impressive, whether Shipstead is explaining airplane mechanics, describing life during wartime or otherwise layering her story over and through history. Her nonlinear storytelling creates a marvelous pastiche of adventure and emotion as she explores what it means (and what it takes) to live an unusual life.

Underpinning it all is a reverence for nature, thrumming in the forests of Montana, the jagged peaks of Alaska and the stupefying ice shelves of the Antarctic. Shipstead’s exhilarating, masterful depictions of Marian’s flights feel like shared experiences that invite readers to contemplate both magnitude and majesty. Great Circle is sure to give even firmly earthbound readers a new appreciation for those who are compelled ever skyward.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Maggie Shipstead may not want to be a pilot, but she can’t help but explore that skyward impulse.

Loosely based on true events—and the real people and animals that played a part—The Elephant of Belfast captures the turmoil of both a city and a young woman’s life during World War II.

S. Kirk Walsh’s first novel opens in 1940, just as German bombardment begins to threaten Northern Ireland. The Bellevue Zoo has welcomed a new elephant named Violet to its menagerie, parading the pachyderm through the streets of Belfast with all the pomp of a visiting dignitary. Onlookers are bewildered, but young zookeeper Hettie Quin finds a sense of purpose in the elephant’s presence.

Hettie’s older sister is dead and her father absent, and she tiptoes around the house she shares with her mother, Rose. Hettie wants to be taken seriously as the only female zookeeper at Bellevue, though navigating her terse boss and the physical demands of working with large exotic animals proves challenging. But Hettie steadily proves to herself that she is capable, even resilient, despite the nearly constant state of upheaval caused by her tense relationship with Rose, confusion about the opposite sex, the ever-present Catholic and Protestant divide and the threat of bombing raids.

When the Luftwaffe bombs start to fall in April 1941, caring for Violet becomes Hettie’s sole focus. In a time where everyone is looking for something solid to hold on to, Hettie has Violet, and their relationship keeps the young woman from falling into total despair.

With such a unique premise, the novel remains engaging despite occasionally clichéd prose and a plot that gets bogged down in detail. Hettie’s grief and longing are palpable, her mounting losses real and tangible. Through heart-stirring scenes of violence and destruction in a city unprepared for the chaos of war, Walsh showcases a flair for description and emotion, and for rendering ordinary lives amid extraordinary circumstances.