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.

Erasmus Darwin Wells has a history of failure. At 40, he has no wife, no children, no close friends, and his life's work as a scholar-naturalist has come to almost nothing. Yet, as Andrea Barrett's fascinating new adventure novel demonstrates, it's never too late for a second chance.

Set in the mid-19th-century, The Voyage of the Narwhal follows Wells and the crew as they set sail for the Arctic, hoping to find the missing explorer Sir John Franklin and perhaps get a glimpse of an open polar sea. As she did in the National Book Award-winning Ship Fever, Barrett weaves fact and fiction seamlessly, incorporating historical figures such as Sir Franklin, Thoreau, and Darwin into the lives of her fictional characters. The voyage starts off well, and an early encounter with a tribe of Greenland Esquimaux suggests that Franklin and his men had, in fact, traveled the same path. Driven on by the obsessive ambition of their commander, Zeke, however, the crew soon find themselves trapped in the ice, forced to endure an impossibly long, cruel winter off the coast of Greenland. The true nature of each man begins to emerge as they struggle to survive.

For Wells, it is a life-changing experience. In this unlikely setting, the cautious and fearful scientist, who had wrapped himself in a cloud to avoid the pain of early disappointments, reawakens to the world. He finds his first true friend in a fellow naturalist on the crew, and remarks in his journal that "they talk about what we've seen how nature, in this place and season, is reduced to her bones . . . It is so, so beautiful here, despite the danger, despite the discomfort; I would never have chosen to winter here yet it's as if I was waiting my whole life to see this." Indeed, Barrett's extraordinarily detailed and poetic descriptions bring to life the stark and radiant landscape of the Arctic and its romantic appeal for 19th-century explorers. Her exhaustive knowledge of boats and seafaring will also delight maritime fiction fans.

The turning point of the story arrives when Zeke, who has set out alone for one last expedition, fails to return. Summer is nearly over and the crew cannot survive another winter on the Narwhal. Wells must decide what to do. The consequences of his decision to leave Zeke who is also his sister's fiancee drive the rest of the story. He returns to Philadelphia maimed, guilt-ridden, and disconsolate. Yet, with the help of his family and a young friend of his sister's, he slowly recovers, finding, at last, the courage to change his life. During his winter in the Arctic, Wells mulls Thoreau's observation that it is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals . . . than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's own being. With this remarkable novel, Barrett proves the truth in Thoreau's words.

Beth Duris is a writer for The Nature Conservancy in Arlington, Virginia.

After writing two witty novels about gay life in Washington, D.C., Louis Bayard hit on a winning formula with his 2003 novel, Mr. Timothy, which starred Dickens’ Tiny Tim and gave the character a complexity that was sorely lacking in the original. He followed that up with The Pale Blue Eye, a story of Edgar Allen Poe’s time as a cadet at West Point that earned an Edgar Award nomination. Now, Bayard turns his attention to the turbulent French Restoration. The Black Tower puts legendary French policeman and ex-con Vidocq (the inspiration for Victor Hugo’s Jean Valjean) together with medical student Hector Carpentier to find out what really happened to the son of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI.

A clue in a dead man’s pocket leads Vidocq to Hector, whose late father, a doctor, treated the Dauphin during his imprisonment. Though records show the boy died in the tower, a long-lost diary and a murderer who seems to be stalking Hector and anyone else with a connection to the boy-who-should-be-king indicate otherwise. Could Charles Rapskeller, a young man with an affinity for gardening, really be Prince Louis-Charles?

Bayard has a particular talent, also displayed in Mr. Timothy, for evoking the poignancy of the longing for a lost father without being overly sentimental. In the years following the Dauphin’s “death,” the senior Carpentier became closed off from his family and friends, and it is only by reading his journals that Hector discovers how much he was loved by his father. Though he and Charles are close in age, Hector finds himself taking over his father’s role as Charles’ protector, while Vidocq goads him on in pursuit of definitive evidence of Charles’ royal lineage.

In his previous novels, Bayard has had the courage to keep the ending honest—as in life, not every loose end is left neatly tied. The Black Tower is no exception, and it includes a final twist that will leave even the closest of readers flipping back through the pages to find clues they’ve overlooked. A perfectly balanced blend of compelling characters, elegant writing and spellbinding plot, The Black Tower will keep fans of historical fiction riveted.

As The Living and the Lost opens, Millie Mosbach has just returned to her hometown, Allied-occupied Berlin. Millie is German and Jewish, and she escaped Berlin as a teen before the war with her brother, David. She attended high school and college in the U.S. with the help of an American family friend, all the while not knowing whether her parents and younger sister survived.

Postwar Berlin is almost unrecognizable. It’s a mess of rubble and half-standing buildings, its inhabitants starving, the city divided into Allied and Soviet sections that are not yet completely sundered by the Berlin Wall. Millie has joined the U.S. Army, helping to sort out which Berliners can continue to work as editors, publishers and translators in this new denazified Germany. Meanwhile, David, who served with the Army in Europe during the war, is in Berlin, too, and he’s not telling Millie what he’s up to. 

As the novel moves between Millie’s and David’s points of view, we get vivid glimpses of life in this unsettled landscape, with uncanny scenes of American military officers enjoying beers in former Nazi halls, German Fräuleins by their sides, and the abundance in military black markets contrasting with the extreme lack faced by Berliners. Millie is haunted by the probable loss of her parents and sister and by the choices she made earlier in life. 

As Millie tries to tamp down her trauma, guilt and anger, the novel flashes back in time, filling in the siblings’ pasts. While she was a scholarship student at the tony Bryn Mawr College, Millie experienced both the joys of college life and a genteel but insidious antisemitism.

The Living and the Lost moves along quickly, and its descriptions and dialogue feel true to the era. While the novel would have benefited from more interiority from both Millie and David, it’s still an illuminating historical drama with plenty of action and even some romance, evoking a lesser-known historical period—the immediate postwar era and Berlin before the wall—and the complications and compromises that come with the end of war.

In Jai Chakrabarti’s debut novel, A Play for the End of the World, a play by Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore is a magical and malleable symbol, used to help children accept a dark reality and as a tool for resistance.

When Holocaust survivor Jaryk Smith was a child living in a orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Nazi occupation of Poland, The Post Office represented the possibility of hope. In the children’s production of the play, Jaryk played Amal, a little boy with an incurable disease who’s confined indoors but makes the most of what he’s got: a window. Amal makes friends at a distance and gleans vicarious joy from watching others play.

Through the play, Jaryk and his fellow orphans experienced a kind of liberation by imagination. But while the other children’s relief was temporary, Jaryk had the life-altering fortune and burden of becoming the orphanage’s lone survivor. Unlike his fellow orphans, unlike almost everyone else he had known in his short life, Jaryk got a chance at a long life. 

A Play for the End of the World primarily focuses on what happens next, how new life takes root after extreme ruin. Chakrabarti frames recovery and renewal as a long and winding road, requiring more than a little grace and serendipity. For a long time, connections are difficult for Jaryk, relationships almost impossible. He experiences the world as though he’s wrapped in thick, protective insulation. He has big feelings but they’re subdued or self-censored. 

Then in 1972, Jaryk’s oldest friend, Misha, a man 10 years his senior who lived and worked at the orphanage when Jaryk was a child, dies unexpectedly while traveling alone in India for a production of The Post Office. Jaryk is tasked with taking Misha’s place as director, and the play provides him with another shot at redemption. “I finally have a chance to do something good,” he tells his weary girlfriend, Lucy Gardner. 

Whereas “in Warsaw, The Post Office helped to prepare the children for death,” this production has a radically different agenda. In Gopalpur in West Bengal, where the people are poor and the territory disputed, the production’s organizer, professor Rudra Bose, sees the famous play as a political tool: “It’s all about a new life. About resistance!” But while political unrest is the novel’s frequent backdrop, its most recurring theme is stubborn resilience: living fully in the face of sorrow, loving after immeasurable loss.

Chakrabarti’s novel is realistic and tentative and breathtakingly poignant, with a payoff that’s more than worth the trip if you have the heart to withstand it.