Jess Walter’s first novel in eight years arrives with the weight of high expectations. His last, Beautiful Ruins, was a surprising and well-deserved bestseller. His previous fiction—including crime novels, a 9/11 tale and short stories—were rapturously reviewed.

In The Cold Millions, Walter tries another mixed genre, the Western historical novel, and shows he is a master at investigating the “hobo” world of 1909. The star of the book is Spokane, Washington, a “boomtown that just kept booming.” It is here, amid skid row poverty and mansions of wealth, that 19-year-old rabble rouser Elizabeth Gurley Flynn intersects with two orphaned young men, Rye and Gig, who are the protagonists of the story.

The book is uneven, however, and falls short of the romanticism of Beautiful Ruins. There is fine detail on dark anarchy and dank jail cells, but unlike Walter’s funny version of Richard Burton in Ruins, Flynn is so focused (one might say didactic) as to be wooden. Her leadership of the dismal class struggle becomes repetitive. Rye and Gig are callow, and even though Gig is a book lover and Rye a striver, they don’t fully inhabit their space. Readers may be far more interested in the villain, a robber baron named Brand, and a smart circus performer named Ursula the Great. When these two are cavorting, The Cold Millions shines.

Walter has devised some fantastic set pieces, including a riot that leads to a dreadful scene of jail overcrowding. The freedom of the road, the lawlessness of the police, the spectacle of a few cynical power figures making life miserable for the huddled masses—it’s all enlivened by Walter’s vivid writing. A reader can feel the rails rattling under the trains that thunder through the mountains. A new life, the 20th century, is roaring into being. As Rye thinks to himself, “History is like a parade.” 

Forget the book’s shortcomings; it’s good to have Jess Walter back.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Jess Walter offers a closer look at The Cold Millions, his “last-gasp Western.”

Often in books and movies, dramatic settings like Hollywood or Washington, D.C., serve as the backdrop for stories of sociopolitical changes. However, in The Wrong Kind of Woman, first-time author Sarah McCraw Crow instead zeros in on a sleepy college town in New Hampshire. It’s 1970, and upheaval in the world, such as the events at Kent State University, feels far away. But the feminist and antiwar movements are determinedly creeping in.

The Wrong Kind of Woman features an ensemble of characters, but the primary focus is on Virginia Desmarais, whose husband, a professor, has died. Virginia put her academic career on pause to raise their daughter, and without a husband or her own Ph.D., she doesn’t know where she stands with the administrators at the all-male Clarendon College campus. Worse, she doesn’t know where she stands with herself.

Fans of the FX on Hulu miniseries “Mrs. America” will find the same feminist themes addressed in The Wrong Kind of Woman. Crow has tapped into a less flashy character of second wave feminism: the reluctant but curious wife and mother. The book, however, isn’t preachy, and the few strongly opinionated characters aren’t portrayed as necessarily likable.

The Wrong Kind of Woman explores the sublimation of self within a marriage, sexism in the workplace and the pros and cons of activism versus revolution. These are heady topics, but this slow burn of a novel proves a perfect place to give them serious thought.

On the eve of World War II, Elspeth Kent and young Nancy Plummer meet aboard a ship as they travel to Chefoo School, a missionary school in northern China. Nancy is already homesick for her family, especially her mother, while Elspeth has come to teach and reinvent herself, having lost the man she hoped to marry in a mining accident. A few years later, in 1941, Elspeth is ready to return to England when the Japanese army takes control of the school after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Inspired by true events, When We Were Young & Brave tells the story of what happens to Elspeth, Nancy and the rest of the school’s students and staff for the duration of the war.

The latest novel from bestselling English author Hazel Gaynor (The Girl Who Came Home) is reminiscent of J.G. Ballard’s powerful classic Empire of the Sun, based on his own experiences as a boy in China after World War II. When We Were Young & Brave is told in alternating chapters by Elspeth and Nancy, as each tries valiantly to maintain an attitude of stoic optimism. Once the school group is moved to a large internment camp, they suffer malnutrition, disease and more. In the face of all this, Elspeth and the rest of the staff provide heroic solace to their charges, continuing with lessons, activities and Girl Guide meetings, trying to impart as much structure, normalcy and distraction as possible. The narration flows smoothly, full of big and small moments: an adopted kitten, sunflower seeds planted as an act of memory and hope, the worsening illness of Nancy’s best friend and a Chinese newborn who needs care. Years pass until eventual liberation, and Gaynor excels at describing the rhythms of this difficult daily life.

Readers will quickly find themselves immersed in When We Were Young & Brave, which, despite its subject matter, is an uplifting, hopeful tale of camaraderie in the face of hardship and danger.

The passing of time encourages reflection, looking back over one’s life and the seminal moments that defined it. In author and poet Benjamin Myers’ The Offing, an old man remembers a youthful summer of significance.

As a shattered England recuperates from World War II, 16-year-old Robert Appleyard heads out to wander, in search of life beyond his village and the coal mines where his father worked. He meanders south, picking up odd jobs and witnessing remnants of a war he was too young to fight. For Robert, “the newness of the unfamiliar was intoxicating.”

A dead-end lane brings Robert into Dulcie Piper’s orbit, and thus begins an education. Well read and well traveled, unabashed and blunt, Dulcie has lived a life of adventure and pushed boundaries that Robert never imagined. For the last six years, though, her life has been overshadowed by a sudden and horrible loss. When Robert unearths a neglected manuscript in the tumbledown artist studio next to Dulcie’s cottage, his eccentric host opens up about her love and life with Romy Landau, a tormented and brilliant German poet living at a time when most British people considered Germans to be the enemy.

Myers writes beautifully and insightfully in The Offing. Highly sensory and inviting, the novel reads like a paean to the mettle of Britain’s men and women during a time of great upheaval. It’s also a pastoral ode to the lovely, verdant countryside that Robert encounters away from his coal-dusted home. Dulcie’s hospitality sparks an appetite in Robert not unlike her own youthful zest for life. His first tastes of lemon, wine and lobster, his first blush with pure poetry, his first attempt at driving a car—each has their own heady effect. Dulcie may be schooling Robert in the ways of her world, but his youthful and open perspective helps her see possibility beyond her grief.

There is plenty of wit and depth to be found in Myers’ lyrical writing and in the captivating way he envisions an unlikely friendship that charts a new course for both parties.

Alice Randall’s latest novel is a genre-bending series of profiles of the dazzling residents of Black Bottom, the commercial and residential heart of Detroit’s Black community in the era spanning from the Great Depression to the early 1960s. Characters are revealed through the eyes of real-life emcee, theater director, newspaper columnist and dapper man about town Joseph “Ziggy” Johnson (1913–1968). From his deathbed, Ziggy recalls friendships with some of the city’s most notable characters, some well known and some not.

Black Bottom Saints is an intriguing and beguiling look at the storied city at the height of its pomp. Randall shows us a warm, thriving, tightly woven community of “breadwinners,” or auto industry workers who fled the Jim Crow South and became patrons of Detroit’s glittery club scene. Also part of the novel’s milieu are artists such as poet Robert Hayden, actor Tallulah Bankhead and theater director Lloyd George Richards, as well as United Auto Workers negotiator Marc Strepp, boxer Joe Louis, NFL Hall of Fame defensive back Dick “Night Train” Lane and entertainment industry figures such as Sammy Davis Jr. and Motown Records’ finishing school legend Maxine Powell. The final profile is of “Colored Girl,” whose identity is not quite clear. Perhaps she is Randall herself. Each chapter ends with a cocktail recipe in tribute to the profiled person.

This is a book to read at your leisure, as you might a collection of short stories. Each profile offers fascinating insight into the characters that made Black Bottom a hub for glamour, culture and creativity.

Jennie Fields’ Atomic Love scrupulously captures both the minute (you might say “atomic”) and panoramic elements of the early Cold War. At ground zero: a female physicist, an FBI agent and a possible spy. Each has been broken, physically, emotionally or both, by World War II. They form a triangle, which brings to mind the symbol of a fallout shelter.

Rosalind was the lone woman on the University of Chicago team that constructed the first controlled nuclear reaction, but in 1950, she’s unhappily selling jewelry at a department store. During her wartime service, she fell hard for Weaver, a British team member who awakened her sexually and then dumped her. As the novel begins, Weaver, “the cartoon of a good-looking man” with a “dimpled Cary Grant chin,” injects himself back into Rosalind’s life. FBI agent Charlie suspects Weaver of selling secrets to the Soviets, and he enlists Rosalind’s help to unmask her former lover. 

Surely among the most patient FBI agents in recent fiction, Charlie is a complex character who has repressed most feelings, though he feels a strong attraction to Rosalind. Tortured as a prisoner of war, Charlie was left with one hand so disabled that someone else must help knot his tie. When Rosalind tends to his tie, it is an intimate gesture.

In Rosalind, Fields has created an anxious yet gutsy heroine who carries her Shakespearian name with aplomb. Growing up, science was her religion, yet she is horror stricken at the destructive power of the atom bomb she helped unleash. Inspired by such female scientists as physicist Leona Woods and the author’s own mother, Atomic Love is as much about undercover work as it is about women’s passions.

Drawing from a discovered cache of journals, letters and unpublished fiction, Héctor Tobar’s third novel, The Last Great Road Bum, follows the true peregrinations of Joe Sanderson, denizen of Urbana, Illinois. Privileged and corn-fed, Joe goes where his whim takes him, and his family even pays for him to do so, their money wired to embassies all over the world. You might grit your teeth with resentment if Joe weren’t so openhearted—and if Tobar weren’t such a wizard of a writer.

Joe’s journey begins on a teenage lark when he hitchhikes out of Urbana and ends up in Jamaica with a band of welcoming Rastafarians. But the tale darkens as he gets a glimpse of the Vietnam War and then the horrifying famine in Biafra. Throughout his travels, Joe witnesses suffering that radicalizes him, though his letters home remain almost aggressively cheery. After more rousting about, he stumbles into a group of guerrilla fighters in El Salvador. It’s among these dedicated compas, some still in their teens, that the last great road bum finds his purpose.

Third-person narration weaves with Joe’s stream of consciousness, so we’re privy to not only his thoughts and observations, which flit from topic to topic like the butterflies he used to catch as a child, but also the thoughts of his mother, his fellow compas and even people he meets briefly. Quirky endnotes conclude each chapter. This structure lends propulsion and unexpected cohesion to a tale that would have been haphazard without it. A work of fiction and sort of true, The Last Great Road Bum is brilliant in its contemplation of a particularly American restlessness, innocence and foolishness.

In 1950s Iran, religious and nationalist fervor can be sparked by last names, loyalties and different appearances. Against this backdrop, a discarded girl with a boy’s name matures in a man’s world. Through this girl’s journey, Iranian-born author Nazanine Hozar’s debut novel traces the reign and overthrow of the Shah of Iran through Ayatollah Khomeini’s dramatic return to power.

Young Aria, rescued as an infant by a sensitive army driver but abused by his angry wife, endures early censure and ridicule because of her blue eyes and red hair. Her life is marked by division and strife, but she grows up defiant and strong, wondering where she came from. Everyone she encounters—from her childhood friend Kamran, to her wealthy school pals Hamlet and Mitra, to those who know the truth about her birth mother—influence her path. She learns and loves, goes to school, wrestles with the shifting politics of her country, eventually marries and has her own baby amid the Iranian Revolution.

Hozar’s vivid depictions of daily life in the divided city of Tehran ground Aria in stark reality. Modernity strains against the confines of a place where the past always has a foothold—where history keeps being rewritten and a new future staged, where power changes hands, often brutally.

Hozar’s perceptive writing falters at times, and the plot meanders distractingly. But early poetic chapters and the novel’s thrilling climax draw the reader in. One thing is clear: Pain propels us, but so do offerings of love. Aria accepts both in her life, and they develop into the will and perseverance she needs to survive.

History, it is said, is written by the winners. But good historical fiction can be written about the losers. L. Annette Binder’s sad, intimate first novel, The Vanishing Sky, conveys a sense of Germany at the tail end of World War II, as seen primarily through the experiences of one family from Heidenfeld, near the city of Würzburg.

Etta and Josef have two sons, Max and Georg. Josef was the head teacher at the local school until he became forgetful and had to retire. Max, a soldier, has been sent to the Eastern Front, where he witnesses unspeakable horrors. Georg, just 15, is enrolled in the Hitler Youth group, where he struggles with his feelings about a blond young colleague named Müller. Georg is also a budding magician and hoards five half-dollar American coins, sent from a relative in Milwaukee, with which to do tricks.

This is autumn 1944, and although the radio and newsreels say the Germans are fighting back, we all know what’s to come. (In the following spring, Würzburg becomes a target for large-scale bombing by the Allies.) At the start of the book, Max is sent home from the front; his parents don’t know why. Soon, his behavior suggests that something is awry with this once strong and active young man. He barely eats, and he sees visions. Soon, he is taken away to a psychiatric hospital. Meanwhile, Etta, an indomitable “Mutti,” seeks out food for the family from neighbors in town and in the country. She tends to Josef, a stick figure who never really comes alive in the book. He is almost a caricature of the German sensibility: rigid and unfeeling.

The most successfully rendered character is Georg, a pudgy, bookish youngster who’s ill-equipped for fighting. He is the book’s Odysseus, his mother its Penelope. Binder creates a believable, lost world with Etta and Georg. The ending is inevitable, and we are left with an overriding—and poignant—sense of loss.

In her third work of historical fiction, Kathleen Rooney takes her gift for inhabiting fascinating real-life figures in an exciting new direction. Both of the narrators in Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey were lauded for their heroic actions in World War I: Major Charles Whittlesey, leader of the famous “Lost Battalion,” and Cher Ami, a brave homing pigeon. As in her previous novels, 2012’s Robinson Alone and 2017’s bestselling Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk, Rooney provides historical context that is at once sweeping and specific, and her affinity for research is evident in details both lovely and harrowing.

Charming, contemplative Cher Ami speaks from a display at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, where her taxidermied body has been behind glass since her 1919 death. She reflects on her homing-pigeon training in Britain and her service in WWI, where she crossed paths with the major. Charles, an intelligent and kind man suffering from PTSD, harks back to his prewar life in New York City, where he had a law partnership and spent evenings visiting neighborhoods where he could meet other closeted gay men.

The two share their experiences of a 1918 battle in France’s Argonne Forest, where their battalion was trapped for five terrifying days. Cut off from supplies, surrounded by the enemy and, in a final insult, pelted with shells fired by fellow American troops, they were saved by Cher Ami's delivery of a crucial message. The press and the Army showered Charles and Cher Ami with honors and praise, but memories linger: the trenches, filled with danger and death; institutional incompetence that left the soldiers vulnerable; and the anguish of seeing feathered and human friends die.

Rooney makes a strong case for considering alternatives to war, pondering who we call heroes and why, and offering animals more empathy and respect. This is a creative, heartfelt, edifying reimagining of an important event in World War I history, as seen through the eyes of two extraordinary individuals.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Kathleen Rooney illuminates the unlikely heroes of Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey.

As everyone now knows, the challenges of being a health care worker are exponentially greater during a global pandemic. As Emma Donoghue explains in the author’s note to The Pull of the Stars, her thinly plotted but moving new novel, the centenary of the 1918 flu pandemic inspired her to write this work. She couldn’t have foreseen how relevant this story would feel upon its publication.

The novel takes place over three days in Dublin, from Halloween to All Souls’ Day, when World War I is winding down and the flu is ravaging the population. Nurse Julia Power is a single woman about to turn 30. She lives with her younger brother, Tim, who suffers from war neurosis and has remained mute since his return from the front. One morning, when Julia arrives at the Roman Catholic hospital where she has worked since age 21, she learns that the head of the maternity/fever ward has taken ill. Julia is to serve as acting ward sister in her stead.

In spare prose, Donoghue documents Julia’s harrowing three days. Her patients are pregnant women of various economic backgrounds. Some characters are more fully fleshed out than others, but all suffer from the flu and other complications, much of which Donoghue renders in graphic detail. Among the people assisting Julia is the book’s one real-life figure: Kathleen Lynn, the physician and Sinn Féin activist who was instrumental in the Easter Rebellion of 1916.

The book’s most touching sequences dramatize the budding friendship between Julia and Bridie Sweeney, a volunteer who was raised in a convent and gives her age as “about twenty-two.” The stories of Bridie’s upbringing are among the book’s most devastating passages, as when she tells Julia that punishments at the convent sometimes involved hanging the transgressor by the hair from a coat hook.

At its best, The Pull of the Stars confronts a reality as pertinent today as it was in 1918 Ireland: Some people are part of what Bridie calls “the pipe”—orphanages, reformatories, prisons—whereas others benefit from greater privilege. Donoghue’s novel is a plea for an end to the inequality that pandemics make all the more stark.