It’s 1956, and in the American West, military servicemen are returning from Korea and Japan looking for work, the fledgling interstate system is going up, and bomb tests draw Nevada tourists to watch the explosions. This is the backdrop for Shannon Pufahl’s assured debut, On Swift Horses, set in a time and place where the new and old rub up against each other, often uncomfortably. 

As the novel opens, Muriel has left her native Kansas for Southern California to join her new husband, Lee. Lee gets a factory job, and Muriel waits tables at the Heyday Lounge near the Del Mar race track. As she listens to the bar’s regulars, she picks up some insider horse-racing knowledge, which she chooses not to share with Lee. She also pines for Julius, Lee’s unruly younger brother. Julius, meanwhile, gambles and risks his life, first in California, then in Las Vegas and Tijuana, Mexico. 

As different as Muriel and Julius are, they both harbor secrets—one of which Muriel shares with Julius early in the story. And they’re both trying to find a way to love more truly and openly, since neither fits into the strictures that 1950s America wants to keep them in.

On Swift Horses offers many painful reminders of the damage that repression can do, but it’s also a deep-breathing, atmospheric novel. Pufahl renders postwar San Diego, the characters’ rural poverty and 1950s closeted gay life in careful detail, spinning plain language into beautiful images. Her prose carries hints of other writers who combine the bleak and the hopeful, such as Annie Proulx, Wallace Stegner and Kent Haruf. While the novel’s middle drags a little, Muriel’s and Julius’ journeys are compelling and surprising. Pufahl is a novelist to watch.

Observant travelers along Tennessee’s highways may notice roadside signs denoting watersheds across the state. These are regions where water from streams, rivers and lakes provide power, recreation and clean, safe drinking water. The creation of one such watershed is the pivotal backdrop of Mark Barr’s powerful debut novel, appropriately titled Watershed. 

In a rural Tennessee community in 1937, contractors from across the country have converged to construct a federal dam that will help bring electric power and prosperity to the post-Depression-era community. Into this setting comes one such contractor, Nathan McReaken, an engineer hiding a dark secret from his past. Nathan joins the crew at the dam on a probationary period and quickly learns that loyalty, hard work and diligence are no guarantee of continued employment when there are so many others begging for work.

Nathan takes up residence in a boarding house, where he encounters Claire, a local housewife escaping her abusive husband, Travis, who also works at the dam. On her own for the first time, Claire takes on an assistant role to a power company salesman, going door to door to get people signed up for electric service. As Nathan’s past catches up with him and Claire’s relationships with men reach a boiling point, their stories intersect in suspenseful, heartfelt fashion.

Watershed is the second title in the Cold Mountain Fund Book series, a collaboration between Hub City Press and National Book Award-winning author Charles Frazier. But more than that, it’s an eloquently written story of two people and their ambitions, yearnings and passions amid a key historical period.

Ill-suited to the stultifying environment and prospects of England, Alice jumps at the chance to escape to America by marrying Bennet, the wealthy, handsome son of a coal-mine owner. However, soon after arriving in Bennet’s small town in Depression-era Kentucky, Alice realizes that problems in her marriage, a controlling father-in-law and small-town gossip are equally suffocating. 

When Eleanor Roosevelt creates a mobile library system as part of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, Alice volunteers to become one of the librarians on horseback to escape her father-in-law’s house. As a librarian, Alice joins four others: unconventional Margery, who lives by her own rules; boisterous Beth, who has eight brothers; Izzy, the library organizer’s pampered daughter, who wears a leg brace and has a beautiful voice; and Sophia, a black woman who risks backlash to work for the mobile library, in violation of the state’s segregation laws. 

Together, these women and their horses face hardship and danger to bring books and information to the poverty-stricken backwoods of Kentucky. In return, they find companionship and fulfillment. The library’s future is threatened, however, when Margery and Alice step too far outside the accepted norms of society, angering the powerful patriarchy of the town. 

Jojo Moyes, bestselling author of Me Before You, has written a wonderful novel based on the real-life Pack Horse Librarians of Kentucky. Moyes’ research is evident, as her writing completely immerses readers in the world of a small, Depression-era coal-mining town—the class structure, the ignorance and the violence, as well as the overwhelming beauty of the surroundings and the strength of character required to survive. Moyes has written unforgettable characters who come alive on the page. All five women, but especially Alice and Margery, are written with such depth that readers may wish they, too, could join this tight circle of remarkable women. 

A heartwarming page turner, The Giver of Stars is certain to be Moyes’ next bestseller and should not be missed. 

Alice Hoffman is a brilliant weaver of magic and the mundane, as many of her novels have proven over the years. In her hands, a story we think we know, from a time we think we’ve extracted every possible detail, can become a soulful new voyage into the heart of the human condition. With her latest novel, The World That We Knew, Hoffman travels to a hidden world built amid the horrors of the Holocaust and brings forth a spellbinding tale of love, loss and what it means to endure. 

Hoffman’s story begins in 1941 in Berlin, where a young Jewish mother, Hanni, knows that she must find a way to smuggle her daughter, Lea, out of the city before the Nazis take notice of her. To do this, she turns to a rabbi for mystical help, only to discover that his daughter, Ettie, is more willing to help Lea through magical means. Ettie, working from knowledge she’s gained through observing her father, crafts a golem they call Ava to guide and protect Lea. Thus begins an unlikely and harrowing journey through France, where Ettie finds a new purpose, Lea finds her soul mate and Ava finds that she’s much more than a single-minded creation.

In beautifully precise prose, Hoffman chronicles the experiences of these characters and those whose lives they touch along the way. Throughout the next three years of the war, each woman tries to survive while also pursuing her own process of self-discovery. Though Nazi-occupied France is an endlessly compelling place to many readers, Hoffman never takes her historical setting for granted. Rather than leaving us to lean on what we think we know, she weaves a fully realized vision of the hidden parts of history, chronicling the stories of people who slipped through the cracks on their way to freedom and the emotional toll that freedom took. 

Page by page, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, The World That We Knew presents a breathtaking, deeply emotional odyssey through the shadows of a dimming world while never failing to convince us that there is light somewhere at the end of it all. This book feels destined to become a high point in an already stellar career.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Alice Hoffman discusses the origins and history behind The World That We Knew.

At the center of Maaza Mengiste’s stunning second novel is Hirut, an Ethiopian servant girl who rises to become an important warrior in the Ethiopian struggle to expel would-be Italian conquerors under the dictator Benito Mussolini, whose army invaded the country in the 1930s.

One of the thrills of the story is to witness Hirut, who is often harshly mistreated by some of her wealthier countrymen, develop into a determined and powerful person. But that is by no means the only wonder of the novel. Mengiste has said that at first she felt trapped by the need to stay true to historical facts. Luckily, she broke away from that suffocating exactitude and produced a work of fiction that is epic in reach, with brilliant borrowings from the forms of classic tragedy. There is, for example, a chorus that interjects and sometimes disputes the narrative being told. There are descriptions of photographs that render an intimate sense of the horrors and heroics of the war. And there are gripping descriptions of the battles themselves.

Then there are the other characters. The myth in Ethiopia about this war is that through courage and pluck the noble, outgunned Ethiopian peasantry defeated a modern, mechanized European army. It’s partly true. But in the range of her Ethiopian characters portrayed here is something closer to the truth: There are some bad actors on the side of the righteous. Likewise with Italians. The leader of the invaders is thoughtful and brutal; his war crimes are appalling. His photographer, there to document the victories and atrocities, is both soulful and morally compromised.

In The Shadow King, no character is completely pure. And the war is brutal. Mengiste often writes lyrically, but she also writes bone-chilling descriptions of the terror and savagery of the war. The book is impossible to put down or put out of mind.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read an interview with Maaza Mengiste on The Shadow King.

Debut author Lara Prescott’s parents gifted her with a gold mine. First, she was named after a character in her mother’s favorite book and movie, Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. Then in 2014, her father sent her a newspaper article about how the CIA secretly helped publish and distribute editions of the novel in the late 1950s, using it as political propaganda to try to turn Russians against their government. Prescott spent years researching this bizarre saga, ultimately turning her knowledge into richly imagined, thrilling historical fiction.

The result, The Secrets We Kept, uses multiple narrators to deftly show how this drama unfolded on opposite sides of the world. Readers learn how Pasternak came to write Doctor Zhivago, a Nobel Prize winner that his government refused to publish, and how his mistress Olga Ivinskaya both inspired parts of the novel and helped get it published outside the Soviet Union, despite unimaginable costs to both herself and her children. As Prescott’s fictionalized Ivinskaya explains, “I was the person who ushered his words out into the world. I became his emissary.”

Readers also take a deep dive into the clandestine world of literary spycraft through a host of characters, including a pool of female CIA typists (who occasionally serve—quite delightfully—as collective narrators). Several of these women are spies, like Sally Forrester and newcomer Irina Drozdova, whom Forrester trains. In addition to the sheer drama of the situation, the historical details and office politics are intriguing. Think “The Americans” meets “Mad Men,” with a dash of Soviet literature.

Indeed, this is a whirlwind of storytelling. With a bevy of themes that include the monumental power of words and literature, governmental attempts to suppress citizens and craft political propaganda, women’s ongoing struggle for equality, and the suppression of gay and lesbian rights, this novel could have easily become either heavy-handed or perhaps confusing. Never fear, because in Prescott’s supremely talented hands, the result is no less than endlessly fascinating, often deliciously fun as well as heartbreaking.

The Secrets We Kept is a dazzling, beguiling debut.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our September 2019 cover story on Lara Prescott and The Secrets We Kept.

In the devastating The Last Train to London, bestselling novelist Meg Waite Clayton brings to life the true story of Truus Wijsmuller, a Dutch woman who helped transport hundreds of Jewish children out of Austria as countries closed their borders to these youngest refugees. Wijsmuller, known as Aunt Truus to the many children she shepherded to safety, fought bureaucracy and apathy with steely determination to get as many children as possible out of the Nazis’ grip.

It was dangerous and frustrating work, but Wijsmuller believed it was her calling. “Perhaps this is why God chose to deny us children,” she said to her husband. “Because there would be this greater need, this chance to save so many. Perhaps He’s saved us the burden of having to choose to risk leaving our own children motherless.”

On a trip to Vienna soon after occupation, she gets an unfathomably cruel offer from Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann: Gather exactly 600 Jewish children in one week, and they can be transported by train out of Nazi-occupied Vienna, with no guarantees of reunification with their families. It came to be known as the Kindertransport, and the details of how Wijsmuller and her partners pulled it off are unforgettable. Clayton depicts an all-too-relevant story of cruelty in its many forms, from the casual nastiness of Gestapo taunts to the violence of nighttime home raids. The book is haunted with images of traumatized children caring for each other on packed train cars, of a teenage boy hiding in the sewer tunnels below Vienna to avoid being sent to a labor camp.

In a time when many parents are again facing the impossible choice of seeking safety for their children, even if it means separation and uncertainty, The Last Train to London reads like a warning note from the past. Yet the novel also glimmers with hope: the heroism of everyday people putting their own comfortable lives in jeopardy to help others.

It’s been eight years since Téa Obreht’s debut, The Tiger’s Wife, became an instant literary bestseller. Her new novel, Inland, set in the American West at the end of the 19th century, has a similarly sweeping grasp of history, telling a boldly imaginative story of two characters bound together by their relationships to the dead.

Wife and mother Nora Lark lives in an unincorporated Arizona town struck by drought. When Inland opens, her husband is out searching for potable water and her two older sons have disappeared, leaving her alone with her youngest son, Toby, and her husband’s 17-year-old cousin, Josie, known for her psychic powers. Both Josie and Toby swear the homestead is being menaced by a mysterious beast, and between the young cousins’ growing hysteria and the lack of drinking water, Nora is at her wit’s end. But how can Nora doubt their claim when she herself carries on a daily conversation with her daughter, Evelyn, who died of heatstroke as a baby?

Outlaw Mattie Lurie has only the dimmest memories of childhood and the Muslim religion in which he was raised before coming to the United States. Surrounded by death for most of his life, Lurie encounters ghosts at every turn. Orphaned young, he did whatever he could to survive and, after killing a man, remains on the run. When Lurie meets up with a traveling caravan of camels and their drivers who are working for the U.S. Army, he feels a personal connection to their leader, Hi Jolly, and throws in his lot with theirs.

Obreht mixes the fictional with the factual in the same effortless way she mixes the magical with the real, the beast with the human. Inland is based, in part, on the true history of the use of camels in the Southwest after the Mexican-American War significantly expanded America’s borders. Though the novel could have benefited from some streamlining, the final chapter in which the paths of Nora and Lurie finally cross is a brilliant prose poem on the interrelationship between the living and the dead, between memory and loss. 

Though he’s abandoned the magical realism of his 2017 Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning novel, The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead continues to confront racial prejudice in American life. Based on a true story, The Nickel Boys is a blistering exposé of bigotry in a Florida reform school in the 1960s, when the modern civil rights movement was just beginning to awaken the entire nation to the justice of black Americans’ demands for equality.

Nurtured by a loving grandmother after his parents abandoned him at age 6, and with ambitions fueled by recordings of speeches by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., 17-year-old Elwood Curtis of Tallahassee, Florida, has his eyes set on college as the first step on the road to a consequential life. But after he has the bad luck to hitch a ride with a car thief, he finds himself confined to the Nickel Academy for Boys, a rigidly segregated reform school that’s home to some 600 students.

Almost as soon as he arrives at Nickel, Elwood beholds a nightmare world of deprivation and cruelty. Even modest transgressions by Elwood and his fellow black students are punished by savage beatings at a building called the White House, where a giant industrial fan is used to mask the screams of the victims, members of an “infinite brotherhood of broken boys.” Some students face even worse mistreatment, their brief lives ending with burial in a secret campus graveyard and fabrications about their “disappearances.”

As Whitehead reveals in a sympathetic but clear-eyed narrative, Elwood’s idealism is subjected to the ultimate test when it confronts the school’s relentless racism. Determined to expose the misdeeds of Nickel’s brutal administrators, Elwood makes a fateful choice that lays the groundwork for an emotional plot twist in the novel’s concluding pages.

Whitehead pulls no punches in telling this heartbreaking story. The Nickel Boys offers optimists an opportunity to be encouraged by how far the United States has come in the past 60 years in addressing racial inequality, but a careful reading of this disquieting novel leaves one with the feeling that we still have much further to go.

A little-known chapter of World War II history, at least to most Western readers, is the effect of the war on Cameroon, which was under French administration. In 1940, Cameroon fell under Nazi control after France was occupied by Germany. Patrice Nganang chronicles the effect of these events on the small city of Edéa in When the Plums Are Ripe, a tale that is as poetic as it is harrowing.

Poetry is one of the passions of Pouka, an Edéa native who has returned from the capital city of Yaoundé in June 1940. In Yaoundé, “the heart of the country is revealed when the plums are ripe.” These are African plums, inexpensive delights so plentiful that fruit sellers have to discard unsold quantities into the streets each day. This makes them a perfect metaphor for what Cameroon did during the war, “when it sent off along the road through the desert its many sons . . . just like the fruit-sellers toss away each evening the plums they haven’t been able to grill.”

Pouka is one of Cameroon’s young men, although he is spared the war’s worst. He is an administrator who has worked with white people in the capital for the past three years. In intimate, old-fashioned prose (“Wait a moment, dear reader, for this is a scene he had played out for himself several times”), Nganang describes Pouka’s reason for returning home: to start a poetry circle, like one of his idols, Théophile Gautier, had done.

As the war intensifies, Pouka’s family members and friends are recruited to serve under General Leclerc and the Free French forces. Among them are Hebga, Pouka’s cousin, a boxer who “remained the area’s favorite son, just for the strength of his muscles,” and Philothée, a stutterer who is one of the few to show up for the poetry circle. In the midst of it all is M’bangue, Pouka’s father, known for dreams and predictions that invariably come true, although his latest seems preposterous: that Hitler will commit suicide.

The tone of some plot developments is too outlandish for the rest of the book, but When the Plums Are Ripe is a moving tribute to a people so little regarded that, as Nganang’s narrator puts it, if they appeared in Hollywood movies, they’d have no speaking parts, “their story told by a narrator off-screen—someone like me.”