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.”

In Elizabeth Macneal’s debut sensation, an aspiring artist traverses the fine line between destruction and creation.

In 1851 London, Iris works long hours in a doll-making studio. Trapped into an apprenticeship beside Rose, her unhappy twin sister, Iris plots to build a new life in which she is free to paint while Rose runs her own shop. Iris also hopes to gain a position stable enough to help the toothless street urchin Albie, who sews doll clothes for the studio and becomes like a little brother to her. When up-and-coming artist Louis offers to give Iris paintings lessons—in exchange for her modeling for a painting he wants to enter into the Great Exhibition—she feels that she’s one step closer to making her plan succeed. But little does Iris know, a lonely taxidermist named Silas has his own designs for her.

Chapters interweave like the finest lace, as Iris, Rose, Albie, Louis and Silas each take a turn in the spotlight. They are trapped in an intricate web of desire and obsession, the passions that can make or break art. Iris risks stability in her desperation for artistic freedom, Rose’s chronic regrets pull her away from Iris, and Albie wants a new set of teeth so badly he almost betrays his benefactress. While Louis rebels against the academic standards of the time, depicting fleeting moments in his pre-Raphaelite paintings, Silas is dead-set on preserving his specimens for all time. Does art break down or build up ideals? Or both?

London’s splendor as well as its squalor come alive in visceral detail, and Macneal’s attention to artists’ processes spans the extremes from ecstatic joy to macabre revenge and everything in between. The Doll Factory isn’t just inspired by the Victorian era; it takes Thackeray’s social satire and Rodin’s natural forms and molds them into a stunning portrait of a modern heroine.

Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong and Leni Riefenstahl were three of the most famous people in 20th-century cinema, no mean feat given the dominance of men in the cutthroat industry. And they each endured their share of prejudice, whether from accidents of birth or ill-advised associations.

Amanda Lee Koe charts the lives of these women in Delayed Rays of a Star, her debut novel. This century-spanning work dramatizes each woman’s rise and fall—from aspiring young actresses to elderly women looking back both on unwise decisions and the gatekeepers who never gave them their due.

The narrative begins in 1928, when Dietrich, relegated to cabaret gigs and bit parts in films, crashes the Berlin Press Ball on a producer’s last-minute invitation. There, she meets Wong, a Los Angeles native who is already an international star but who has dealt with more than her share of racism, from boys in school who made slit eyes at her to producers who commanded her to “scream like a Chinese” and said she’d be replaced if she declined. Neither woman could have known that they would embark on a brief romance, nor that four years later they would star together in Shanghai Express, one of the films thatbrought Dietrich the stardom she craved.

Also at the party is Riefenstahl, a photographer and wannabe actress who is angered years later when Dietrich beats her for the lead role in The Blue Angel. Most of her sections in the novel focus on her attempts to make the film Tiefland in the early 1940s and her cozy relationship with Hitler.

Many of the novel’s most affecting scenes are of the women in old age: bedridden 88-year-old Dietrich puttering around her Paris apartment and receiving mysterious calls from a 17-year-old boy who quotes Rilke to her; Wong reduced to being offered commercials in which she would have to sport a Fu Manchu mustache made of toothpaste; and 101-year-old Riefenstahl, determined “to set things straight” decades after her Nazi propaganda work.

The novel is sometimes overwritten, but Delayed Rays of a Star is a heartfelt tribute to extraordinary women who helped define modern cinema and a reminder that discrimination has always come in many guises.

Bestselling author Beatriz Williams skillfully sets a story of love and sacrifice against the backdrop of war in her fascinating new novel, The Golden Hour.

In 1941, the island of Nassau, Bahamas, “is terrible for gossip,” recently widowed Lulu Randolph admits. “It’s the favorite pastime. Everybody seems to be knee-deep in each other’s dirty business.” As a society columnist for Metropolitan magazine in New York, Lulu is tasked with getting close to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (the former was once king of the United Kingdom and is now governor of the island), for whom Americans have “an insatiable appetite.” Using her journalistic skills and social etiquette, Lulu succeeds in befriending the duchess, Wallis Simpson.

As Lulu grows closer to the royal couple, who are long suspected of being Nazi sympathizers, she gleans deeper insights into their complex web of political, racial and financial intrigue. When real-life philanthropist Harry Oakes is found murdered on the island in 1943, the duke takes a particular interest in the case. Lulu, meanwhile, has fallen deeply in love with Benedict Thorpe, an English botanist and intelligence agent in the war. After Thorpe is captured by the Nazis and imprisoned in a German prison camp, Lulu journeys to London, determined to help regain his freedom.

Williams alternates Lulu’s story with that of German baroness Elfriede von Kleist and her love affair with Wilfred Thorpe in the early 1900s, linking the generations together. Readers will be spellbound by Williams’ elegant prose, fascinating characters and unforgettable settings while fully engrossed by the novel’s dual plots.

Bigger isn’t always better or more effective. The small, unassuming body of a pigeon carrying coded messages behind enemy lines, avoiding capture, detection or death by falcon, can end up wreaking as much havoc as a bomb. In The Long Flight Home, Alan Hlad tells a dramatic, fictionalized story about the real use of pigeons during World War II. British intelligence hoped that the pigeons, dropped by the thousands into Nazi-occupied France, would be found by resistance fighters and used to return messages containing vital reconnaissance.

Long before the United States enters the fight, Oliver “Ollie” Evans from Maine smuggles himself into Britain with dreams of a different kind of flying. Before he can join the Royal Air Force, he is obligated to help Bertie Shepherd and his granddaughter, Susan, with their role in a top-secret pigeon mission. Unsurprisingly, Ollie and Susan’s proximity leads to romance, and when Ollie gets stranded in France, the coded messages contain more than just German troop movements. Hoping to return to Susan, Ollie tries to assist the resistance effort until he can escape, while Susan awaits messages from him, carried by her remarkable pet pigeon Duchess, who accidentally got conscripted with the trained birds.

In his debut novel, Hlad tells a compelling if somewhat predictable story. The engaging plot and fascinating details of the National Pigeon Service make it a rewarding read. Many civilian pigeon-keepers volunteered to try to turn the tide of the war, not knowing if it would work or be worth the loss of their birds in the dangerous process. The Long Flight Home captures the contributions of the average citizens who, in a time of peril, rose to meet the challenge in heroic ways.

From E.M. Nathanson’s The Dirty Dozen to Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, the trope of a disparate yet plucky band of outsiders deployed behind enemy lines to carry out a secret mission is well-trod territory. And in the hands of a lesser writer than Leila Meacham, author of bestsellers Roses and Somerset, it could easily descend into redundancy or even parody. Happily, in Dragonfly, this is by no means the case.

Five idealistic young Americans—two women and three men—are recruited at the height of World War II to assume secret identities in Paris and spy for the Allies. Over the course of the opening chapters, we come to realize that each has a motive beyond patriotism that qualifies them for the mission but could also endanger both their operation and their lives.

During their cursory read-in and training, one of the five, a fly fisherman, codenamed Limpet, comes up with the perfect name for the team: Dragonfly. “They’re almost impossible to snare and have no blind spots,” he explains. “Their eyes wrap around their heads like a football helmet to give them a three-hundred-sixty-degree view. Most insects, predators can attack from underneath and behind. Those are their vulnerable areas. Dragonflies don’t have them.”

Ah, but this Dragonfly does. In an occupied city where the slightest transgression or out-of-place comment can get you reported to the Gestapo, our freshly minted agents find themselves evading close call after close call—until they don’t. Is one of their number nimble enough to escape a prison cell and a firing squad? The truth, if there’s one to be had, may rest on a single mark on a convent wall’s mural.

Most people in America—and for that matter, most people in Paris by this point—have never lived in an occupied city. Meacham’s impeccable pacing and razor-wire tension evoke the daily drama of life under a Reich whose French reign might have lasted little more than four years but felt like the thousand years that it threatened to endure.

Before you read this review, look up “steam donkey” on Wikipedia. Take a good look at the picture, then return. Now you know what a major piece of equipment looks like in Karl Marlantes’ sprawling tale of immigrants, logging in the Pacific Northwest and what it all has to do with early 20th-century socialism. A doorstopper at over 700 pages, Deep River seems a work born from Willa Cather by way of Upton Sinclair. But this new book is its own animal, and it’s something of a masterpiece.

The story begins at the turn of the last century in Finland, the home of the brilliant, fearless, passionate Aino Koski and her family. At that time, Finland was under Russian rule, and Aino is drawn to socialism and revolution, which she clings to even through bouts of torture whose ghastliness is only hinted at. Her commitment to Comrade Lenin only grows when she and her brothers emigrate—flee is actually a better word—to Washington. Nothing dims her zeal for the coming socialist utopia, not even her troubled marriage or motherhood. Aino brings her baby along to Wobbly (Industrial Workers of the World) meetings or leaves her with her brother and his wife.

Marlantes, author of the powerful war novel Matterhorn, immerses the reader in the life of the Koski siblings, whose worldview is dominated by sisu, a Finnish concept of honor, dignity and inner strength. Sisu requires men and women to be stoic, to always fight for their honor and to work from sunup to sundown. Page after page is dedicated to the dangerous and grueling job of harvesting gigantic trees from old-growth forests—see “steam donkey.” The reader will be in awe of such hard labor done in the service of exploitive bosses who pay little. At the same time, Deep River bemoans the ruin of virgin forests, the pollution of pristine rivers, the fact that 100-pound wild salmon are now scarce. The book extols the love of family and friends and the beauty of the landscape even as that landscape is ravaged.

Best of all, Marlantes’ new novel has more than a few moments of fun and laughter. Even combative Aino can laugh at herself. In Deep River, she takes her place beside Ántonia Shimerda as one of the great heroines of literature.