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.

According to Katherine, the narrator of Catherine Chung’s new novel, the 10th muse was the youngest of the semidivine sisters and chose to tell her own stories rather than be a source of inspiration for men. Because of this, the 10th muse was stripped of her immortality. A symbol of female creativity and empowerment, her bold spirit hovers over The Tenth Muse, a sweeping tale of identity, gender and genius.

Katherine was raised in a small Midwestern town as the daughter of a Chinese immigrant and a white American veteran of World War II. Already ostracized because of her mixed parentage, Katherine is further scorned by her classmates after her mother abandons the family. Though Katherine is clearly a gifted math student, her teachers don’t acknowledge her abilities, and on the cusp of college graduation, she is brutally tricked by a classmate who claims her work as his own. At the same time, her father’s plans to remarry force Katherine to uncover the tangled truth behind her parents’ relationship.

Katherine establishes herself in the male-dominated world of advanced mathematics and becomes involved with a charismatic older professor, Peter Hall. But as a woman, she has trouble getting recognized for her accomplishments, and much to Peter’s dismay, she accepts a fellowship in Germany. Pursuing an unsolved mathematical hypothesis draws Katherine further into the mystery of her lineage, and in Bonn, Germany, she uncovers a theorem that promises to lead her closer to the truth. Other characters’ complicated stories of duplicity, innocence and sacrifice are echoed in Katherine’s experiences of stolen research and betrayed trust. Though she finds some answers and even some remaining family in Germany, she also accepts that life has fewer tidy endings than any mathematical formula.

Similar to the way she used Korean folk tales in her first novel, Forgotten Country, Chung uses the history and language of mathematics in The Tenth Muse to explore how the past is inextricably tied to the present. Her writing has a beautiful clarity, and the novel has an epic feel, sweeping between decades and continents without ever losing sight of the human lives at stake. This is a timely story about a woman searching for her identity in an inhospitable environment and emerging scarred but triumphant.

Dominic Smith’s engaging new novel, The Electric Hotel, offers a deep dive into the history of early cinema. In the early 1960s, Claude Ballard, a retired French filmmaker, lives in a run-down hotel. When approached by a young graduate student named Martin Embry about the long-lost film masterpiece The Electric Hotel, Ballard is reluctant to revisit the past, but Embry’s enthusiasm encourages Ballard to recall his role in the making of an early cinematic treasure. Then Ballard reveals that he still has a copy of the film.

A photographer’s apprentice in Paris in the 1890s, Ballard was hired by the Lumière Brothers as a roaming projectionist. His travels took him as far away as Australia and America, where, in picaresque fashion, he befriended a stunt man, a French actress and the young owner of a seedy Brooklyn amusement parlor. Before long, this idiosyncratic troupe settled in the cliffs of Fort Lee, New Jersey (once a prime location for the making of American movies, hence the expression “cliffhanger”), pouring all their energy, money and talent into what Ballard refers to as the “great cinematic experiment.” It will come as no surprise to readers that the making of The Electric Hotel almost destroyed the lives and careers of the four friends.

As in Smith’s own masterpiece, The Last Painting of Sarah DeVos (2016), the joy in The Electric Hotel is in the getting there: the travels from Paris to New York at the very birth of cinema, the repeated run-ins with a litigious Thomas Edison and Ballard’s return to Europe amid the scarring battlefields of World War I. Though an extended set piece in war-ravished Belgium feels like a slight misstep, the novel quickly gets back on track as Ballard and Embry plan for a rerelease of the restored classic.

Smith skillfully blends film history with the adventures of his intriguing crew, never losing sight of their individuality. The Electric Hotel enchants with a compelling plot but satisfies with the fully felt pathos of its characters.

Residents of West Mills, North Carolina, joke that their town never changes. Yet there’s never a dull moment for the stubborn, loyal characters in De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s debut novel, In West Mills.

The novel opens in 1941 with a fight between main character Azalea “Knot” Centre and her man, Pratt. When Pratt enlists for the war, Knot’s neighbor Otis Lee looks after her and keeps her company. He chides her for her obsessive drinking and reading. In turn, she scolds him for his rift with a mutual friend, Valley. And so it goes, friends becoming family until the town includes three generations of fierce fighters and lovers.

Reminiscent of August Wilson’s 10-play cycle marking each decade in 20th-century African-American history, In West Mills telescopes four decades into a densely packed drama surrounding Knot, a woman full of passion and pathos, an object of both hate and love. Knot is nicknamed as a girl for balling up her little body around ceramic “whatnots” stolen from her mother. Other West Mills inhabitants’ nicknames include Pep, Breezy and Goldie, showing how these neighbors claim one another as their own. As the novel progresses, the story becomes less about Knot and more about how the whole town handles its woes, and the story’s central figure becomes a tightly wound web of lies, secrecy and forgiveness.

Characters deal with inflamed emotions, gender and race roles, sexual preferences, addiction and children born out of wedlock—the stuff of the soap operas Knot and friends watch every day on their new televisions. What distinguishes West Mills’ melodrama from episodic TV, however, is the real-life, unglamorous attitudes of ordinary people. Amid their squabbles, they work hard as farmers, cleaners, midwives, teachers and musicians. They eschew happy endings but stick with each other despite their differences.

In West Mills exemplifies the timeless adage that it takes a village to raise one another. This is a historical fiction triumph.

Former slave Frannie Langton is warned early in her service to her London employer, George Benham, that “a good servant must know her place, to be content in it.” Frannie readily admits that this has “always been my trouble. Never knowing my place or being content in it.”

Frannie, who is fiercely independent, immediately likable and stubbornly contrary to the expectations of her role in society, shares many such admissions while awaiting trial for the murder of Benham and his wife, Marguerite. What Frannie can’t account for is how she wound up covered in their blood and being charged with their murders. In an effort to make sense of it all, Frannie pens her life story from jail. What follows is a literary sojourn as Frannie explores her place in history through race, class and sexuality.

Set in the early 1800s, The Confessions of Frannie Langton begins with Frannie’s life as a slave on a Jamaican plantation and her education in reading and writing. From there, she recounts how she attained her “freedom” when her master took her to London, where he “gifted” her to the Benhams, and how she eventually began a love affair with Marguerite. The story casually meanders through Frannie’s narrative in a mostly linear fashion but is interspersed with snippets from the trial in progress, including damning testimony and fiery newspaper accounts, making certain that readers don’t forget what’s at stake.

First-time novelist Sara Collins, a lawyer of Jamaican descent and winner of the 2015 Michael Holroyd Prize for Creative Writing, crafted her debut as a tribute to Jane Eyre, “but with a protagonist who would have lived outside the margins set by history.” In that regard, Collins has succeeded admirably, resulting in a novel that reads like a classic gothic romance.

American poet and short story writer Elizabeth Bishop devotedly chronicled her life in her journals with the curious exception of a three-week period in June of 1937. That three-week gap, during which a young Bishop traveled through pre-World War II France with friends, provides the catalyst for Liza Wieland’s absorbing new work, Paris, 7 A.M.

The novel, which opens in 1930 while Bishop is a student at Vassar College, meticulously combines the ample facts of Bishop’s life with reimagined events of 1937. In this coming-of-age story, Wieland provides glimpses into Bishop’s painful childhood while detailing her burgeoning sexuality and rebellion, nascent alcoholism, close circle of female friends and battles with writer’s block. As she struggles to finds her place in French literary circles, and as fear of fascism spreads through Europe, Bishop is drawn into an underground movement secretly rescuing Jewish infants in Normandy and transporting them to a convent in Paris.

This creative retelling of Bishop’s life provides an intriguing look at a complicated woman and writer. Moreover, Wieland’s choice to write in the eternal present with a limited third-person point of view to reveal Bishop’s thoughts and keen perceptions of those around her lends a particular freshness to the novel. Such skillful writing is not surprising, however, as Wieland has received several fellowships, including one from the prestigious National Endowment for the Arts, and was the 2017 winner of the Robert Penn Warren Award for fiction from the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

Although those already familiar with Elizabeth Bishop may appreciate seeing this famous American writer in her youth through Wieland’s eyes, enjoyment of this novel does not require prior knowledge of Bishop. However, readers should not be surprised if, on finishing Paris, 7 A.M., they discover a new curiosity to learn even more about Bishop’s compelling life and work.

In Chip Cheek’s debut novel, Cape May, the year is 1957. Young Henry and Effie from tiny Signal Creek, Georgia, are on a two-week honeymoon in Cape May, New Jersey, where Effie’s uncle has a summer home. Henry “had never been north of Atlanta, and he had never seen the ocean.” Effie hadn’t understood what “off-season” meant when describing the bustling vacation spot of her childhood. It’s late September when they arrive, and as the waiter tells them at the one diner they find open that first night, “If you came to get away from it all, you came to the right place.” The newlyweds eat in silence, and are home and in bed by eight o’clock.

By the end of their first awkward week of marriage, Effie wants to go home early, and Henry, defeated, assents. But the night before they are to leave this coastal ghost town, they spot signs of life—signs of a party, no less—and decide to stop in: “They were nervous, for some reason; he could tell that she was too. Maybe it was the Rolls Royce in the driveway. Maybe, absurdly, is that they were expecting some kind of rescue and didn’t want to bungle it.” Enter brassy Clara (“she was a whirlwind, this woman,” observes Henry); her lover Max; his sullen, beautiful sister, Alma; and entirely too much gin and time to kill.

Cheek paints a graphic and sensuous portrait of an fragile marriage embattled well before its time. Henry is a brilliantly complex narrator, devastatingly naive and steadfastly assured of his own essential goodness. Sexually innocent but with a flinty edge, Effie is an enigma to her husband and to the reader.

Cape May is a besotted picnic of a novel—day-drunk and languid, shadowed by ever-threatening storm clouds.

Contemporary postal carriers don’t realize how good they’ve got it. Yes, there are the occasional dogs, inclement weather or the gloom of night, but these inconveniences pale in comparison to the would-be rapists, bigots and crazed preachers on the trail for Cussy Mary Carter in Kim Michele Richardson’s impassioned new novel, The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek.

A courier for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famed Kentucky Pack Horse Library Project, Cussy is tasked with delivering library books over treacherous paths to impoverished hill folk, rural farmers and coal miners who toil in the Appalachian Mountains during the Great Depression. Cussy, 19, who makes her deliveries on the back of her faithful pack mule, considers her job a necessary one and part of “a respectable life” despite her father’s protestations. Cussy is one of the last of her kind, a blue-skinned woman (resulting from a real-life genetic blood disorder called methemoglobinemia), and so Pa wants her safe. He’d rather see her married off so she’ll have someone to take care of her when he no longer can. He even arranges such a marriage, only for her husband to die from an apparent heart attack while raping her.

Freed of the marriage she didn’t want, Cussy returns to her true passion in her old job of traveling librarian. For many, her visits are more than welcome, and the books she brings offer hope for brighter days, an escape from their daily doldrums and a singular connection to the outside world. But there are also those who distrust both the books she brings—some women complain that “she’s carrying dirty books up them rocks”—and her mysterious blue hue. And there are the aforementioned threats along the trail itself, including Pastor Frazier, the unstable cousin of her late husband, who fears she’s delivering the word of Satan. But Cussy’s strong will and commitment drive her forward.

Richardson has penned an emotionally moving and fascinating story about the power of literacy over bigotry, hatred and fear.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Kim Michele Richardson shares a look behind The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek.