Varian Fry was a young Harvard-educated journalist and editor who worked for the American Emergency Rescue Committee during World War II. His primary goal was to prevent notable artists, writers and political exiles, many of them Jewish, from being interned in concentration camps. Stationed in Marseilles in 1940, Fry procured visas, created false passports and sought out escape routes on both sea and land for almost 2,000 people, including Marc Chagall, André Breton and Max Ernst. His inherently dramatic tale is the basis for Julie Orringer’s thoughtful and absorbing new novel, The Flight Portfolio. 

For just over a year, Fry and a core staff of Jewish and non-Jewish expats focused their efforts in the south of France, collaborating with an extensive network of forgers, blackmailers and petty thieves. Working out of a hotel room, Fry eventually rented a villa to provide a temporary home for refugees who needed a safe residence.

The Flight Portfolio opens after an unpersuasive visit to the Chagalls, who show no interest in leaving France. Fry is approached by Elliott Schiffman Grant, an old friend and lover from their student days at Harvard, where both men were part of Lincoln Kirstein’s inner circle. Now teaching at Columbia, Shiffman—or Skiff, as he is called—has followed his German-born Jewish lover, Gregor Katznelson, to Europe in hope of locating Katznelson’s son. Both father and son need to leave Europe, and swiftly. Although Fry and Skiff haven’t seen each other in over a decade, they become romantically involved as they work together to provide the Katznelsons with safe passage.

Like Orringer’s earlier novel, The Invisible Bridge, The Flight Portfolio mixes historical fact with imaginative fiction. Though Skiff is an invention, Fry’s bisexuality is well documented, and Orringer makes use of the relationship to explore Fry’s sense of growing empathy and to highlight the moral issues inherent in deciding who is and who is not worth saving. Orringer is a meticulous researcher, and the novel’s cloak-and-dagger thrills keep the pace lively in this lengthy but intriguing tale of resilience and resistance.

A wealth of history turns Wunderland into a novel that’s both beautiful and devastating. Author Jennifer Cody Epstein (The Painter From Shanghai ) taps into the 1930s prewar era, laying out an unsparing narrative that details tragic events and horrifying legacies.

Renate and Ilse, Jew and Gentile, are best friends in pre-World War II Germany, but they’re driven apart in the terrible buildup to war when Ilse joins Bund Deutscher Mädel, the female division of the Hitler Youth movement. Many years later, in 1989 New York City, Ilse’s estranged daughter, Ava Fischer, receives her mother’s ashes and a trove of letters, addressed to Renate but never sent, that reveal her mother’s terrible secrets. In turn, Ava resists sharing Ilse’s history with her own daughter, Sophie, and Ava realizes that she “has kept Sophie from her own story.” 

The narrative unfolds from several characters’ perspectives, making plain “the things we lie about to make our crimes bearable,” while also opening a new door that may lead to redemption and joy for future generations.

In his ninth novel, Courting Mr. Lincoln, Louis Bayard dramatically re-creates the months after Abraham Lincoln’s 1840 winter arrival in Springfield with delicious detail and diligent diplomacy. Alternating between the disparate voices of Lincoln’s future wife and Lincoln’s best friend, Bayard offers an insider’s view of just how much the two may have influenced the awkward, often ill-mannered country lawyer as he began to inch his way up the political ladder.

Mary Todd is a debutante who has been told she needs to find a husband, and quickly. While visiting her sister in Springfield, Mary is not at all impressed by Lincoln in their first meetings, and besides, her family believes that Springfield’s societal rules restrict Mary from allowing the man a spot on her dance card, much less a courtship. Lincoln soon discovers that Mary is not the average young woman. She is educated and passionate about politics, something he doesn’t usually encounter in young women, if he ever even notices them. Mary eventually becomes drawn to Lincoln’s intelligence, humor and respect for her boldness. When Lincoln and Mary begin their relationship, albeit clumsily, they are forced to hide their courtship from everyone, including Lincoln’s roommate, Joshua Speed.

Joshua rescues Lincoln as he arrives in Springfield with only the clothes on his back and a few other items in saddlebags. With no money and no legal work yet, Lincoln agrees to Joshua’s suggestion that they share a room with only one bed. The two become inseparable, historically rumored to have been lovers, and bonded together by mutual respect and a great deal of admiration. Joshua guides Lincoln through Springfield’s waters, which can quickly become raging if proper customs regarding attire, table manners and the like are not observed. Joshua is not looking for a woman to share his life with, and he really doesn’t think that Lincoln should either—hence the crux of the problem and the book’s main thrust. Will Lincoln sacrifice his relationship with Joshua to court Mary? Better yet, should he?

Although readers know Lincoln eventually marries Mary, Bayard does an exceptional job of keeping readers engrossed as he weaves fact and fiction in this intriguing tale of intimacy between Lincoln and his two closest confidantes.

Following several lauded volumes of nonfiction, visual artist Kris Waldherr delivers an accomplished debut novel, The Lost History of Dreams, an atmospheric and hypnotic love story that not even death can end.

Wracked with grief over an accident that befell his wife three years previously, Robert Highstead has cut himself off from his family and turned his back on his writing, instead devoting himself to photographing the dead as one final memento for their family members. Incapacitated by sorrow, Robert remains ensconced in the past, one in which he and his wife are still madly in love with each other. But when Robert’s brother reaches out and requests that he head to the wilds of Shropshire to deliver the body of their cousin, the famed poet Hugh de Bonne, Robert finds himself powerless to refuse. Hugh’s last request was that his remains be buried beside his own wife, Ada, and that he be photographed alongside his niece and heir, Isabelle Lowell, in a dazzling glass chapel built in Ada’s memory. When Robert arrives at his cousin’s estate, however, he receives a prickly reception from Isabelle, who holds the only key to the chapel. In no uncertain terms she tells him that Hugh will never be allowed entrance to the chapel and that Robert is wasting his time. Finally the two strike a deal: Over the course of five evenings, Isabelle will relate Ada’s story, and Robert will transcribe it. Only after the story is completed will Isabelle open the chapel, and the many ghosts tethering both her and Robert to the past can finally be laid to rest.

“Love stories are ghost stories in disguise,” Isabelle warns Robert on their first evening together. The Lost History of Dreams is a sensual, twisting gothic tale that embraces Victorian superstition much in the tradition of A.S. Byatt’s Possession, Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights; the mystery is slyly developed, while the love story is tastefully titillating. 

In a novel that blurs the line between life and death, nothing can be taken for granted, and just when you think you have everything figured out, Waldherr turns the tables once again. This means that at times the narrative becomes convoluted and certain plot points don’t come to fruition, but it’s still an absorbing read.

On the surface, Beatriz Perez is a gorgeous 22-year-old society woman gliding through a cycle of parties, gossip and marriage proposals along with the other moneyed elite in 1960s Palm Beach, Florida. But beneath her cool exterior burns a pure, sharp desire for revenge. In Chanel Cleeton’s When We Left Cuba, we learn that Beatriz and her family (including sister Elisa, protagonist of Cleeton’s Next Year in Havana) left Cuba after Fulgencio Batista was overthrown, Fidel Castro took power and her sugar-magnate father’s land was seized by the government. 

The Perezes moved to Palm Beach in hopes of finding a sense of safety, rebuilding the family fortune and, to Beatriz’s unending frustration, marrying off the unwed daughters. She has much bigger plans—like, say, taking down Castro so she can go home to her beloved Cuba. Thanks to her still-privileged social position and her strong bond with Eduardo, a family friend and revolutionary, she’s actually got a chance at doing so. Eduardo introduces her to a CIA agent who sees her as a good bet: She’s fierce and smart, anger has made her reckless, and her social status gives her plausibility.

But there’s a complicating factor. Beatriz and Nicholas—a smart, sexy senator-to-be—meet at a fancy party, and their chemistry is immediate and electric. Alas, he’s engaged, an arrangement orchestrated by two families that want political and financial benefits from the union. Beatriz and Nicholas understand each other on that level and so many others, from the political to the personal to the physical. But amid the aftermath of war and continued upheaval in the U.S. and Cuba, plus divergent views on how best to achieve their goals, being together often feels impossible.

An edifying, entertaining read filled with adventure, suspense, history and romance, When We Left Cuba is a thought-provoking look at the ways in which politics can be intensely personal.

In 1968, the town of Hometown, Australia, is perplexed by Hannah Babel and her survival of Auschwitz, her Jewishness and her books. Tom Hope finds her especially entrancing. Tom’s wife, Trudy, has left him and taken her son, Peter, a boy who is not Tom’s biological child but is in every sense beloved as his own.

Tom, a farmer and tradesman, is smitten with Hannah and also a bit confused by her. This erudite Hungarian woman keeps a pet bird named David and wants to open a bookshop in the less-than-bibliophilic Hometown. Her goal—to sell 25,000 books, the same number of books burned by German students in Berlin in 1933—defines her as potentially mad but also enthralling.

Tom and Hannah find the spark of redemption in each other. Their individual suffering draws them together, yet interrupts their intimacy. The horror of Auschwitz is not something Tom understands; those horrifying events occurred a world away from his life in Australia. Hannah doesn’t want to burden him either, so as their connection grows, she must face the vows she made not to be a wife or mother again.

In The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted, Robert Hillman’s observations are astute and thoughtful as he captures the slightest mood shift and nuance of personality. The inner workings of his finely tuned and memorable characters come to life in his open, honest style of writing. In particular, Hannah’s voice carries both the sorrow of the tragedies she’s lived through and a childlike glee when she finds something marvelous. Her pursuit of beauty—despite it all—inspires.

“God lets us love,” a character observes late in the novel. The broken hearted can be healed. Fractures, even of the heart, can be set. As it says in the book of Joel in the Old Testament, the years the locusts have eaten can be restored.

Recent bestselling nonfiction books by Ayelet Waldman and Michael Pollan suggest that psychedelic drugs are poised to once again transform the zeitgeist. Could it be that we’re about to re-enter that buoyant experimental phase in which we look to psychedelics to unlock our spiritual and psychological prisons?

T.C. Boyle’s captivating 17th novel, Outside Looking In, takes the reader back to a similar moment in the early 1960s when LSD emerged from Timothy Leary’s and Richard Alpert’s experimental psychology labs at Harvard to quickly become the fuel for the transcontinental party bus of novelist Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters—after which tripping became the coming-of-age ritual of a generation. The novel follows the well documented history of Tim, Dick and a coterie of grad students and followers as they travel—prodded along by frowning academic and legal authorities—from Harvard to Mexico to a 64-room mansion in Millbrook, north of New York City.

At its center is the fictional Loney family. Fitzhugh, “Fitz,” is a psychology grad student who has drawn Leary as his academic adviser; Fitz’s wife, Joanie, dropped out of college to support his career and have their child, Corey, now in his teens. They, especially Fitz, are outsiders at first. But they move into the group’s inner circle and experience the magic of its experiment along with its fraying edges.

Boyle, who apparently had his own days of wild and weird, is insightful and sometimes humorous in depicting the allure and chaos of attempting to live communally under the egocentric leadership of Timothy Leary, expand the individual and group mind through psychedelics, find God or not, and go deep into spiritual and physical love with people who are not necessarily legal partners. The novel vividly conveys what was seductively tactile, profound and sometimes scary about this moment in time.

But in the end, Outside Looking In offers a cautionary tale. A contemporary reader will wonder, for example, why in this communal paradise is it only women who cook and clean? And more importantly, after the party, what comes next?

With a title like Cherokee America, one might expect to read a grand, sweeping epic in the vein of Dances with Wolves or Gone with the Wind. And in the hands of Margaret Verble, who previously penned the Pulitzer Prize finalist Maud’s Line, such expectations certainly make sense. But while Verble delivers an impressive, historical saga of Native American life in the mid-19th century, it comes on a much more intimate and narrower scale.

Set shortly after the Civil War in 1875, the novel revolves around Check Singer and her journey from Tennessee to Cherokee land in Oklahoma. The story also follows her extensive family, including her ailing, bedridden husband, Andrew, and their five children—Connell, Hugh, Clifford, Otter and Paul, ranging from school-aged to grown up—as well as their hired help, assorted friends and neighbors. Check’s mission throughout is simply getting through the day with only a modicum of trouble, but with the ready admission that “trouble breeds trouble.”

Trouble, of course, arrives right away when one of the hired hands on her sprawling potato farm, a black man named Puny, learns he is the father of a child through an illicit affair. The child is born “bad sick” and doesn’t have long to live when Check brings it to Puny. The child, after its death, is buried in a potato farm in an attempt to keep it hidden from Puny’s wife, Ezell, a secret that doesn’t last very long.

Puny and one of Check’s boys, Hugh, get into further trouble later at a brothel where Hugh is shot in the leg, prompting an investigation by the sheriff. At the same time, rumors surface of buried Confederate gold somewhere on the property, while racial tensions escalate between the black, white and native peoples in the community. Check balances it all without ever losing her control, providing calm, wisdom and discipline in the face of cultural, societal and physical hurdles.

Cherokee America meanders quite a bit due to its impressive cast and multiple storylines, taking its time to explore each’s feelings and tribulations, but Verble keeps Check at its grounded center. Readers shouldn’t expect to fly through these pages at breakneck speed, but rather enjoy a more leisurely pace that will leave them wholly immersed in Check’s world.

Editor’s note: A previous version of this review incorrectly described Puny as burying the baby in the potato farm.