A novel from the multiple award-winning author Kate Atkinson (Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Life After Life) is always cause for celebration. Transcription, based on the life of a former Secret Service worker during World War II, is no exception.

A hallmark of Atkinson’s work is her playful use of time. Transcription starts at the end of a life when, at 60, Juliet Armstrong is hit by a car in a London street. Readers are then plunged back to the 1940s, when 18-year-old Juliet finds herself at loose ends after the death of her mother. Eager to assist in the war effort, she joins MI5. Quickly plucked from the initial tasks of departmental filing and collating, she is placed in an agency-owned apartment, where she transcribes recordings of the secret comings and goings of a group of fascist sympathizers. Juliet is eventually given a nom de guerre and sent to infiltrate a group of wealthy appeasers. The work is mostly dull (transcribing) and occasionally terrifying (shimmying down drainpipes). When the war ends, she presumes her role with the agency is finished as well.

A decade later, Juliet is producing children’s radio dramas, and the personnel overlap between MI5 and the BBC is unusually high. When she is confronted by persons she thought were long gone, she realizes that not everything was tied up as neatly as she was led to believe. Though the war is over, it turns out there are still enemies that must be reckoned with.

Atkinson created a new approach to the detective novel in her delightful Jackson Brodie series, which began with Case Histories in 2004. Similarly, Transcription combines elements of the spy novel with Atkinson’s love of British history, a tremendous knack for getting the details right and a unique take on human behavior. Transcription has its share of intrigues and secrets, but it also has a level of wit and poignancy that many espionage novels lack.

Based in part on archival records and period memoirs, Transcription is a rich, sometimes comic, always insightful peek at a unique aspect of British history. Learning about women who participated in the British Secret Service and the BBC is just icing on the cake.

This article was originally published in the October 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Time marches on, taking with it alliances and allegiances both political and personal. With a physician’s precision and an artist’s eye, author Daniel Mason (The Piano Tuner) captures the emotional and physical upheaval wrought by war. Right from the start, his new novel, The Winter Soldier, thrums with tension, whisking the reader into the fray.

Amid the disorientation and displacement of World War I, Lucius, a barely trained young medical student, reports to a remote church requisitioned as a field hospital in the Carpathian Mountains. There, he meets the enigmatic Sister Margarete, a nurse who has been the main medical provider with a few orderlies since the previous doctors deserted or died along with her fellow sisters. Quick, witty and knowledgeable, Margarete becomes Lucius’ teacher, while a more than collegial relationship stirs beneath the surface.

As the front advances around them, churning out the wounded, Lucius and Margarete toil side by side in their “patch and send” hospital. Amputations, nervous shock, skulls caved in, typhus, rats and lice—it’s exhausting to imagine the onslaught of it all, but Mason deftly renders every scene in vivid detail. Winter’s inevitable descent looms over them constantly, ready to take the lives they struggle to save. Yet even in winter, to paraphrase Camus, an invincible summer lies within. Hope, love, desire, laughter, even beauty exist alongside the blood and mayhem.

The arrival of a wrecked shell of a soldier, trapped in both body and mind, brings a reckoning. Choices made by both nurse and doctor shape the young soldier’s life for good and for ill, reverberating until the novel’s final page. Through Vienna, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Galicia, The Winter Soldier roams from battlefields and hospitals to villages and ballrooms, never losing the thread between Lucius and Margarete.

With striking prose and an unencumbered pace, The Winter Soldier makes for a uniquely compelling read.

This article was originally published in the September 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

It’s hardly surprising that Frances de Pontes Peebles’ award-winning debut novel, The Seamstress, was published a decade ago, as her follow-up, a sweeping, cinematic and thoroughly engrossing tale about an enduring friendship and the story of samba, is a mighty accomplishment—the kind of novel that demands ample time to write.

Two girls—beautiful and privileged Graça, who has a captivating singing voice, and orphan Dores, nicknamed “Jega,” which means “donkey” in Portuguese—grow up in the early 20th century on the same sugar plantation in Brazil, which Graça’s family owns. Dores is the more levelheaded and intelligent of the two, and Graça is an impetuous risk-taker. When they first hear music on the radio, their lives are forever changed. As teens, Graça’s rebellious nature wins over her friend, who harbors an unrequited love for her, and they escape via a boarding school trip to Rio de Janeiro’s gritty Lapa neighborhood, with the aim of pursuing their dreams.

Though the girls are originally a musical duo, it’s clear that Graça is the star. She is renamed Sofia Salvador after finding success in a nightclub owned by a local gangster, and Dores cedes the spotlight to write her friend’s songs. Amid a colorful canvas of sex, corruption, drugs and violence, the history of samba unfolds. The young women’s relationship is often strained, but they remain united through ambition.

When Hollywood calls, Sofia Salvador becomes an international star during World War II, a pin-up for the troops à la Carmen Miranda. But there is a price to pay.

The Air You Breathe unfolds from Dores’ first-person perspective as she reflects on her life and losses. A sense of melancholy imbues the tale, but Dores has a compelling and fascinating voice. She is unashamed of her sexuality and confident in her ability to write songs in a male-dominated arena, and her strength and singularity propel this unforgettable novel.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Frances de Pontes Peebles.

This article was originally published in the September 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The classics are experiencing a feminist revolution. Emily Wilson’s new translation of the Odyssey—the first to be written by a woman—was published to great acclaim at the end of 2016. Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, a contemporary reworking of Antigone, won the 2017 Women’s Prize. And American author Madeline Miller has just published Circe, her second novel based on classical characters. Joining this group is the award-winning British novelist Pat Barker (The Regeneration Trilogy, Toby’s Room), whose 14th novel, The Silence of the Girls, is a reimagining of one of the key episodes in the Iliad, told from the perspective of a captured queen living in the Greek army camp during the final weeks of the Trojan War.

Briseis was the queen of one of Troy’s neighboring kingdoms when her city was sacked and her husband and brothers were killed. A prize of battle, she becomes the property of Achilles, and she lives in the women’s quarters but is available to him as his concubine and slave. When King Agamemnon demands Briseis for his own, Achilles relinquishes her but, as a show of resistance, refuses to fight the Trojans any longer. In Barker’s retelling, Briseis finds herself torn between the two men, helpless but also uniquely positioned to observe the power struggle whose outcome will decide the fate of the ancient world.

The Iliad concerns a war fought over a woman, and women play a major role in the epic poem as nurses, wives and, of course, unwilling sex slaves. Yet the lack of women’s voices in the original text is deafening. In The Silence of the Girls, Briseis is the master of the narrative, telling her story in counterpoint to Achilles, becoming her own subject rather than his object. Her voice is wryly observant and wholly cognizant of the cost that she and other women have paid for the violence and abuses of war perpetrated by men. Barker’s retelling of some of the most famous events of the Iliad feels strangely relevant to today—displaced peoples, war refugees, abandoned women and children, sexual violence—and assures us that women’s voices will be silent no longer.

This article was originally published in the September 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Fiona Davis has established herself as a master of historical settings and fictional recollections of those worlds. Her debut, The Dollhouse, pulled readers into a long-kept secret at New York City’s Barbizon Hotel for Women. Davis’ sophomore effort, The Address, explored Manhattan’s Dakota apartment building and the lives lived there, separated by a century. And with The Masterpiece, Davis shows yet again that New York’s historic structures are apt settings for intrigue.

Grand Central Terminal once served not only as a temple of travel but also as the home for the Grand Central School of Art, where (mostly male) artists lived bohemian lives with the prestigious school at their center. In Davis’ story, a sole female teacher, Clara Darden, struggles to make her way as an artist in a decisively male-dominated world. She sees some success as an illustrator, but there’s no trace of Clara after 1931.

Some 35 years later, the terminal is no longer the architectural masterpiece it once was. After her divorce, single mother Virginia Clay finds temporary work at Grand Central’s information booth. The job begins as a way to stay afloat, but when Virginia stumbles upon the art school, abandoned in 1944, she becomes obsessed with both learning its history and saving the transportation hub in which it resides.

Davis expertly switches between the lives of Clara and Virginia, weaving their struggles for independence and security with Grand Central’s history. Readers will be drawn into the lives of these remarkable women—and, alongside Virginia, into the mystery of what happened to Clara.

This article was originally published in the August 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

If there were ever a cautionary tale about the disasters of patriarchy and inequality, the tale of the Romanovs is it. C.W. Gortner’s engaging historical novel tells the story of the last dowager empress of Russia, Maria Feodorovna, née Princess Dagmar of Denmark.

Engaged as a teenager to the czarevich (the Russian heir apparent) who dies suddenly, Maria is handed over to his brother, the gruff Alexander III. Luckily for her, their marriage is a devoted one.

Despite (or because of) the unfathomable wealth and privilege of the Russian imperial family—they can literally get away with murder—the Russian people are getting tired of them. Nihilists finally blow up Maria’s father-in-law, Czar Alexander II, and other members of the czar’s family. And everyone knows the fate of Maria’s son Nicholas II and his family.

Is it possible that these tragedies did not have to happen? Under inhuman pressure to produce a male heir, Maria’s emotionally brittle daughter-in-law Alexandra gives birth to four healthy daughters before she finally produces a son, the hemophiliac Alexei. Because of the boy’s illness, Alexandra and Nicholas II fall under the spell of Rasputin. Consider what would have happened if Alexandra had her first two daughters, an heir and a spare, and was then allowed to quit.

Maria is fairly good-hearted, but forget about her checking her privilege. According to her, the czar and imperial family were ordained to rule by God. There is no scene in the book more heartbreaking or queasily funny than when Cossacks break into Maria’s bedroom in the middle of the night, and she reminds them that she’s the dowager empress—though by then, it hardly matters. The imperial downfall has already begun.

Gortner is wonderfully subtle, but given the times we live in, the problems are obvious: When a tiny percentage of people hold most of the wealth, it leads to demagoguery. The Romanov Empress relates an important piece of history. It’s also a warning about what comes when a nation is marred by rampant inequality.

This article was originally published in the July 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

You won’t learn anything about her writing—the novel never mentions the title by which most readers know her, or any of her other works—but the Jean Rhys depicted in Caryl Phillips’ beguiling new novel, A View of the Empire at Sunset, is not unlike the poorly treated and subjugated female characters from some of Rhys’ own books, among them Wide Sargasso Sea and Voyage in the Dark.

Phillips, a native of the Caribbean island of St. Kitts and author of 2015’s magnificent The Lost Child, begins his tale in 1930s London. Gwendolen Williams (Rhys’ birth name) is unhappily married to her second husband, literary agent Leslie Tilden Smith. He has recently received a legacy from his late father. With the money, in the hope of repairing their relationship, he suggests a trip to Gwennie’s West Indies homeland, “for he understood how desperately she wished once again to see her birthplace.” 

From there, the novel goes back in time to Gwennie’s childhood on the island of Dominica. A series of vignettes follow her into adulthood and dramatize “her mother’s irrational fear of Negroes”; her time at a Cambridge boarding school, where English classmates ask questions such as, “Do you have monkeys in your family? I mean as relatives, not pets”; her attempts at a stage career; her relationships with many suitors; and her marriage to journalist Jean Lenglet, with whom she spends the 1920s in Paris and has two children, including a boy who dies at three weeks.

Readers of Phillips’ previous novels will recognize similar elements here, including the elegant formality of his prose and the criticisms of racism and colonialism. A View of the Empire at Sunset is a provocative portrait of one of the 20th century’s most enigmatic authors.