Paris, a city unequivocally associated with romance, is front and center in Beatrice Colin’s latest novel, To Capture What We Cannot Keep, an unlikely love story involving the Eiffel Tower’s real-life engineer, Émile Nouguier, and a 30-year-old Scots widow.

We begin on a cold and rainy morning in February of 1887, inside a hot air balloon. Caitriona Wallace, known as Cait, is chaperoning the unconventional Arrol siblings as they tour Europe on their rich uncle’s dime. Émile and Cait’s chance meeting seems more awkward than electric, but leaves behind a spark.

Émile’s prestige and promising career is a stark contrast to Cait, whose gender, age and marital status point toward a grim and choiceless future. But love is not always reasonable—something Colin proves over and over again as Émile and Cait’s secret relationship advances.

Colin ably brings to life a time before the iron lattice of the Eiffel Tower became an iconic part of the Parisian landscape. To Capture What We Cannot Keep is part history lesson and part thrilling love story, leading to an ending full of depth, promise and hope.

This article was originally published in the December 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In 16th-century Italy, where goodness and beauty are believed to go hand in hand, blemishes on the skin are seen as physical manifestations of the state of one’s soul. So when Flavia is born with a lurid birthmark across her face, the girl is viewed as an object of horror. After years of rejection, on the eve of her sister’s wedding Flavia snaps and does something so terrible that she is banished to a convent. 

Here her path crosses with Ghostanza, a woman whose otherworldly beauty inspires reverence in women and men alike. She claims Flavia as her ornatrix (a lady’s maid), schooling her in the art of Renaissance-era beauty regimens and cosmetics. However, Ghostanza’s tutelage goes much deeper, teaching Flavia that physical perfection carries a hefty price. 

By drawing sly parallels between Flavia’s world and our own, debut novelist Kate Howard demonstrates that unattainable beauty standards are hardly new. But Howard’s true genius lies in her skillful interweaving of themes of beauty, self-acceptance and artifice versus authenticity into an immersive story. The meticulous research and rich world-building place Howard alongside masters of the genre like Sarah Dunant and Tracy Chevalier (though Howard isn’t afraid to take readers down more ominous paths). If the idea of The Picture of Dorian Gray with feminist leanings gives you a thrill, then The Ornatrix is for you.

This article was originally published in the December 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The 1979 new wave hit “Pop Muzik” had an infectious chorus that began: “New York, London, Paris, Munich.” PEN/Faulkner winner Sabina Murray sends her characters to all four of these locales—and many others—in her sprawling, colorful new novel.

Based on real-life events and people, Valiant Gentlemen opens in 1880s Africa and closes in postwar Paris, where Murray’s characters, and the world, have been changed utterly by World War I.

Murray’s tone is light at the outset. Englishman Herbert Ward and Irishman Roger Casement are in Belgian-ruled Congo, just two of many young, careless expeditionaries. They mingle with the local population and brainstorm about how to make money; Ward eventually decides to write for magazines about his time living amid “naked natives and cannibalism.” 

The story picks up steam with the introduction of Sarita Sanford, a sharp-tongued heiress who marries Ward. Casement, meanwhile, must deal with multiple identity crises: He is a revolutionary for Catholic Ireland, but a Protestant, and is often taken for an Englishman. He is also living a closeted gay life. Complex characters in exotic locales combined with Murray’s deft use of language (trees in Niger, for example, are described as having “crabbed fingers”) are the strongest aspects of Valiant Gentlemen.

The approach of World War I creates tension between Ward and Casement, and their differences build to an emotional, even wrenching climax. Valiant Gentlemen offers some sharp satire on culture clashes and colonialism. Casement even makes a flip remark about some “horror,” echoing the conclusion of Joseph Conrad’s African-journey classic, Heart of Darkness. Though a bit too long, Valiant Gentlemen is ultimately an impressive accomplishment, offering an immersive read for historical fiction fans.

This article was originally published in the November 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

It is 1854, and Mexican singer Julia Pastrana is making her way to New Orleans to seek her fortune. Raised by an old nun after being abandoned by her mother, she has a good voice, is a decent dancer and speaks three languages. But her most singular feature is her thick black hair, which covers her entire body. Her strong jaw gives her an even more ape-like appearance.

Invited to join a traveling sideshow, Julia travels from city to city, remaining veiled in public between shows so as not to cause a panic. She’s billed as Troglodyte of Ancient Days, the Ugliest Woman in the World and Mujer Osa (Lady Bear). Audiences around first America and then Europe are captivated—they don’t know whether to be horrified or charmed by this intelligent, well-spoken woman who looks something other than human.

“She was the most extraordinary being that had ever existed on the face of this ridiculous earth,” author Carol Birch writes of Julia, a real-life historical figure. “Everyone said so. They wanted to see her, they wanted to meet her, everyone came, the great, the good, the scared, bewitched, bewildered, the willing and unwilling. And they paid.”

Julia is managed by Theo Lent, a down-on-his luck showman who eventually, improbably, falls in love with her. But even after they marry, he can’t quite get over his shame, writhing with discomfort at what others must think of him, the man who sleeps with an ape.

Orphans of the Carnival is a strange, transfixing novel. The gorgeously written story moves between Julia’s story and 1980s London, where a depressed woman named Rose is stockpiling (one might say hoarding) found objects in her small flat, to the dismay of those who love her. She picks up a small, burned-looking doll that she names Tattoo, whose bittersweet significance is not revealed until the very end of the novel.

“Am I human?” Julia asks a fortune-teller. “It’s possible to be human and not know it,” the woman replies. Orphans of the Carnival is about how we can find humanity in all fellow creatures, which is surely a message worth pondering now more than ever.

This article was originally published in the November 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Martin Cruz Smith, who has been called “the master of the international thriller” by the New York Times, departs from his usual modus operandi to put an old-fashioned romance at the heart of his latest suspense novel.

Cenzo is an Italian fisherman who spends his nights trolling the lagoons of Venice for cuttlefish, sole and sea bass. It’s the waning days of World War II, and Allied bombers often pass over his fishing boat, headed for Turin, Milan or Verona. Venice is still occupied by the Nazis, who seem to be unaware of the hopelessness of their cause and still doggedly pursue their enemies, especially any Jews still in hiding. One morning, it isn’t fish that Cenzo finds in his nets, but a young woman: Giulia, an Italian Jew who is fleeing the German SS squad that killed members of her family.

Cenzo, who has lost both a brother and wife to the war, impulsively decides he must do whatever he can to keep Giulia out of the hands of the Nazis. That decision leads him down a potentially dangerous path, as Venice is in a chaotic state at war’s end. Nazis, Fascists and various partisan groups are lurking around every corner, trying to establish themselves before the end finally arrives.

Smith blends this glimpse into Italy’s past with a charming story of the love that grows between the poor fisherman with little hope for change in his future and a young woman raised in one of Venice’s wealthiest families. Though it lacks the tension levels of his Arkady Renko thrillers, The Girl from Venice is an enlightening look at the chaos of Italy at the end of World War II, enlivened by a romance taken straight from the pages of a fairy tale.

This article was originally published in the November 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Like so many male genius-types, Albert Einstein’s behavior toward at least one woman who supported him was revolting. Fortunately, Marie Benedict’s tragic, crisply told novel isn’t about Albert, but about his Serbian, almost-as-brilliant first wife, Mileva Marić, who narrates it. The two met at Zurich Polytechnic as students in 1896, embarked on a passionate affair and launched a turbulent, 13-year marriage in 1903.

To be blunt, Benedict’s exploration of this unfortunate woman’s life makes you mad, and that’s probably the point. What really burns one up isn’t reading page after page about how ill-used Marić was by her philandering husband, or how thoroughly he derailed her career and life, but the knowledge that this story isn’t entirely a relic of the past. Somewhere in the world—yes, even in the United States of America in the year 2016—there is another young woman like Mileva Marić, whose promising future is crushed by domesticity and an ambitious, selfish partner.

At least, the way this story unfolds in The Other Einstein, Marić has the wisdom to dump Einstein before he dumps her. But even that scene isn’t a moment of feminist triumph. Worn out from years of childbearing and housekeeping, Marić becomes a single mom with few prospects, burdened by the stigma of divorce. 

Benedict does take liberties with her story: The Other Einstein is a novel and not a biography. Her speculations on how much Marić contributed to her husband’s work and what happened to their first child, born before their marriage and lost to history in the real world, are thought-provoking, if unable to be substantiated. There’s no doubt this is a novel that will inspire strong emotion in its readers. And it carries a warning: Hold on to your dreams, and find someone who’ll support them even as you support theirs. 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Behind the Book essay from Marie Benedict on The Other Einstein.

Lucy is 16 and in love. There’s nothing but possibility ahead. That is, if she can first break free of a world in which her love is forbidden.

You see, Lucy’s boyfriend is her 30-something high school English teacher, William. Lucy never thought she showed much promise until William’s class. Her older sister, Charlotte, is the smart one of the pair. Lucy is—you guessed it—the pretty one.

But William helps Lucy with her writing, and she begins to recognize her own greatness. And his. So when William proposes they flee their lives in Boston and go off the grid, Lucy is all in. In only two years, her love will no longer be scandalous. Surely she can make it that long without Charlotte and their adopted mother, Iris.

The seams of William and Lucy’s stitched-together existence show quickly. Although he’s found another teaching job, William keeps Lucy far from the school to avoid suspicion. She writes at home, but she longs to get her GED so she can find a job. To William, that’s a warning sign. Why isn’t their relationship enough? Can’t she be patient? She can’t risk outing their love and sending him to prison.

Masterful novelist Caroline Leavitt sets Lucy and William’s story in 1969, when the tension of Vietnam and the Charles Manson murders whirl around them. As Lucy follows the Manson case, she views her relationship through a different lens. Is William everything she thought? Or is there someone more sinister beneath his insistence that she stay home and devoted to him? As in her previous bestselling novels (including Pictures of You and Is This Tomorrow), Leavitt engages the reader by avoiding simple answers.

Life isn’t straightforward, and the lives of William, Lucy, Charlotte and Iris carry their own secrets and surprises. Gripping and suspenseful, Cruel Beautiful World will leave the reader pondering who, exactly, these people are—and perhaps, how thoroughly we can understand any individual.

The bored, bourgeois housewife going off the reservation has a long pedigree in literature. Emma Bovary is perhaps the canonical example. It didn't end well for her. And it's not clear that it ends well for the protagonist of Stephanie Bishop's The Other Side of the World.

Said protagonist is Charlotte, wife to an Anglo-Indian egghead named Henry. She follows him to Australia from England to escape the country's dismal winters. Or so she tells herself. But she's no sooner off the boat than she develops a repulsion to the land down under. She seems to mind being a wife and mother even more. Why then did she marry and have children? She knows even less than we. But this was the mid-1960s, when women who had been channeled into traditional roles were beginning to chafe at them.

Rather like Charles Bovary, Henry is nice but dull, romantic but somewhat self-centered. He is too preoccupied with work to notice his wife's wandering eyes. They land on Nicholas, who appreciates Charlotte's aspirations in the visual arts. Her art is the only thing keeping her sane, until it isn't. When Henry's mother in India nears death, he shoves off to Delhi to tend to her. This leaves Charlotte to consider her next, quite surprising move.

The Other Side of the World is as much about a kind of free-floating restlessness as it is about a failing marriage. By virtue of his skin color, Henry doesn't fit in anywhere. Charlotte can't seem to be content anywhere, or with anything. She seems to love her children only in a rather instinctual sense. But she's ready at any moment to abandon them. Henry, meanwhile, is a study in Faust-like futility, laboring over an academic treatise. He longs for India; then he longs for "ordinary suburban boredom.”

This rather suffocating feeling of pointlessness ends up dominating the novel. The Other Side of the World could have been a tired reprise of the Bovary morality tale. Instead it becomes more like Virginia Woolf, Kate Chopin or Jhumpa Lahiri. That is, it becomes a powerful manifesto of liberation. Not happiness, just liberation. Happiness is more complicated. Just ask Flaubert's Emma.

Poet and novelist Paulette Jiles’ latest book is once again set in the post-Civil War era, a time that she memorably evoked in previous works like The Color of Lightning. News of the World is a beautifully written story based on a real-life former soldier, Capt. Jefferson Kidd, who traveled the north Texas landscape in the 1870s reading the news—from politics to polar expeditions—to the inhabitants of small towns and frontier outposts who had no access to information outside their own limited environs.

In Wichita Falls, Capt. Kidd is approached by an old friend, Britt Johnson, for a favor. Johanna Leonberger was taken captive by the Kiowa after they killed her parents and sister. After four years with the tribe, she has been recovered. Britt asks the Captain to deliver the 10-year-old to her aunt and uncle outside San Antonio—a 400-mile journey fraught with danger from highwaymen, raiding Kiowa and the unforgiving landscape itself.

Jiles writes with great sensitivity about the bond that develops between the 70-year-old widower who has served in three wars and the girl who has completely forgotten her birth language, her parents, her people, her religion—even how to use a knife and fork. As their journey nears its end, Jiles conveys in sparse language the emotions of each of these perfectly drawn characters, building to a remarkable conclusion that will not soon be forgotten. News of the World is highly recommended historical fiction that brings to life an overlooked period of Texas history.

This article was originally published in the October 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.