Tracy Chevalier’s new novel, At the Edge of the Orchard, is a heartbreaking narrative of an Ohio pioneer family’s struggles that bears no resemblance to the pastoral stories in the Little House series.

The novel begins amid the loamy misery of 19th-century rural Ohio. James and Sadie Goodenough and their 10 children—swamp fever ends up claiming five—have traveled from Connecticut in search of a place to put down roots. When the family’s wagon becomes stuck in the mud, their grueling, cross-country journey comes to an abrupt halt, and the Black Swamp becomes home by default.

While readers will likely find it tough to sympathize with the hard-drinking, ill-tempered and foul-mouthed Sadie, her seemingly stolid and mild-mannered husband is no more sympathetic. Obsessed with the welfare of his apple trees, especially his rare and delicate Golden Pippins, James makes his orchard the third party in their relationship.

But when a traveling apple tree salesman becomes a frequent visitor to the Goodenough’s Black Swamp home, Sadie becomes smitten by the charismatic man. Known as John Appleseed, he provides an escape from her daily drudgery with a steady stream of alcohol-infused applejack.

After a random act of violence shatters the Goodenough family’s already precarious existence, the couple’s son, Robert, flees the Black Swamp, straight into the muscular arms of the California Gold Rush.

While some readers might grow a bit restless with the slow and steady pace of Chevalier’s patient narrative, her impeccable research and the abundance of fascinating historical anecdotes about everything from grafting apple trees to the circumference of the mighty redwoods add up to a pleasurable literary experience.

Novelist and essayist Darryl Pinckney draws on the legacy of Christopher Isherwood’s 1930s expat classic, The Berlin Stories, in his second novel, Black Deutschland. Pinckney’s young, African-American narrator, Jed Goodfinch, makes repeated visits to Berlin in the decade before the Berlin Wall falls in 1989. Unlike Isherwood’s characters, however, Jed can openly state that the city’s thriving gay community is a big part of its appeal.

Jed has spent several summers in Berlin, drinking and drugging at the Chi Chi bar and sponging off his cousin Cello, an imperious classical pianist who married into a wealthy German family. But his latest visit is different: Fresh out of rehab, Jed is working with a celebrated and controversial architect whose project to renovate whole sections of West Berlin mirror Jed’s hopes for his own reinvention. 

The novel shifts in time, much as Jed travels between Berlin and Chicago. Chicago represents the complexities of being a black man in the United States, not to mention Jed’s parents’ disappointment in him—though whether that is due to his addiction or his sexuality, he’s not sure. Berlin means AA meetings with black GIs, bohemian clubs, socialist co-ops—and lots of love, mostly unrequited but, in one magical instance, very requited indeed. 

Black Deutschland is an episodic mix of ideas, places, happenings and emotions. At its best, the novel plunges the reader directly into singular events—the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, or the somber days after the sudden death of Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor. Though the shifts in time and place can be disorientingly swift, the through note is Jed’s wryly comic, witheringly honest voice. Pinckney’s belief in a ferocious intellect as a key component in the engaged life is deliciously present in this inviting and absorbing novel. 

RELATED CONTENT: Read a Q&A with Darryl Pinckney about this book.

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

The terrible waste of war—especially its unrelenting effect on those who somehow survive—lies at the center of Sebastian Faulks’ 13th novel. Where My Heart Used to Beat is a return to historical fiction, the genre Faulks is best known for thanks to bestsellers like Birdsong.

London psychiatrist Robert Hendricks, now in his 60s, has tried to bury the memories of his service in World War II, but the losses he experienced still haunt him. Isolated and lonely, Robert is intrigued when he receives a letter from 93-year-old Alexander Pereira, a neurologist and World War I vet who claims to have served in the same infantry unit as the father Robert barely knew. Curious, Robert decides to accept Dr. Pereira’s offer to visit him at his home on a remote island off the southern coast of France.

Over the next several months, Robert makes a series of visits to Pereira, immersing himself in the revelations about his father and his own cloudy wartime memories. Pereira gradually gets Robert to open up about his war experiences—things he had not shared with anyone except the woman he loved and lost. Throughout the course of these introspective episodes, Robert and Pereira debate an array of philosophical issues, including whether 20th-century “ills” like the Holocaust and apartheid were the fault of individuals or governments. Robert gradually concludes that his postwar work as a psychiatrist has been “little more than an attempt at rebuttal.”

Faulks delves into the subjects of memory and loss with erudition and perception, engaging his readers in the task of grappling with their own memories of the past, and how those memories interject themselves into the present. His latest is a thoughtful and moving novel, beautifully told, about how humans can comprehend—or fail to comprehend—the atrocities that surround us every day. 

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

It’s difficult to overstate the disastrous impact World War II had on civilians caught in its many war zones. These stories are often overshadowed by tales from the front, but these days the more unusual contributions of civilians to the war effort are being recognized more and more, as in movies like The Imitation Game. Kristin Hannah’s moving The Nightingale joins these ranks to take a look at the experiences of ordinary people and the great reserves of courage and innovation the fighting called forth from them.

The heroines of this story are two sisters, the somewhat matronly Viann and the younger and wilder Isabelle. Having lost their mother as children, with a father who is too torn up with grief and the effects of the last world war, the two are not close. Besides, Viann, who married young, is happy to concentrate on her pretty little daughter, Sophie, and her loving husband, the town postmaster. 

Then comes the war. Viann’s husband is mobilized, but since France capitulated to Germany with hardly a shot being fired, things in their town are not too bad at first. But when the Nazis start billeting their soldiers among the townsfolk, life deteriorates. Jewish friends and colleagues are humiliated, then rounded up. Food and fuel become scarce.

Meanwhile, Isabelle enters the resistance. Her task is to find downed British then American airmen and guide them over the Pyrenees into Spain, a trip so grueling that it made this reviewer's feet hurt just to read it. Her code name is Nightingale, the English version of her real last name: Rossignol. Having saved hundreds of Allied airmen, she becomes one of the Nazis' most wanted.

The book is narrated by an omniscient narrator and a woman, now elderly and ill, who decides to return to France to accept honors for her bravery and sacrifice during the war. If nothing else made you cry during this book, this part, with its gentle twists and surprises, should do it.

Caroline Herschel’s prospects as a plain, poor and pox-scarred woman in 19th-century Germany are not good. Living in a cramped home surrounded by siblings and an affectionless mother, her only saviors are her brilliant older brother William—who moved to England—and her loving but sickly father, who after attending the wedding of a neighbor’s daughter wails to Caroline, “Oh, my dear. You are neither handsome nor rich. What is to be done?”

After Caroline sends her attractive, eccentric brother a letter in which she pleads, “Save me,” he brings her to England to serve as his assistant. An astronomer of growing renown, William teaches Caroline (he calls her Lina) to help him chart the skies. She also cooks, cleans, handles his records and keeps the household accounts, while managing to become an accomplished astronomer in her own right. When William decides to marry—it is not coincidental that his betrothed has inherited a sizable estate—Caroline finds herself on her own for the first time in her life, faced with deciding who she is.

The Stargazer’s Sister is a lovely addition to Carrie Brown’s works of historical fiction. Brown brings the true story of the Herschel siblings to life in exquisite detail and deftly explores what it meant for Caroline to be an intelligent woman far ahead of her time. 

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

Kristina McMorris evokes such a strong sense of place in her writing that to open her books feels less like reading and more like traveling.

Her absorbing new novel, The Edge of Lost, opens on Alcatraz Island in 1937, where on a foggy night the warden’s 10-year-old daughter has gone missing. An inmate working in the warden’s greenhouse is hiding information about where she is. We are quickly zipped back to 1919 Dublin, meeting Shanley Keagan, a 12-year-old orphan whose vicious Uncle Will forces him to perform in pubs for spare change. Shan grabs an opportunity to get on a ship to America, scrabbling to forge a future in New York.

How those two storylines intersect is at the heart of this epic, deeply felt tale of struggle and second chances, where Shan goes from a boy with dreams of Broadway to an inmate who “waited for the steel bars to slam” while he served 15 to 25 years.

McMorris has made a name for herself with beautifully written World War II fiction, including her debut, Letters from Home, which was based upon her grandfather’s wartime letters to a girlfriend. Her latest novel was inspired in part by McMorris’ reading about children who grew up on Alcatraz Island, whose parents were employed at the infamous prison. Some of the children claimed to be friends with inmates, although they were forbidden to talk to them.

But Alcatraz is just one of many places in The Edge of Lost, a transporting piece of historical fiction in which America is a melting pot, a place of supper clubs and Model Ts, Prohibition and fedoras, dreams and disappointments. 

This article was originally published in the December 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

One of fiction’s greatest powers is its ability to allow writers and readers the opportunity to examine the question of “What if?” In The Hours Count, Jillian Cantor revisits a pivotal moment in American history and asks: What if Ethel and Julius Rosenberg—the only Americans to ever be executed for spying during the Cold War—were actually innocent?

To explore this idea, Cantor transports readers back to the time of Truman and Eisenhower, an era when fears of smallpox and atomic bombs ran rampant and all things Russian were eyed with deep suspicion. Here we meet Millie Stein, mother to a young son named David who refuses to speak and a Russian husband whom she does not love. Due to David’s unusual behavior, Millie is rejected by the other mothers in her neighborhood and made to feel that his issues are the result of her own failures. When an enigmatic psychologist enters her life with claims he can help David and a chance meeting with her neighbor Ethel (herself the parent of a difficult child) sparks a genuine friendship, Millie feels she’s been thrown a lifeline. Initially both of these relationships are a boon to Millie, but when the FBI turns it attention to her husband and her neighbors, she soon finds herself unsure whom she can trust and forced to question her own loyalties.

It’s a tricky business blending fact with fiction, but Cantor—who imagined the life of Anne Frank’s sister in her previous novel, Margot—manages to do so beautifully in The Hours Count. Although Millie is Cantor’s creation, she is brought brilliantly to life and her emotional struggles as a young mother in a loveless marriage provide an interesting lens through which to view the historical events of the novel. Millie doesn’t know who the villains are and we must watch as she lets her heart guide her. This ambiguity and uncertainty feels true to life and results in a story that is filled with plenty of surprises, where the stakes feel impossibly high and stolen moments mean the most. A domestic spin on a spy thriller, The Hours Count is an affecting and effective piece of historical fiction that begins with readers asking “What if?” and ends with them wondering “What might have been?” 

Writers have been known to embellish facts for dramatic purposes. A possible embellishment provides part of the drama of Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise, the final novel by Oscar Hijuelos. This posthumous work, set in the late 19th and early 20th century, is more restrained than previous Hijuelos books, including the Pulitzer Prize winner The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. And the protagonists are as un-Hijuelos as you can get: Mark Twain and Henry Morton Stanley, the Welsh explorer who achieved fame for his search for David Livingstone.

Three years after Stanley’s death in 1904, his wife, artist Dorothy Tennant, discovers a manuscript that contradicts his official biography. In the hidden version, he wrote that Henry Hope Stanley, “the merchant trader from New Orleans whom he considered his second father,” had not vanished during a visit to Cuba in 1861, and that the young Stanley had traveled there with Samuel Clemens (Twain) to search for him. Tennant asks Clemens: Is it true? What follows is a chronicle of the decades-long friendship between these two very different men.

Hijuelos was still working on this novel at the time of his death in 2013, and Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise is clearly an unfinished manuscript. Descriptions go on for too long, and dialogue often sounds written rather than spoken. Despite its flaws, however, the book entertains. Hijuelos beautifully dramatizes Stanley’s discomfort with women and his struggles with celebrity. Clemens is the swaggering Twain of legend—until the moving passages that depict the deaths of his eldest daughter and beloved wife. And the scenes from Stanley’s final months, when he has trouble recognizing Dorothy, are heartbreaking. 

Late in the novel, Clemens says that books will last as long as there are people to read them. One could add that, as long as people read books, they will read books by Oscar Hijuelos. In its better moments, this novel shows you why.

This article was originally published in the November 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.