Set in upstate New York just after the Civil War, Jeffrey Lent’s latest book is a bit puzzling. To be blunt, it ends just when things are getting really interesting. It’s not that things haven’t been interesting from the beginning: By page three we’ve been witness to a double murder. The murderer’s name is Malcolm Hopeton, and he’s returned from the war only to find that half of his farm has been sold out from under him and his wife is canoodling with his hired man—the type who, in the old days, would have been called a cur. In his fury, Malcolm even injures his hired boy, Harlan Davis, who has witnessed the whole tawdry mess. As for Malcolm, he resigns himself to the gallows. But will he hang, after all?

In between the murder and the book’s non-ending, Harlan heals up and goes to work for young widower August Swartout; Harlan’s sister, Becca, is already keeping house for him. The book then turns its focus from a spectacular crime of passion to the quieter rhythms of the labor that goes into running a farm. Most of the people we meet follow a Quakerish/Shakerish religion that values honesty, humility, hard work and an overall, austere decency. Observing that hard work and decency is where the novel’s real pleasure lies.

Lent, whose 2000 debut novel In the Fall was a bestseller, is known for his breathtaking and detailed descriptions of the land and nature. His characters’ speech is so rich and lyrical that it reminds the reader of J.M. Synge’s western Irishmen. One lingers over dialogue discussing the qualities of mules, the castration of pigs, the harvesting of oats and the making of jam, bread and pickles. Most impressive is the smallest person’s determination to be and do good in the face of calamity. And though he may dread having to tell the whole truth about his boss’ late wife and her paramour, no one wants to do good more than Harlan Davis.

Maybe A Slant of Light doesn’t deliver the resolution one might want from a modern police procedural, but its other virtues more than make up for it.

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

BookPage Fiction Top Pick, April 2015

A search for an elusive sea monster at the height of World War II sounds like the plot of a genre-mashup movie. But in At the Water’s Edge, the latest novel from Water for Elephants author Sara Gruen, what starts out as a lark on the part of rich, entitled friends turns into a quest that is at times frightening, liberating and even comical.

Bored and wealthy Ellis schemes to find and photograph the Loch Ness Monster in an attempt to one-up his dismissive father, who was ultimately discredited in his own infamous attempt. He and his best friend, Hank, drag Ellis’ wife, Maddie, along—and her journey to uncover truths about herself, her marriage and the kind of life she wants to lead provides the novel’s heart.

Glad simply to be alive after encountering German U-boats during their Atlantic crossing, Maddie isn’t willing to participate in the boys’ foolish scheme—and she soon starts to wonder whether the true monster might be closer to home. Ellis and Hank certainly possess money and the breeding that often goes along with it, but as their search proves futile, Ellis displays increasing disdain for Maddie and the people of the Scottish village where they’ve sheltered. As Ellis’ desperation mounts, Maddie fears for the safety of herself and her newfound friends, including the brooding, handsome proprietor of the village inn.

Gruen skillfully weaves in historical reference points, making Maddie’s story seem larger than that individual focus. The author conveys the lure of the Scottish Highlands, and its storied lore and mystery help create her novel’s riveting, ethereal atmosphere. Maddie’s growing self-awareness is presented in stark—and welcome—contrast to her husband’s spiral into conceit and self-deception.

At the Water’s Edge captivates with its drama, intrigue and glimpses of both the dark and light of humanity. As Jane Austen once wrote, “with due exceptions, woman feels for woman very promptly and compassionately.” For all her faults, Maddie’s tragic history and her courage in the face of her present predicament will win readers to her side.

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

Young William Wyeth sets out from St. Louis as part of a fur-trapping brigade in 1826, hoping to prove to his family back East that his wandering, capricious nature can be put to good use. Wrestling with his insecurities spurs him forward into the relatively uncharted land west of the settled United States, filled with wild game, angry natives and endless potential.

On his first trapping trip, Wyeth nearly loses his life in a hunting accident. While healing at a nearby military fort, he falls in love with a newly widowed woman named Alene. As he prepares for a second trip west as part of a new brigade, he promises Alene he will marry her upon his return. However, he knows any number of things may keep him from fulfilling his commitment.

The mythology of the early American West is often monopolized by dramatic battles between cowboys and Native Americans, but Into the Savage Country approaches the era from a more somber angle. From horse races to buffalo hunts, Wyeth encounters much danger over his expedition, relying on friends in his brigade and a certain amount of good fortune to help him in his quest to return to St. Louis a rich man. Along the way, he discovers he misjudged many of his comrades, and as he begins to appreciate what they bring to the group, he forms friendships that are crucial to surviving the harshness of the unsettled West.

Tennessee-based writer Shannon Burke is the author of two novels, Safelight and Black Flies, and has worked on numerous film projects, including Syriana. Burke’s choice to write Into the Savage Country from Wyeth’s first-person perspective lends a realism to the historical, yet fictional account of his adventures, and his descriptions of the scenery and the native peoples encountered on his travels are striking. It’s a fresh take on the Western story.

When 22-year-old Alice becomes pregnant out of wedlock in the early 1930s, both she and her family fear disgrace. Her mother sends her from London to the Gloucestershire countryside to await the baby’s birth at a place called Fiercombe Manor, after which she will give the baby to an orphanage. Her mother’s old friend, Mrs. Jelphs, is the housekeeper at the empty manor, and she promises to keep watch over Alice, who has concocted a cover story of a recently deceased husband.

The house’s owners, the Stantons, live abroad, so Alice spends the sweltering summer mostly alone, accompanied by a feeling that something is amiss with the manor and its history. She becomes determined to seek out the secrets of the manor’s past and discovers that, 30 years ago, another pregnant woman suffered a tragedy on the estate. As Alice uncovers Elizabeth’s story, she fears that she, too, will share her fate. Weaving together Alice’s and Elizabeth’s stories, Fiercombe Manor ties together two women who, despite their different statuses and eras, are connected in many ways.

British writer and journalist Kate Riordan has worked for the Guardian, and her debut novel, Birdcage Walk, was based on a real-life crime in 1900s London. Her rich language pulls readers in, giving them a glimpse of the idyllic English countryside, its inhabitants and its secrets. Fiercombe Manor is fierce, imaginative and suspenseful.

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

Pre-Civil Rights Mississippi was a place where issues of race and class weighted down air already heavy with humidity. Jonathan Odell takes this complicated setting and throws two young mothers from widely different worlds together.

Hazel, a wealthy white woman, and Vida, a poor black woman, are at first only joined by the devastating loss of their children—and their enmity for one another. Vida is frequently harassed by the racist local sheriff, which, combined with the loss of her son, has made her bitter and mistrustful. When Hazel’s husband hires Vida to take care of Hazel after a drunken car crash, close proximity and lack of other companionship force Vida and Hazel to learn to get along. The two team up to turn their town of Delphi, Mississippi, on its head, and watch as change takes place—in their city, their state, their nation and their culture.

This is the third novel from Mississippi native Odell (The Healing), and it draws from his own experience. Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League is quintessentially Southern in its frank discussions of friendship, marriage, family, feminism, grief and redemption.

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

It’s always thrilling when a new novelist marches into familiar territory and delivers something refreshingly different. In this case, Andrea Chapin presents a story of William Shakespeare, a woman every bit his equal, and the relationship that inspires some of his best work. If you think you know this tale already, The Tutor will prove you wrong in wonderful ways.

In the year 1590, 31-year-old widow Katharine de L’Isle is living on her uncle’s estate in Lancashire, where the family secretly practices Catholicism amid Queen Elizabeth’s rampant persecution of their faith. Katharine is resigned to a quiet life populated by her extended family and the books her uncle taught her to love from an early age. Then a new schoolmaster arrives: William Shakespeare.

Shakespeare is not yet the literary titan he will grow to be, nor is he yet the toast of the London theatre scene, but there’s already a boldness to him that’s at first off-putting to Katharine. As the two grow closer, though, they find an intellectual kinship which blossoms into something much more passionate.

Chapin spent years researching this novel, but she never lets her knowledge of Shakespeare or Elizabethan England overwhelm the story. Instead, her research infuses the book with the kind of detail that makes it feel warm, lived-in and real.

Perhaps more importantly, though, she writes Shakespeare not like a god among men, but like a human. He feels real in ways other fictional depictions of him never have, and a big reason why is Chapin’s creation of Katharine. She’s Shakespeare’s intellectual and emotional equal, and she’s not simply swept off her feet by him. In many ways, she’s the dominant character, and that’s both refreshing and entertaining.

The Tutor is a rich, beautifully constructed debut novel that will captivate readers of historical fiction and romance alike, and even the most devoted of Shakespeare fans will be thrilled by this new look at The Bard.

The Civil War has been over for five years, but half a decade is not enough time to rid America of the demons the war left behind. Postbellum Philadelphia is populated by families mourning their lost sons, and streets full of men with missing limbs serves as a reminder that time does not heal all wounds. Such is the backdrop for Alan Finn’s Things Half in Shadow, full of spellbinding tales of the supernatural.

The novel is told from the point of view of Edward Clark, now a reporter for one of the city’s largest papers. He is still haunted by the things he saw while fighting in the war, by nightmares of friends whose lives he saw fade amidst cannon fire and smoke. The years have also not brought reprieve from a tragedy he witnessed as a child: The murder of his mother at the hands of his father, famed magician Magellan Holmes.

Because of Edward’s experience with illusion and deceit, thanks to his childhood with Magellan, he is asked by his editor to work on a story exposing the many mediums seeking to make money by reconnecting families with their lost loved ones on the other side. When the city’s most prominent (and perhaps legitimate) medium, Lenora Grimes Pastor, dies mid-seance, Edward must join forces with fake medium, the widowed Lucy Collins, to find her murderer.

Alan Finn is a pseudonym for an acclaimed author of mystery and crime fiction. He resides in Pennsylvania, the state in which his debut novel is set. Things Half in Shadow couples historical detail with imagination and fantasy. The author’s writing style is simplistic but not simple, allowing readers to fill in the blanks as they remain thrilled, intrigued and captivated with every turn of the page.

A moment can change everything. Nat Weary learns that in a hurry. One minute, he was a World War II veteran on bended knee, proposing to his sweetheart during a concert in their hometown of Montgomery, Alabama. The next, Weary spots several men armed with pipes heading toward the performer, his childhood friend Nat “King” Cole.

Before his girl can utter a response, Weary leaps from the auditorium’s colored balcony and runs on stage to defend his friend. By cracking one of the men over the head with a microphone stand, Weary saves Nat’s life—and ensures he’ll spend the next 10 years of his own in prison.

In Driving the King, gifted novelist Ravi Howard uses glimpses of Weary’s post-prison life to give weight and hope to all he lost during a decade locked up. Weary finds a second chance and much-needed distance from Montgomery by becoming Cole’s driver and trusted friend in Los Angeles. Howard weaves historical events through this fictional retelling, using them as key plot points and context for Weary’s internal turmoil. The Montgomery bus boycott is central, and Howard also introduces readers to a young Martin Luther King Jr.

In reality, Cole never returned to perform in the South after being attacked during a 1956 performance in Birmingham and was resented by some black people for performing in front of segregated audiences (resentment that continued even after Cole revealed his financial support of the Montgomery bus boycott).

This novel follows in the thematic footsteps of Howard’s debut, Like Trees, Walking, which recounted a lynching in Mobile, Alabama. Through unfussy language and well-formed characters, Howard takes readers of all races, ages and classes into the world of pre-civil rights era black people, offering insight on and understanding of one of our country’s most tumultuous periods.

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

Priya Parmar’s second novel opens an intimate, witty and highly entertaining window into the early 20th-century circle of writers, philosophers and artists known as London’s Bloomsbury Group. They met several times a week at the homes of Vanessa and Clive Bell and Vanessa’s brother and sister, Adrian and Virginia Stephen (later Woolf). This erudite group also included the novelist E.M. Forster; biographer Lytton Strachey; artist Duncan Grant; art critic Roger Fry, curator of New York’s Metropolitan Museum; and economist John Maynard Keynes. The Stephen siblings—Vanessa, Virginia, Adrian and Thoby, the eldest brother— moved to the “bohemian hinterland” of Bloomsbury after their parents died, and Thoby’s Cambridge friends quickly adopted it as their favorite gathering place.

By means of Vanessa’s diary entries and letters, postcards and telegrams traveling back and forth among this large cast of characters, Parmar delves into not just their intellectual pursuits, but also their flirtations, affairs and sexual proclivities, which they reveal with little thought to discretion. But, as the title suggests, Parmar’s main focus is the Stephen sisters: Vanessa, the artist, and Virginia, the novelist, whose relationship was challenged by Vanessa’s 1907 marriage to Clive Bell.

Vanessa and Her Sister succeeds not only as a glimpse into this remarkable artistic family, but as an insightful portrayal of post-Victorian London as seen through the eyes of its increasingly uninhibited intellectual elite.

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

RELATED CONTENT: Read a behind-the-book essay by Priya Parmar.

This exciting historical novel is about mountain man and trapper Hugh Glass, who is working for the newly formed American Fur Company, founded in 1823 and owned by Jacob Astor when beaver pelts were worth serious cash. For men like Glass, there’s serious pressure to produce pelts and a profit for the young business—even it if means entering the land of the hostile Ariakra tribe.

The suspense is tight from the opening scene, when Hugh is attacked by a mama grizzly protecting her cubs. The wounds nearly kill him, but he lives, mostly thanks to his will and a strong desire to seek revenge on the two comrades who abandoned him and took his knife and rifle, leaving him defenseless. To survive, Glass has to battle hostile Indians, starvation and extreme weather. He even fights a ravenous wolf pack for a share of a buffalo.

The Revenant (which is soon to be a film starring Leonardo DiCaprio) gives us a vivid portrait of brutal men, living in a brutal time, in a brutal land. Some sweetness is provided in the character of a teenaged boy, a fictionalized Jim Bridger, one of the best known mountain explorers of that time. Michael Punke’s visceral prose feels authentic to the era and is full of compelling historical detail: This is Western writing at its best. Readers are immersed in a landscape that had only recently been explored by whites for the first time, thanks to the famed Lewis and Clark expedition. This thrilling book is easy to read, but hard to put down. 

It’s easy to forget that by the time he was 41, F. Scott Fitzgerald was washed up. His books were out of print, magazines weren’t interested in his stories and his monthly royalties were down to pocket change. In 1937, he went to Hollywood, where he struggled to make a living writing screenplays, barely staying one step ahead of his creditors. It is these lean years that Stewart O’Nan examines in his brilliant biographical novel West of Sunset.

When Fitzgerald arrived in Hollywood, his wife, Zelda, was in a mental hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, and their daughter, Scottie, was lodged in an East Coast boarding school. Overcome with guilt and plagued by the alcohol addiction that would lead to a fatal heart attack just three years later, Fitzgerald worked as a studio screenwriter for projects both notable (Gone with the Wind) and forgotten (A Yank at Oxford), surrounded by colleagues such as Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley and Humphrey Bogart. At the same time, he met and fell in love with Sheilah Graham, a British gossip columnist with her own complicated past. Their relationship sustained him and also made it possible for him to work on his final novel, The Last Tycoon. But he still returned east regularly to see Zelda or take her on small trips—once, he even brought her to her family’s home in Alabama for a trial stay.

O’Nan has always found the drama inherent in hard work (Last Night at the Lobster) and in the nuances of personal relationships (Emily, Alone), and West of Sunset combines both. As glamorous a subject as Hollywood in the 1930s is, the small moments work best in this poignant novel: the guilt Fitzgerald feels over not spending his holidays with his wife and daughter; the awkward friendship between Scottie and Sheilah; and the struggles that Fitzgerald has alone with his typewriter. O’Nan handles these situations with the utmost sympathy. He paints a deeply personal portrait of a man on his last legs—financially, creatively and physically—and as painful as the subject matter is, it is also a pleasure to read. West of Sunset is truly one great writer exploring the life and work of another.

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

In Anthony Doerr’s riveting novel, All the Light We Cannot See, we meet 16-year-old blind girl Marie-Laure and 17-year-old Nazi soldier Werner as they are hunkered down in separate corners of the French seaside town of Saint-Malo during the American liberation of the Nazi occupied city. Through alternating chapters that jump back and forth in time between 1934 and 1944, Doerr beautifully tells the story of these two children, doomed by the war, and destined to meet.

In 1934, 6-year-old Marie-Laure loses her sight from a degenerative condition. Although her mother died in childbirth, her doting papa is relentless in helping Marie-Laure relearn her world. The master locksmith at Paris’ Natural History Museum, Daniel LeBlanc is also an exceptional miniaturist and puzzle maker. He creates a miniature version of the Paris block they live on, complete with sidewalks and street lamps. He guides her on the walk to and from the museum every day until one day, two years later, Marie-Laure is able to guide him. Her father’s love and the confidence he gave her sustains Marie-Laure once she is forced to become self-sufficient.

At the same time, in a coal-mining complex in near Essex, Germany, Werner lives with his sister, Jutta, in an orphanage. Curious Werner is clearly a gifted child and peppers the benevolent head of the orphanage, Frau Elena, with continuous streams of questions. One day, Werner comes across a discarded radio. It takes him three weeks, but he finally gets the spool of wires to pick up a station playing music. Six years later, Werner’s talent with radios captures the attention of a high-ranking mining official. And it’s he who writes a letter of recommendation for Werner for a coveted spot in the most prestigious SS school, saving him from the fate of his father, who died working in the coal mines, and simultaneously sealing his fate as a Nazi child soldier.

The reader travels both backward and forward through these characters lives as they move closer and closer to each other until they are finally in the same place at the same time. Doerr does a brilliant job of weaving this kind of six degrees of separation story together so that the reader can’t even guess at the links until they are slowly revealed. The prose is simple and lyrical. It perfectly captures the innocence of youth and then, later, the loss of it. Each short chapter overflows with the intense emotions of the time and is packed with enough action to make the novel an unlikely, gripping page-turner. A National Book Award finalist, All the Light We Cannot See is easily one of the best books of the year and not to be missed.