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.

British-born Maud Heighton, the protagonist of Imogen Robertson’s latest page-turner, The Paris Winter, couldn’t have picked a worse time to come study painting at Academie Lafond. It’s the winter of 1909-1910, when the Seine overflowed its banks, flooding people out of their homes and sucking away the very ground beneath their feet. Perhaps Maud had some idea that she would be a starving artist for a few weeks before she sold her first painting and made a big splash at the Salon, but she had no idea what she was in for. She’s broke, starving, freezing and probably on the verge of a deathly illness.

Fortunately for Maud, her rather desperate situation is noticed and she’s sent to be the companion for a young woman named Sylvie Morel, who lives with her brother. Now, Maud has a warm bed to sleep in and some decent food to eat. The Morels are kind to her. Everything goes well, until, of course, it doesn’t. The bad stuff includes but isn’t limited to gaslighting, attempted murder and an ingenious jewel heist that almost works. It all engenders in Maud a lust for vengeance that recalls Greek tragedy. The phrase “revenge is a dish best served cold” seems not to have occurred to her. But will it be a tragedy for her, or a tragedy for the people who betrayed her?

Robertson is skillful at conjuring up not only a twisty, gripping plot, but also compelling characters. There’s the upright, intelligent and ambitious Maud and her wealthy, compassionate fellow artist Tatiana, who’s in Paris with two fussy aunts who want her to marry some rich Russian dolt against her will. There’s the earthy life model Yvette, neurasthenic Sylvie and an American-born Countess who’s no better than she ought to be. These multidimensional characters and Robertson’s descriptions of Belle Epoque Paris—even of rats in ancient, flooding cellars—make the reader want to visit, even for a day.

Set in the 1800s, Citizens Creek chronicles two different lives in its two parallel sections: those of Cow Tom, a slave born in Alabama and sold to a Creek Indian chief prior to his 10th birthday, and his granddaughter, Rose.

Cow Tom possessed many unique gifts. As a healer and expert in keeping cattle healthy, he became a kind of cow-whisperer as he grew, a trait that later manifested itself in the ability to master all kinds of languages. Armed with dreams of freeing himself, his wife and their two young daughters and establishing themselves in the Creek Tribe, Cow Tom must navigate working as a translator for the U.S. military and traveling the Trail of Tears, among other trials.

Following in Cow Tom’s footsteps is his granddaughter Rose, who, in her efforts to lead the family, becomes the matriarch and guardian of his legacy. As she tries to ensure her family is provided for and grapples with love, motherhood, political and social hostility, Rose proves her story is timeless.

Set against a vibrant backdrop of American expansion, black emancipation and the displacement of Native-American nations, Citizens Creek is a story of identity, community, family and an individual’s will to make a difference.

California-born Lalita Tademy is the author of Cane River, a best-selling novel and a 2001 Oprah Book Club Selection, and its critically acclaimed sequel, Red River. Here, she uses frank, descriptive prose that teems with life as it depicts Cow Tom’s travels and Rose’s trials and triumphs. Some books hold whole worlds between their pages—Citizens Creek is one of them.

This article was originally published in the November 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Peter Schoeffer has no choice. Johann Fust raised him as his own son, and Peter owes him everything—even if that means he must do the work of the devil.

This is how Peter feels about Fust’s request that Peter abandon his promising career as a scribe to apprentice to Johann Gutenberg. The cunning inventor’s rote technique of making books seems blasphemous to all who learn of it. Anxious that the Church will feel the same, Gutenberg and his financial backer Fust vow to keep their press a secret until they complete a massive undertaking: the printing and binding of nearly 200 copies of the Holy Bible, a book with well over a thousand pages.

At first, the clandestine workshop in Mainz is just as Peter imagined it would be—a brutal, spirit-crushing, suffocating place full of molten metal and jet-black sludge. But as Peter devotes all his waking hours to the task of printing with movable type, he slowly discovers printing’s beauty, its power and its art.

Gutenberg’s Apprentice is, in large part, a depiction of the creative process. It highlights the ingenuity, patience and skill that often shape seemingly lifeless mechanisms, but it also examines the interdependent and often rocky relationships that exist between individuals involved in collaborative, creative activities. Those with ideas, skill and funding all depend upon each other to make their vision a reality—which makes betrayal all the more brutal, as the novel shows.

Letterpress printer Alix Christie’s debut novel also asks profound questions. How do we determine whether the work we’re doing is good or evil? Is a greater dissemination of knowledge through mass production worth the creative touches and soulful variations it often loses? Gutenberg’s Apprentice is an imaginative recounting of history that, despite a 15th-century setting, reflects many of today’s chief matters of concern. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the ever-changing art of publishing.

RELATED CONTENT: Read Alix Christie's behind-the-book essay.

This article was originally published in the October 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Lin Enger’s moving and enlightening second novel resonates emotionally and intellectually on several levels: as an homage to the vanished American bison, a reflection on the forceful removal of Northern Plains Indians from their homelands and an engaging family saga peopled with characters who could have been this Midwestern author’s own ancestors.

The High Divide opens in the summer of 1886, when Ulysses Pope, husband to Norwegian-born Gretta and father to Eli, 16, and younger son Danny, abruptly disappears from their western Minnesota home. Shortly thereafter, Eli finds a letter to his father from a woman in Bismarck—so he and Danny hop a freight train west, following their only clue to their father’s whereabouts. Gretta, in turn, embarks on her own journey, “with two dollars left in her purse and not a single blood relative in all the North American continent—aside from her own two sons, whose whereabouts were unknown to her.” She instead heads east to St. Paul, the home of Ulysses’ sister, who shares details of her brother’s military years that were unknown to Gretta—and which may somehow be connected to his disappearance now, nearly two decades later.

Enger entwines Ulysses’ odyssey with the actual Hornaday Expedition of 1886, during which the curator of the National Museum in Washington, D.C., now the Smithsonian, sought to kill a large number of the vanishing bison—paradoxically, to stuff and preserve them for future generations.

Though the reader gradually learns the facts behind Ulysses’ disappearance, his ultimate search is for forgiveness for his part in what he now knows is the decimation of the Cheyenne, Crow, Lakota and Blackfeet tribes that were part of the land on which he was raised. Enger’s gripping story is a marvelous blend of strong characters and a brilliant depiction of a land and time now lost.

This article was originally published in the October 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Eliza Granville’s suspenseful novel hearkens back to the fairy tales we remember from childhood—but not the sanitized Disney versions. These are the darker tales about witches, ovens and children lost in the deep woods, fleeing for their lives.

Gretel and the Dark tells two stories that eventually connect, revealing the mystery at the heart of the novel. The first concerns Krysta, a young girl in Nazi-controlled Germany whose widowed father works at an infirmary with an ominous mission. Granville reveals this world through the eyes of Krysta, a spirited and stubborn girl who seems to delight in confounding her adult caretakers. Krysta uses elements of fairy stories to explain her father’s increasingly tortured mental state and the bizarre world in which she finds herself. As Granville gradually unveils the chilling details—which her innocent narrator does not fully understand—we readers recognize the true terror of her situation.

The second story, told in alternate chapters, takes place in the late 19th century. Josef Breuer, a psychoanalyst of some renown, becomes fascinated by a nameless, beautiful woman claiming to be a machine. She’s in search of a monster, she tells him, who must be destroyed before he spawns more monsters just like himself. Breuer is determined to discover who she is and why she bears a smudged tattoo of numbers on her forearm.

This combination of history, mystery and fairy tale makes for engrossing and irresistible reading—right up to the ultimately redemptive final twist.

This article was originally published in the October 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

It is said that truth is often stranger than fiction, but what happens when truth can only be found in the pages of fiction? Readers of Laila Lalami’s latest novel, The Moor’s Account, may find themselves asking exactly that question, as fact and fantasy coalesce in a masterful story that shines a new light on one of the darkest eras of history.

A sweeping saga that revisits the Spanish conquest of the New World in the 1500s, The Moor’s Account is told through the eyes of a Moroccan man named Mustafa, born as a Muslim and reborn as a Christian named Estebanico when he is sold into slavery. Stripped of his freedom, Estebanico travels far across the ocean in the service of the legendary Narváez expedition to seize the modern-day Gulf Coast—and all its incumbent riches—in the name of Spain. But in this foreign land, everything that can go wrong—from hostile Indians and debilitating disease—does. A mission bent on conquest soon turns into a desperate bid for survival, and Estebanico finds himself questioning who the savages really are and what it means to truly be free.

The backbone of Estebanico’s story is a brutal one that even the most disinterested history student will be familiar with. And yet, with Estebanico as the narrator and Lalami at the helm, the events take on such a deeply personal tone that it is all too easy to believe that The Moor’s Account is actually a long-lost memoir written from a shamefully overlooked perspective. Lalami spent more than four years dwelling in the murky excised portions of historical accounts to piece together this story, based on actual events. The compelling end result rings so true, it feels like one of history’s silent witnesses has finally been given back his voice. Whether you have a special interest in this period of history or not, Estebanico’s miraculous journey is not to be missed.

This article was originally published in the September 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

It’s estimated that around 500 women passed themselves off as men so they could fight in the Civil War. In the haunting Neverhome, Laird Hunt deftly imagines one such situation and its heartbreaking repercussions.

She calls herself Ash Thompson, a farmer who enlists to fight for the Union. Ash quickly earns a reputation as a brave and stoic soldier, even in the direst of battles. But Ash is actually Constance, an Indiana farmer’s wife who left her husband behind to fight. Her reasons become clearer as this beautifully paced novel unfolds, and Ash goes from a war hero to a broken woman looking for a way home.

After Ash is revealed as a woman and accused of spying for the South, she is jailed in deplorable conditions, nearly going mad while awaiting a chance to escape. On her trek back to her farm, many of those she encounters help her in their own ways: a trio of orphaned sisters; the wife of the General who commanded Ash. Others stick to their own path, fighting their demons as they make their way home from war. “Here and there you would cross a discharged veteran still had bombs and bullets flying in his eyes,” she said.

Hunt is at the top of his game with Neverhome, a mesmerizing book whose quiet surface belies its rich depths, up until its heartbreaking conclusion. His impeccable ear for authentic Civil War-era dialect—and his vivid battle scenes—breathe life into a novel that explores what happens when the call of duty collides with the lure of home.

This article was originally published in the September 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.