Justin Go’s ambitious, sprawling and compelling debut novel, The Steady Running of the Hour, lurches from America to England, France, Sweden Germany and Iceland—even stretching to the Himalayas—switching back and forth in time from pre-WWI England to the present.

Tristan Campbell, a postgrad in California in 2004, receives a letter from an English law firm suggesting that he may be the sole inheritor of a sizeable fortune willed in 1924 to a beneficiary who, for all purposes, disappeared that year and never collected the funds, now worth millions. The evidence of his relationship to this beneficiary is tenuous at best, and Tristan is given the task of finding some piece of solid evidence in less than two months.

The novel’s intriguing premise leads Tristan in many directions, following flimsy clues that he hopes will eventually reveal that he is related to the beneficiary, his possible great-grandmother Imogen Soames-Andersson. Imogen and her older sister Eleanor, an artist, were the daughters of a Swedish diplomat and an accomplished English sculptress. They lived in London, where Imogen met explorer Ashley Walsingham in August 1916. The two embark on a brief but intense affair, each acutely aware that Ashley is to be deployed to the Western Front in only a week. After the war, Ashley joins a British expedition to Mt. Everest, where he loses his life—only weeks after leaving his entire fortune to Imogen and her descendants.

Despite a somewhat ambiguous ending, Go’s saga is engaging and infused with large dollops of mystery and romance. The Steady Running of the Hour should appeal to readers of each of these genres.

For those who mistakenly assume that PTSD is a malady of modern warfare, prize-winning author Helen Dunmore’s novel The Lie provides a poignant reminder that throughout history, the battle is far from over after a soldier returns home.

Such is the case for WWI veteran Daniel Branwell, whose return to his pastoral homeland in Cornwall proves to be no escape from the enemy. He is haunted by his morbid memories and crushing guilt over the death of his best friend Frederick. Dunmore’s deft and poetic narrative veers gracefully from realism to the supernatural—in particular, Daniel’s recurring glimpses of what appears to be Frederick’s restless ghost, invoking the horror of the trenches in all its grisly and grim detail.

While the reader is never quite certain if Daniel’s visions of his dead best friend are truly hauntings or simply hallucinatory, Dunmore provides a fresh counterpoint to the terrifying ambiguity of these scenes with the renewed friendship between the novel’s tormented antihero and Frederick’s stalwart sister, Felicia, a young war widow. Felicia is living with her toddler in the wealthy family’s cavernous manse, a place which holds both warm and chilling memories for Daniel.

As both Daniel and Felicia grieve over loved ones, the pair forge a bond that promises redemption—but which is soon threatened by a secret, the “lie” that is at the heart of Dunmore’s novel. It soon prompts suspicions that Daniel’s truth is not what it seems. As this impeccable and finely wrought literary tale winds to a chilling conclusion, readers will themselves be haunted by its evocative portrayal of a life-defining friendship and loss.

Jean Zimmerman’s new novel, Savage Girl, is the ideal historical fiction narrative: The history is accurate, and the story fits neatly into the facts.

The novel opens as Hugo Delegate, son of an outrageously wealthy captain of industry, is found next to the mutilated body of one of his friends. Because he cannot, or perhaps will not, explain why he was found at such a gruesome scene, he is taken into custody and asked to tell his side of the story.

 Savage Girl is alluring mystery set in one of the most fascinating times and places in American history.

Hugo tells a complex tale to his attorney about a mysterious girl that the Delegate family adopted while visiting their silver mines in Nevada. The Delegates attend a “freak show” where a girl who was purportedly raised by wolves puts on a somewhat provocative show for the drifters and miners every night. Anna-Maria Delegate, Hugo’s mother, wants to adopt the savage girl, named Brownyn, and save her from this hardly human existence.

After some complex negotiations with Bronwyn's owner, the family brings her back to New York City in their opulent private rail cars (all 13 of them), and get to work assimilating her into high society. However, tragedy seems to follow Bronwyn: Every time a man takes a romantic interest in her, he ends up dead. Is Bronwyn to blame with her survivalist upbringing and aggressive, animal-like instincts? Or is Hugo a jealous “brother” whose psychological well-being is teetering on the brink?

Zimmerman’s detailed descriptions of over-the-top Park avenue townhouses and sinfully gorgeous French ballgowns are captivating, but in addition to these more superficial signs of the time, she touches on industrial-age philosophical and economic issues, resulting in a book that is not just entertaining and suspenseful, but a thorough observation of America’s Gilded Age. Savage Girl is alluring mystery set in one of the most fascinating times and places in American history.

BookPage Fiction Top Pick, March 2014

Alice Hoffman’s latest novel has the word “extraordinary” in the title for good reason: The best-selling author of The Dovekeepers has served up another historical novel that will dazzle readers until the last page. Set in New York City in the early 1900s, The Museum of Extraordinary Things veers from the extravagant mansions dotting the Upper West Side to the foul conditions of the overcrowded tenements on the Lower East Side to the seaside apartments stretched across Coney Island to tell the interwoven stories of Coralie Sardie and Eddie Cohen.

Coralie is the only child of a once-famous French magician who now runs The Museum of Extraordinary Things on Coney Island’s Surf Avenue. His curiosity show—packed with acts performed by so-called “freaks and oddities” like the Wolfman and Butterfly Girl—is being threatened by competing attractions that are being built nearby. Coralie was born with webbed hands, and unbeknownst to her, her father has been preparing her to one day become part of the museum. Nightly, Coralie is submerged in ice cold baths and forced to swim in the Atlantic Ocean in order to build up her tolerance to the cold and increase the strength of her lungs for holding her breath underwater.

On the Lower East Side, Eddie Cohen—a young Orthodox Jewish man who emigrated from Russia—has abandoned his job as a tailor, along with his father and his faith, to pursue a career in photography. Eddie spends his time photographing the crime beat for newspapers. As he is working the devastating Triangle Shirtwaist fire (which killed more than 100 young female laborers), Eddie is approached by a despondent father looking for his daughter. Despite his reluctance to get involved, Eddie finds himself agreeing to track her down. His investigation leads him to cross paths with Coralie, and both their lives are forever changed.

In The Museum of Extraordinary Things, both characters are searching for something. Coralie is desperate to escape from her father’s obsessive and abusive watch. Meanwhile, Eddie is attempting to make peace with himself and the fact that he abandoned not only his father, but also his God. As the two narratives gradually intertwine, Coralie and Eddie’s faith in both each other and themselves will be tested numerous times, only to come to an explosive head at the end of this powerful novel.

The term “Middle Ages” contains a prejudice: that the era was merely an unremarkable void straddling antiquity and modernity. Recent scholarship has eroded this perception. The era produced Dante, Chaucer and Boccaccio as well as significant leaps in mathematics and even algorithms and cryptography. It was, moreover, a time when the lust for life was great and the powerful had lust aplenty. Bruce Holsinger’s captivating historical novel A Burnable Book is testimony to this more accurate view of a fascinating period.

The scene is London in 1385. Reigning over England is Richard II, later to adorn one of Shakespeare’s plays. The church is divided between Rome and Avignon while England hangs in the balance. A book, the “burnable” one of the title, appears, allegedly written during the reign of William the Conqueror. The book prophesies in historically accurate terms the death of every English king from William to Richard. Thus it falls to the book’s many temporary owners to decipher that prophecy and save, or not save, the reigning monarch.

But the true authorship of the book remains mysterious. Is it Chaucer, soon to write his Canterbury Tales? Is it Lollius, to whom the Roman poet Horace addressed one of his odes? Or is it the son of the novel’s narrator, who chews the fat with Chaucer and does some sleuthing of his own, even slinking into the brothels to ask prostitutes pointed questions? Thus the novel careens from court to academia, from house of God to house of ill repute, with scandalous overlap between the latter two.

The novel’s action proceeds at a steady clip and has the stench of authenticity, detailing everything from methods of torture to the happy custom of throwing refuse into the street. Its prose is erudite and focused, reading more like an academic thriller than a frilly period piece: John Grisham meets Umberto Eco. And Holsinger has clearly ventured to imbue his writing with the earthy English words that Orwell, among others, favored over their highfalutin’ Latinate counterparts. The language is also often bawdy, as befits a novel about bawds.

In his own book about England, Paul Theroux argued that England had been written about perhaps more than any other country, but the England he meant was likely that of Dickens, Austen or Hardy. About medieval England we know almost nil. This clever novel, as contemporary as it is distant, helps illuminate an England consigned for ages to a stagnant darkness.

As World War II is to the United States, a conflict endlessly memorialized, representing the nation's crowning achievement before its inevitable decline, so World War I is to Great Britain. Little surprise, then, that on the latter war's centennial, another novel that centers on it should appear: Wake, by British author Anna Hope. As the homonym title suggests, however, Wake is less about the war than its aftermath. It's also less about men than women.

These women include Hettie, who dances for pay with crippled ex-soldiers; Evelyn, a former munitions factory employee now charged with addressing veterans' complaints; and Ada, a mother mourning her allegedly KIA son Michael. Unearthing Michael's true fate ties the women's stories together, and the truth is far from fodder for patriotic song.

The unifying male is Evelyn's brother, Ed, who charms Hettie with his wild talk about anarchism, his boozy vulnerability and his fondness for jazz and cocaine. These are Ed's ways of coping with impotence brought about by service as a captain. Meanwhile, Evelyn has stumbled on Michael's story through a visit from a brother-in-arms, while Ada consults psychics in a desperate attempt to commune with her son.

It has become fashionable to present apparently disparate plots that cleverly converge in the end. Hope can be forgiven for falling for this trope, as her characters are vivid and credible, which is harder to achieve than literary legerdemain. There is a peculiarly British, phlegmatic heroism in the women's efforts to recover from a very unheroic war.  Their dignity matches that of the forsaken veterans, forced to beg or sell trifles in the streets.

“Good prose,” said Orwell, “is like a windowpane.” By that criterion Hope's is an achievement: Rarely, as too often happens in contemporary fiction, does the writer's ego enter into the writing. Instead, Hope lets the story and the characters do the work. That said, the novel's anti-war message could hardly be less obvious. Witness Ed saying, before an admittedly fatuous Armistice Day celebration, that neither side had been victorious. "War wins." True enough in this war, but as fatuous as that celebration when applied to others.

Still, Wake is an impressive first novel. It’s a potent reminder that the scars of WWI on the British psyche run deep, and Hope’s postwar, feminine twist on the usual guys-mud-and-guts treatment make it a unique, engaging read.

In her second novel, author Deborah Johnson takes readers on an intoxicating, ominous and redemptive journey into a special world. At its heart, The Secret of Magic is the story of three people seeking justice, but it also explores how a foreign place can worm into a person's soul.

That person is Regina Mary Robichard. Regina is a rare individual—a female, black law student in 1946—but she lives in the shadow of her mother, a prominent civil rights activist.

Regina works for the Legal Defense Fund, under the famed Thurgood Marshall. One day, while sifting through discrimination claims from Negro servicemen, she opens an envelope from Mary Pickett Calhoun stuffed with newspaper clippings about the death, ruled accidental, of decorated Negro Lt. Joe Wilson Howard, whose body was dragged from a Mississippi river.

The spark that ignites Regina, whose father was lynched before she was born, is a snapshot of Howard and his adoring father. And it didn’t hurt that Calhoun is the author of Regina's favorite childhood book, The Secret of Magic, about three children who explored the Magnolia Forest under the watchful eye of Mr. Lemon.

Once she arrives in Revere, Mississippi—also the setting of Johnson's debut novel The Air Between Us—Regina meets two people who will be important to her case, Miss Mary Pickett and Willie Willie, the dead soldier's father. The killer is soon revealed, but knowing isn't the same as proving in Mississippi. The book is more about Regina discovering that in segregated Mississippi, blacks and whites actually coexist better than in her beloved New York City. She also detects that many characters in her children's book are based on real people, and that volume's magical land finally produces rough justice for the slain soldier.

This gifted author has produced a novel which not only shows that first impressions of a region and its people aren't accurate, but also that justice isn't a black-and-white but rather a fluid concept. She leaves the reader yearning for another visit to Revere.

Leila Meacham’s new novel, Somerset, begins in 1835 South Carolina with the stories of three of the state’s most prominent, plantation-owning families: the Warwicks, DuMonts and Tolivers. Silas Toliver has been left out of his father’s will. With his father dead and all of his family’s land and money bequeathed to his brother, Silas has two choices: Stay in South Carolina, where he will live the rest of his life without ever owning the expansive plantation he aches for, or follow his best friend and counterpart Jeremy Warwick to Texas, where fear of the unknown meets promises of fertile land and opportunity.

Anyone who has read Roses, the prequel to this novel, knows the three families end up in Texas somehow. But the “somehow” turns into a story you do not want to miss. Like its predecessor, Somerset also spans three generations of characters and nearly 100 years of history, only the Civil War and the Texas Revolution are now the historical backdrops.

Meacham writes with the authority of someone who has not only studied history but has sincerely considered how it affects those living within it. Characters do not merely leave as they enter. They change. Though they may remind us of ones we’ve seen in other novels, Meacham reminds us that even the most unlikely characters can change their views as they encounter new people and new experiences. Such changes make the novel come alive in ways you’ve never thought possible of a novel set in the 1800s, and should recommend it to readers of Kathryn Stockett’s The Help or Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind.

Somerset has everything a compelling historical epic calls for: Love and war, friendship and betrayal, opportunity and loss, and everything in between.

At the start of The Swan Gondola, Timothy Schaffert’s enchanting new historical novel, two elderly spinster sisters discover a man in their front yard who has fallen from the sky (or from a hot air balloon, at least). The man in question is Ferret Skerritt, a ventriloquist turned star-crossed lover with an incredible tale to tell. 

The story-within-a-story begins several months earlier, in the spring of 1898, at the opening of the Omaha World’s Fair. Ferret, who rolls with a Fellini-like crew of freaks and circus performers, becomes enchanted by Cecily, a beautiful member of a traveling horror troupe. (She plays Marie Antoinette and nightly has her head chopped off.) Despite a rocky start, the two quickly fall in love, and their relationship blossoms amid the magic and mysteries of the fair.But as with all too-good-to-be-true romances, a threat looms. Here, it’s in the form of William Wakefield, an older Fair investor who has an eye on Ferret’s dummy, Oscar—not to mention Cecily herself. 

Schaffert clearly did a tremendous amount of research for this book, and he’s at his best when cleaving to historical detail and quirky fact. The uncanny automatons cackle with life; the late-night séances are chill-inducing; and the sinking of the USS Maine is on everyone’s mind. But Schaffert’s period authenticity is also literary in nature. He’s clearly a fan of L. Frank Baum, and Wizard of Oz references are plentiful, though at times heavy-handed.

The Swan Gondola will no doubt garner comparisons to Water for Elephants and The Night Circus, and fans of such historical romances will not be disappointed. There’s plenty of magic to go around in this good, old-fashioned love story.

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Read our Q&A with Timothy Schaffert about The Swan Gondola.

Losing a loved one to the chaos of war would be devastating enough, but lingering doubt as to whether a husband were alive or dead could slowly consume a wife. Especially if her last words to him were an ultimatum: Choose his reporting work, or her. In The Wind Is Not a River, Helen and John Easley find themselves caught in the upheaval of World War II, separated emotionally and physically by the lengths to which he will go for a story.

John poses as a lieutenant to sneak into the Japanese-occupied Aleutian Islands, hoping to report about this little-known theatre of the war—which the Americans would prefer the press keep quiet about. His plane goes down on the island of Attu as the novel opens, and instantly the reader is thrust into his fight for survival. The weather is unrelenting and unstable, the only food available is what he and the crash’s only other survivor, young airman Karl, can catch and kill, and discovery by Japanese soldiers is a daily threat.

Helen, at home with her guilt and her ill father, eventually can take the waiting no longer. She, too, lies her way north to Alaska, joining a troupe of USO Swingettes, in a passionate effort to find John.

Canadian writer Brian Payton deftly juxtaposes Helen’s and John’s separate struggles to stay alive and sane against forces that would render them otherwise. Set against a meticulously described Alaskan setting, each harrowing or quietly painful minute is portrayed in realistic detail. John’s ordeal proves miraculous and heartbreaking, told in passages that are sometimes difficult to read due to their intensity of rawness or sorrow. The book arcs poetically across the distance between Helen and John, drawing out the separation that they (and the reader) can hardly bear.

Sometimes life presents you with a slate of bad choices—though some are braver than others. In Motherland, Maria Hummel, author of several novels and a former Stegner Fellow in poetry, enters relatively unfamiliar literary territory to tell the story of one so-called Mitläufer family: German citizens who would never have personally countenanced the terrible abuses that Jews suffered, but nonetheless went along with the Nazi regime. They paid for it in the end—if not as heavily as their Jewish counterparts.

The Kappus family has already gone through heartbreak: Liesl and Frank are recently married after the death of Frank’s first wife (in childbirth with their third son). When Frank is drafted into medical military service, Liesl is left alone to care for his three sons during the last months of WWII, with the front growing ever closer and food and resources becoming more scarce.

Hummel gathered her raw material from the life of her grandfather, reflected in letters written during the war and discovered in an attic wall. Just as Londoners suffered under the Blitz, German citizens spent the last year of the war living as no human being should, amid the horrors of daily air raids and the loss of those they loved. Hummel somehow manages, without sensationalism, to drive home the humanity and suffering of the people who are frequently considered only as the enemy.

Like its characters, Motherland displays little awareness of the Jewish experience, a fact that may trouble some readers. In her afterword, Hummel argues that omission was necessary in order to present her characters’ lives authentically, asking “What did [German citizens] know and when did they know it?” Perhaps only now is the world ready to offer understanding. Without canceling out our sympathy for those targeted by the Nazis, this humane and compelling story may extend it to those who (often unwittingly) assisted in some of humanity’s worst crimes—and who themselves got flicked by the tail of the beast.