It is hard to imagine a more irresistible plot: an orphaned heroine whose mother was an exotic dancer, a Depression-era mental hospital that experiments with shock therapy—not to mention a tragic, unsolved mystery straight from the history books. Lee Smith, the author of 13 novels, including the bestsellers Fair and Tender Ladies and The Last Girls, juggles all these stories effortlessly in the mesmerizing Guests on Earth. The book begins with an Associated Press news article about an actual event: a March 10, 1948, fire at Asheville’s Highland Hospital for the mentally ill, in which nine women perished, one of whom was Zelda Fitzgerald.

With this tragic remnant of history never far from mind, the novel’s heroine, Evalina Toussaint, begins a first-person account of her childhood in New Orleans’ French Quarter. After her mother’s death, the young girl’s refusal to eat finds her shipped off to Highland Hospital, where she will spend the rest of her childhood and her early adulthood.

Moving seamlessly from New Orleans to Asheville, then on to Baltimore and Paris before looping back to Asheville and New Orleans once again, Guests on Earth gives readers a fascinating, albeit heart-wrenching, glimpse of early 20th-century psychiatric treatments, including the work of celebrated psychiatrist Robert S. Carroll. His unwavering belief in the importance of art, music and exercise therapy in treating mental illness was revolutionary in his day—even as he popularized shock therapy.

Guests on Earth delivers on all counts, entrancing readers with a brilliant tapestry that falls inside the confines of historical fiction, yet defies genre with a hypnotic narrative.

In one of the first nationally sensationalized crimes in America, conman Harry Powers sought out vulnerable widows through matrimonial agencies, courted them and then lured them to their deaths, supposedly for financial gain, though evidence suggests money was not the issue. After murdering Asta Eicher and her three children in 1931, he was caught, put on trial and executed. The lurid details of the case preoccupied Depression-era newspapers for months.

Author Jayne Anne Phillips grew up hearing about this crime, which took place in her home state of West Virginia, and has been haunted by the story for decades. In Quiet Dell, Phillips boldly imagines the last year of the life of the Eicher family, especially the fanciful youngest daughter, Annabel, whose creativity and imagination may have provided the spark that Phillips needed to deal with such grim material. The novel begins the Christmas before the crime: The Eicher children have just lost their beloved grandmother, and the widowed Asta is making plans to meet “Cornelius Pierson,” the mysterious man who has been courting her by mail. Cornelius—one of Powers’ aliases—appears chivalrous and elegant, promising to marry her, care for her children and provide a fresh start in West Virginia. Of course, the story ends quite differently.

To more fully explore the crime, Phillips has created a team of fictional reporters, Emily Thornhill and Eric Lindstrom, who travel from the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge to West Virginia and back again in their attempt to see justice done. Emily is also drawn romantically to Park Ridge banker William Malone, who was well acquainted with the Eichers. His guilt over not doing more to help the grieving Asta motivates him to fund the investigation, and his relationship with Emily, passionately and beautifully told, provides balance to the violence of the crime.

Archival records such as court transcripts, letters, photographs and period newspaper articles provide a framework for Quiet Dell, but it’s Phillips’ masterful imagination and sense of empathy that brings an emotional weight and dignity to a story that transcends the genre of true crime.

Before Eat, Pray, Love was an international sensation and a Julia Roberts flick; before Committed was a number-one bestseller; before she was a household name (at least in the literary world), Elizabeth Gilbert was a respected novelist and journalist. Now, it’s next to impossible to discuss her work without mentioning the acclaim that has followed.

But with The Signature of All Things, it’s easy to forget the persona behind the work and focus on a compelling story, impeccably told—which is just what Gilbert has written all along. Curiosity and name recognition may lead many to pick up this novel, but it’s Gilbert’s engaging, thoroughly researched prose that will carry readers through the 500-plus pages of this sprawling story, which covers a century and much of the globe, including Amsterdam, London, Tahiti and Peru.

Henry Whittaker isn’t born with much, save for wits. But the wily botanist applies those smarts to develop a business and relationships that make him one of the wealthiest men in his adopted home of Philadelphia. So when his daughter Alma comes along in 1800, she inherits her parents’ brains, her father’s love for botany and all the advantages he never knew.

The family wealth allows Alma the freedom to indulge her curiosity about the natural world without worrying about translating that interest to profit—or about settling into marriage. Alma becomes enthralled by botany—in particular bryology, the study of moss.

“Mosses hold their beauty in elegant reserve. By comparison to mosses, everything else in the botanical world can seem so blunt and obvious,” Alma says by way of explaining her fascination. Those words could just as easily be used to describe Gilbert’s unconventional heroine; Alma is so cerebral that her gifts are rarely apparent to the untrained eye, and she struggles to connect with anyone besides her parents.

In The Signature of All Things, Gilbert turns her finely trained storytelling skills toward the whole of Alma’s life, examining the history, quirks and quiet moments that make up a person’s being, even as she traces the trajectory of a century and examines larger themes, like faith vs. science. The attention to detail and imagination Gilbert exhibits in this old-fashioned epic prove that her acclaim is truly deserved.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Elizabeth Gilbert for The Signature of All Things.

In The Two Hotel Francforts, novelist David Leavitt (The Indian Clerk) takes his readers right to the brink: to the edge of continental Europe and a war that for many seemed like the end of civilization itself.

The novel is set in 1940s Lisbon, the last neutral port in Europe, overflowing with refugees of every nationality. Among the crowd are American expatriates Pete and Julia Winters. The Winters have been living in Paris, where Pete is a car salesman, but are planning to return to New York because Julia is Jewish. Neurotic even at the best of times, Julia is adamant about not leaving Europe, despite the danger—and even though everything about Portugal, from the food to the accommodations, makes her desperately unhappy. The Winters meet Edward and Iris Freleng, who are traveling with their elderly fox terrier. The Frelengs write mystery novels published under a single pseudonym, and their lazy, somewhat bohemian spirit and careless debauchery draw the American couple closer. A kind of strange ennui born of waiting amid the life-threatening tension prevails, and when Edward instigates an affair with Pete, everything threatens to unravel, including the sanity of both Julia and Edward.

The cobwebbed world of half-truths and lies inhabited by these characters is echoed by the shadowy setting of wartime Lisbon. Portugal’s neutrality masks the unsettling politics of the Salazar government, just as the couples’ untethered lives hide a hollow core at the center of each marriage. Like authors Graham Greene or Ford Madox Ford, Leavitt suggests that the moral ambiguities let loose during the pressures of wartime push people to extremes that they might never have reached otherwise.

Leavitt’s setting may be unsavory, but his storytelling is not, with complex characters and rich details that bring the seedy hotels and crowded cafes to life. This is a brittle tale told with an effortless ease.

What do you get when you mix “Downton Abbey” and Pride and Prejudice? The answer comes in the form of British novelist Jo Baker’s newest offering, Longbourn, which, perhaps not surprisingly, has already been optioned for film.

Spinoffs and sequels to Pride and Prejudice are a dime a dozen, so it takes something quite extraordinary to make readers take note. In 2011, suspense sovereign P.D. James managed it by adding a murder mystery into the mix. Baker’s tack is slightly less gruesome, though perhaps no less grim: Working within the framework of Austen’s novel, Longbourn shifts focus and brings those who toil behind the scenes—the household servants—to the forefront.

But this is not a straight retread. Baker does not attempt to emulate Austen’s writing style, and her story fits in the novel’s framework while being completely original. Lizzie, Jane and Lydia (along with many other characters readers know and love) still pop up, but Longbourn is primarily the story of housemaid Sarah, who toils endlessly for the comfort and care of others. Her days are filled with tasks that make her stomach curdle and her joints ache, and though Sarah dreams of one day having something—or someone—to make her life feel full, she fears that all her future holds is the bleak emptiness of servitude. Enter an intriguing, but infuriatingly taciturn, new footman, and suddenly Sarah is left wondering if happiness might be within her grasp.

Like the novel that inspired it, Longbourn is a love story, but it is also more than that. Ruthlessly unromantic at times, Baker burrows through the froth and frivolity of upper-class life and grounds her characters in harsh realities, allowing for a powerful exploration of the prevailing social issues of the time as faced by the lower classes. Sarah suffers from chilblains, doesn’t get enough sleep and deals with chamber pots on top of it all. Though this gritty realism may turn off some readers, it elevates the book and sets it apart from its source material. Following in Austen’s footsteps is no small feat, but it is one Baker accomplishes with aplomb. Both Austen devotees and readers unfamiliar with the original will find that Longbourn is a robust, compelling novel that easily stands on its own.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Jo Baker for Longbourn.

There are two schools of thought when it comes to just how wild the Wild West was back in the post-Civil War days. Some folks claim it wasn’t as lawless as Sam Peckinpah would have it, while others cling to the notion that it really was as bad as folks said it was. In The Outcasts, Kathleen Kent—known previously for historical novels set in colonial New England—chooses the latter point of view, and then some.

Nate is a young Texas policeman who’s taken the job to get some money for his hardscrabble farm back in Oklahoma, where he lives with his wife and baby girl. He falls in with two veteran rangers, Deerling and Dr. Tom, who are on the hunt for a serial murderer named McGill. Dr. Tom is a bit older than Nate, and a voluble spinner of yarns. Deerling, on the other hand, is old enough to be the father of both men. Taciturn, with one of those adamantine moral codes, he would have been perfectly played by John Wayne.

A parallel story concerns a young woman named Lucinda, whom we first meet escaping a brothel to join up with her lover. He, of course, is the vicious killer the rangers are searching for. Slowly, it dawns on the reader that she’s almost as much of a psychopath as McGill. But the operative word is “almost.” Lucinda is capable of love, even if her love expresses itself in some deeply twisted ways. Will it be her downfall? Will it be McGill’s?

Kent’s minor characters are equally memorable, from the people Lucinda lives among while she pretends to be a schoolmarm, to the young boy who facilitates the last showdown. The dialogue, particularly between the rangers, has an almost Biblical cadence. Kent’s descriptions of landscape, weather and rough justice are stunning. Best of all, she keeps you guessing about the fate of these compelling characters.

It’s rare these days to find a novel about two people in love in which their love story is not the main story. Larry Watson’s latest, Let Him Go, is not about its two main characters falling in love, or falling out of love; it’s set in the happily ever after, but it isn’t about that, either. George and Margaret Blackledge are about 40 years into a solid marriage. It’s clear from the beginning that they’re crazy about each other, in that comfortable, secure, bickering-included way that comes from being married for ages. They’ve been through a lot, but they have been through it together.

When the story begins, though, Margaret is about to take off. She isn’t leaving: She’s hunting. It’s 1951, and the Blackledges live on the edge of the Badlands in North Dakota. They’ve lost their son, James, and his twin sister lives elsewhere, remote and disinterested. But James had a son—their grandson, Jimmie—and Margaret is determined to find Jimmie and bring him home, where he belongs. Margaret is nothing if not determined, so George, naturally, accompanies her on the search. As the author puts it, “No, there was never any doubt what George would do.”

Except that there is doubt, here and there. Or rather, there are surprises, from both George and Margaret. The narrative has a shifting omniscience that lets us see only so far into the thoughts of any given character, just enough to feel as if we know them. One of the ideas the novel explores is the question of inevitability, to what degree character affects the course of anyone’s journey—“how fixed and foreseeable are human lives,” as Watson puts it. But there’s nothing predetermined or predictable about what happens when the Blackledges find their grandson, Jimmie, age 4, and his sweet mother, Lorna. Lorna has married wild, handsome Donnie Weboy, and she and her son are bound up in the Weboy clan in the town of Gladstone, Montana. And the Weboy clan of Gladstone is no good—as George and Margaret quickly discover.

When the two families collide in a fight for the boy, high melodrama ensues. In a few places it’s almost too much, but Watson has perfect tone control. Besides, having given us the beautiful, meandering first third of the novel, in which we follow George and Margaret as they make their lovely way toward this battle, spending nights in jail cots and borrowed pastures, sipping coffee and watching the streets from cafe windows, gently looking after each other—having given us that, Watson can do anything. We are his.

When you first enter the vividly painted prehistoric world of Shaman, you might see it as a departure for Kim Stanley Robinson. This is, after all, the author of some of the most sophisticated and compelling science fiction of the last few decades; a winner of the Hugo, Nebula and Locus Awards; a man fascinated by the possibilities of humanity’s future. So what could he possibly have to say about man 30,000 years in the past?

Almost immediately it becomes clear, though, that Robinson is still trafficking in the universal meditations that make his entire canon so fascinating. Though rich in historical detail and wrapped in powerful, engaging prose, at its heart Shaman is a tale of how humanity chooses to tell its own story, and of one young man’s fight to understand his place in the world.

Robinson’s hero, Loon, is an apprentice growing up under the thumb of an often difficult and at times hostile shaman, Thorn. Through Loon, Robinson shows us not just the interactions of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, and what those meetings might really have been like, but also a compelling version of how the famous cave paintings of Chauvet, France, were created, and what they meant both for their creators and for us now.

The novel’s great strength is an immense and seductive tactile quality, brought about not only by Robinson’s incredible yet never overwhelming attention to detail, but also by his prose, which combines streamlined punctuation with thorough research and remarkably sensitive internal characterization to create a novel that is itself a kind of mystical experience. We follow Loon from inside his head, as he sees and smells and touches a world often alien to us, and we come to understand it in a very vivid way.

Robinson hasn’t really left science fiction behind with this book. He’s still showing us a strange world; it just happens to be a strange old world this time. Because of this, he’s produced a novel that fans of 2312 and Clan of the Cave Bear alike will happily get lost in, a merging of new ideas and old achievements that brilliantly captures some of the great truths of the human condition.

Added to the list of things one shouldn’t judge a book by: page count. Daniel Woodrell’s ninth novel, and his first since 2006’s Winter’s Bone (which became an award-winning feature film in 2010), is less than 200 pages long. But thanks to Woodrell’s rich storytelling, this slim novel has the feel of an epic.

The story centers on a real-life incident—the explosion of a Missouri dance hall in 1929—reimagined as fiction. One by one, in alternating and sometimes overlapping scenes, those who survived the blast recall those who were lost in it. Adding another few layers of intrigue and perspective, the novel is narrated by Alek, a young man remembering the story as he heard it one summer in 1965 from his grandmother, Alma, whose sister was among those killed in the disaster.

Alma fascinates and scares her grandson equally: She’s a stern, reserved woman with a “pinched, hostile nature,” “dark obsessions” and a “primal need for revenge,” Alek says. Her story is essentially a ghost story, and it has a strong hold on the boy. She doles it out slowly, in bits and pieces, with many satisfying digressions. “She would at times leave the public horror and give me her quiet account of the sad and criminal love affair that took her sister Ruby away from us all,” Alek recalls.

The novel has the feel of someone going through an old family photo album, dredging up odd facts and anecdotes about this or that person. The mystery at the center of this storytelling mosaic is, of course, just what caused the dance hall to explode: Who is responsible? And why? And how is it that the truth has not come out, even after all these years? By the time we learn the answer, or at least Alma’s answer, it feels somehow both inevitable and entirely unexpected.

But it’s not the mystery that keeps the story moving. It’s the gossip. As ever, Woodrell is a master of exposing to daylight the darkest corners of the human psyche. His miniature portraits of the local characters, even those that are only a page or two long, make the town vivid and real, and the result is a larger sense of loss. We know these people, not just the main players but the rest of the town; any one of them could have been at the heart of the story. This small book holds a wide world.