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.

Writing a sequel to a popular novel is a risk, especially when the first one was a national bestseller, like Robert Morgan’s Gap Creek, an Oprah Book Club selection.

The Road from Gap Creek will please this gifted storyteller’s legions of fans—as well as those who missed Gap Creek when it was published in 1999. The books need not be read in chronological order. On the contrary, the plaintive and plainspoken poetry infused in both novels allows them to stand alone as separate stories about the same family: Hank and Julie Richards and their four children.

While Gap Creek was narrated by the family’s matriarch, Julie, The Road from Gap Creek is safely in the hands of her youngest daughter, Annie, who has inherited her mother’s indomitable spirit and courage in the face of an endless stream of adversity.

After beginning their married life in South Carolina in Gap Creek, the Richards family has returned home to North Carolina, where the duality of incredible beauty and abject poverty continues to define Appalachian life. From the first pages, Morgan tugs readers into the pathos of a personal tragedy experienced by countless families during the World War II era, heralded by the arrival of a telegram at the family’s doorstep. Still, Morgan does not linger long on grief; instead, by chapter two the story has skipped back to happier days, with the arrival of the family dog, Old Pat, a wise and lovable German Shepherd who is devoted to Annie’s brother Troy.

For teenage Annie, a talented actress in her high school’s theater productions, the allure of life beyond the sleepy and God-fearing Green River community is tempting. Still, her family ties and loyalty are stronger than her dramatic ambitions, and thus, she finds herself post-high school working as a store clerk in a nearby town to help support her struggling Great Depression-era family. Unlike her parents, who plunged into an early and turbulent marriage, the cautious Annie is stubbornly unwilling to acknowledge her lifelong attraction to the devout and idealistic young Muir.

Morgan has crafted another painfully luminous portrait of rural American family life: honest, captivating and resplendent in all its messy glory. Readers will find themselves bereft upon saying goodbye to the Richards clan—and hopeful that Morgan might consider a trilogy.

If Thomas Keneally’s expansive and brilliant novel The Daughters of Mars doesn’t remind you of an Australian version of “Downton Abbey,” I don’t know what would. This isn’t to disparage either work—especially not one from the author of Schindler’s List—but the similarities jump out from the opening pages. We have two sisters who don’t get along. We get the soldier with half his face blown off; the manor house converted into a hospital; the Spanish flu sweeping off otherwise young and healthy people; the upstanding bloke thrown in jail for no good reason and the faithful woman who’s willing to do whatever it takes to get him out; the deaths of loved characters that make you gasp for their sheer unfairness.

In The Daughters of Mars, the Durance sisters—chilly Naomi and somewhat more biddable Sally—sign on as army nurses at the beginning of World War I. We follow them on the long boat trip from Australia to the Mediterranean, where they nurse the soldiers coming in from the disaster at Gallipoli and endure the torpedoing of their hospital ship, the Archimedes. The sinking, depicted with hair-raising vividness by Keneally, will impact the sisters, their friends and lovers for the remainder of the war. For one thing, Naomi and Sally (who, it should be said, are not the daughters of an earl but of a dairy farmer from the Australian bush) finally begin to deal with a sad secret they thought they’d left behind in Australia.

Given the devastating nature of what was then known as the “war to end all wars,” Keneally’s touch is surprisingly nimble. He gives us only glimpses of the horror, but that’s sometimes enough. What he’s interested in are the ways the war affects the life choices of those who are caught up in it, and how ordinary folks rarely know they’re living through—or even making—history. The Daughters of Mars is a masterpiece that is sure to rank among Keneally’s best works.

From 1929 until 1975, North Carolina sterilized more than 7,000 of its citizens, targeting inmates in mental institutions, epileptics and others whose sterilization was considered “for the public good.” Diane Chamberlain has based her latest novel on this controversial procedure, the Eugenics Sterilization Program.

It is 1960, and Jane Forrester has just been hired as a social worker for the Department of Public Welfare and is newly married to Robert, a pediatrician. They live in a wealthy neighborhood in Raleigh.

Ivy Hart is a 15-year-old who lives in a small tenant house on a tobacco farm in rural Grace County. Her father died when she was small; her mother was committed to a mental hospital; and her older sister, Mary Ella, left school at 14 when she became pregnant with baby William. Mary Ella, labeled “feebleminded,” has been sterilized without her knowledge, told she was hospitalized for an appendectomy.

In the alternating voices of Jane and Ivy, we learn how Jane becomes immersed in the Hart family’s dire circumstances, raising doubts in the minds of both her boss and her husband that she’s tough enough for the job. Robert is embarrassed by the fact that Jane is working rather than fitting into the Junior League role embraced by the wives of his colleagues, but he’s especially bothered by her sincere attachment to these poor families, which is starting to make her question the Eugenics Department’s plans for the Harts.

Chamberlain weaves an element of suspense throughout this emotional story as these differing views eventually collide in a powerful denouement. Necessary Lies is a poignant and perceptive novel zeroing in on a hidden social issue—reminiscent of the work of Jodi Picoult and A. Manette Ansay.

Philippa Gregory continues her Cousins’ War series with The White Princess. The year is 1485, and as alliances fail and the York reign comes to an end, the loyalty of the York women to King Henry VII is tested. Elizabeth of York, the oldest York princess, was prepared to marry her lover Richard III, whom she assumed would win the battle of Bosworth and become the next king. Devastated by the news of his death, Elizabeth finds her life drastically changed. Alongside his ambitious, plotting mother, the Red Queen, Henry Tudor plans to marry Elizabeth to unify the warring Tudors and Yorks and create peace in England. Elizabeth finds herself reluctantly betrothed to her lover’s murderer, in an attempt to bring peace to her country. Soon, her loyalties are tested as she is torn between the family of her past and her alliance to her new husband.

Despite their gradually strengthening bond, Henry continues to question Elizabeth’s commitment, since the one thing that could threaten his reign is a challenge from a member of the House of York. And lurking in the background is the memory of the two missing York princes. Henry and the entire kingdom know that as long as there are still living males of the York line, his position as king is not safe. Are they out there?

The White Princess is a story of honor, politics and loyalty. Deception and rumors whisper through the damp and drafty halls of dark castles, creating a story full of intrigue. The pace remains consistent as the story careens down a maze of hallways, each ending in the discovery of another veiled lie. By attempting to explain the mystery of the two missing York princes, Gregory has created a tale of the choices we make and the consequences we cannot imagine. 

Charles Frazier uses reverse psychology to great advantage in his debut novel, Cold Mountain, a Civil War saga with blood on its bayonets and romance in its gentle soul. The author takes some creative risks by reshaping the true battle tales of his great-great-grandfather into an epic story that accumulates power and purpose with each turn of the page.

Our hero, Inman, much like the sensitive lead character in Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, is sickened by the wanton waste of young lives on the battlefield and torn between the traditional conflict of valor and cowardice. In the field hospital, the injured Confederate private witnesses the brutality of both sides in the most bloody of American armed struggles, the War Between the States. 

Emotionally shaken, Inman realizes that he will be returned to the front and possible death as soon as he is well. He watches men on both sides ordered to charge into lethal barrages of gunfire and cannon shot, only to fall after a few precious steps. The author makes some disturbing cultural and social commentary as Inman considers the war philosophy of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, who felt armed conflict was "an instrument for clarifying God's obscure will," a view not shared by the youthful soldier who dons new clothes and decides to reclaim his old life regardless of the consequences.

So the eventful journey back to his sweetheart, Ada, begins. Frazier takes us into the life and mind of Ada, a young girl stunned by the sudden death of her consumptive father. Despite the man's standing in the community as a preacher, no one comes forward to help her until another fatherless young woman, Ruby, appears. Together they team up to put Ada's farm back into operation, trading and bartering for the goods and services they need. It is the emotional bond betwee these two sturdy souls and their startling evolution as characters which lift this novel above and beyond the usual offerings in historical fiction.

Lyrical and magnificent in its narrative power, this is one of the most promising literary debuts in some time. And we are truly glad that Charles Frazier remembered all those marvelous Civil War yarns his great-great-grandaddy passed along.

In a novel that is rich with evocative language and fascinating historical detail, author Paulette Jiles has created a hero, a heroine and a remarkable love story that resonate with remembered childhood tales of brave warriors, resourceful women, hardships overcome and love triumphant.

In 1996, while horseback riding with a cousin, Jiles discovered a lost graveyard which inspired her to uncover a forgotten episode of Civil War history: the unjust incarceration of Confederate women in southeastern Missouri. Further research revealed a virtual ethinic cleansing, with towns torched and widespread murder of male and even female prisoners, all perpetrated by units of the Federal army. Each chapter of Enemy Women opens with excerpts of harrowing accounts of suffering, torture and murder taken from the coroner's records, military letters and other historical documents.

Onto this carefully researched background, Jiles layers the story of Adair Colley, a teenage girl from the Missouri Ozarks who first loses her family and then her freedom. In jail in St. Louis, she meets Major William Neumann, a Union army jailer from the judge advocate general's department. After months of sparring, the two develop a reluctant trust, and Neumann sets in motion plans for Adair to escape, promising to come for her on his release from the army. The remainder of the novel follows Adair's long journey through the martial law countryside of Missouri, which Jiles herself retraced on horseback, and Neumann's equally horrifying trek from the battlegrounds of Louisiana to his post-war search for Adair.

Jiles, winner of the Canadian Governor General's Award for poetry, uses her poetic and narrative skills to draw the reader deep into the emotional lives of Adair and Neumann. Many passages read like prose poems and yet move with the pace of a thriller.

The reader who enjoys discovering new historical territory will love Enemy Women, which combines a little-known chapter of the Civil War with a fresh, unsentimental, yet age-old romance in the love story of Adair and Neumann.

Mary Carol Moran teaches the Novel Writers' Workshop for the Auburn University Outreach Program.