The best romance stories are always the most fearless. You know them when you read them: stories by authors who dare to dig deep into the agony of obsessive and destructive love. With My Last Empress, Da Chen has told another of those bold, relentless tales of ecstatic suffering, set against a vibrant and immersive historical backdrop.

In 19th century America, Samuel Pickens leads a privileged life as a young scholar, but his world is consumed with passion when he meets the exotic and entrancing Annabelle. Their romance is driven by the hunger and energy of their youth, but when tragedy strikes, Samuel is left without his great love. His search for new meaning in his life eventually leads him to China, where he takes a job as a tutor in the Imperial Palace. There he meets a young girl who is a stunning mirror image of his lost love, and quickly develops an obsession with her. As his desire grows, his transgressions become an ever-greater threat to the emperor, and Samuel must attempt to avoid doom in a second all-consuming romance.

What comes through from the first page, from the first sentence, is the pure exuberant emotion of Chen’s prose. He’s a gifted stylist, but his words carry none of the coldness that many other expert sentence-crafters fall prey to. This is a heavy, unapologetically emotional book from the beginning, and that makes it a personal experience for the reader.

The backdrop of Imperial China also adds depth to a powerful tale. Chen pulls you in from the moment Samuel sets foot in Asia, and sweeps you away with visions of a bygone age of royal extravagance. It’s another layer of beauty in an already gorgeously descriptive book.

Fans of sweeping historical romance like Gone with the Wind and Ian McEwan’s Atonement, as well as fans of transgressive sexual explorations like Nabokov’s Lolita, will find another engrossing story in My Last Empress. It’s both moving and frightening, dark and hopeful, gut-wrenching and inspiring. Chen has delivered another powerful work in an already stellar career.

Few authors so easily disassemble the American dream as T.C. Boyle. Over the course of 13 novels, he has made it a signature move to take the core tenets of our identity—the right to define your sense of place, to own and control the land beneath your feet—and dissect them, move the pieces around and put them back together however he likes. This theme returns in his new novel, the surprisingly restrained San Miguel.

Boyle first wrote about California’s Channel Islands in his novel When the Killing’s Done (2011), a contentious story of environmentalists battling over the lives of animals. The backdrop might be similar, but San Miguel is driven less by conflict and more by the emotions of three real historical women.

In 1888, Marantha’s husband Will brings her to the island with the promise of warm Californian air to help soothe her violent consumption. What she finds instead is a moldy house that smells of sheep, terrible storms and the interminable ennui of forced exile. Two years later, Marantha’s adopted teenage daughter, Edith, desperately seeks a way off the island and will stop at nothing to return to civilization. In 1930, the care of the sheep falls to newlyweds Elise and Herbie, who find romance and freedom in their seclusion. However, World War II is a constant, growing threat to their 12 peaceful years as King and Queen of San Miguel.

If Boyle’s past works have chuckled and made glib asides—he was once dubbed an “adventurer among the potholes and pratfalls of the American language” by the L.A. Times—San Miguel simply breathes. Stripped of Boyle’s characteristic irony and comedy, San Miguel allows human frailty to stand, Ahab-like, in stark contrast to a hostile environment. Readers will find within San Miguel a gentler touch, a reticent style capable of rendering a reader speechless with its quiet beauty.

Minnesota author Peter Geye’s engaging second novel, following 2011’s Safe from the Sea, is also set in northern Minnesota, near the rugged shores of Lake Superior. The plot shifts back and forth in time from the late 1800s to the 1920s, focusing on Thea Eide—who is just 17 in 1895 when she leaves Norway for America to find a better life—and Odd, her son, born a year later. Thea arrives on Ellis Island and makes the long trip to the small town of Gunflint, Minnesota, outside of Duluth, where she is to be met by her aunt and uncle. She’s told that her aunt has hung herself, and her uncle has gone mad—but is taken under the benevolent wing of Hosea Grimm, who runs the local apothecary. Geye adroitly weaves together the stories of Hosea and his adopted daughter Rebekah with that of Thea and Odd, gradually revealing the ways in which their lives continue to intersect over decades.

The environment itself plays a huge role in Geye’s captivating story. The dark and brooding north woods, the rivers frozen in winter, the weeks of subzero days in the logging camp, the sudden storms whipping up on Lake Superior—all contribute to an atmosphere that makes the novel come alive. As with Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, readers will feel as if they are experiencing the nature that Geye paints for them first-hand.

"Some years later, in a tugboat in the Gulf of Mexico, Joe Coughlin’s feet were placed in a tub of cement.” As an opening line guaranteed to pick you up by the scruff of the neck and not let go, it doesn’t get much better than that. Live by Night is told in flashbacks, coming around full circle to that gripping beginning, which is, in its way, the end.

Ardent Dennis Lehane-ophiles will recognize the Coughlin family name from 2008’s The Given Day, the sweeping early 20th-century novel in which Aiden (Danny) Coughlin, Joe’s Boston cop father, played a pivotal role. Fast-forward 10 years or so to the heady time of Prohibition, and the younger Coughlin offers up a fine example of the apple having fallen far from the tree. While Coughlin père pursued his vision of law and order, Coughlin fils embarked early on a life of crime. He should have known better than to rob well-connected speakeasy owner Albert White, and he really should have known better than to make a play for White’s girl, but then there would have been no cement overshoes and probably no story as well. And make no mistake, there is a fine story here, more than the equal of its predecessor—one that begs for (and, according to reports, will receive) a third installment.

Susanna Moore’s The Life of Objects reminds us that people have very different ways of reacting to even the worst sort of trauma. It begins simply: Beatrice Palmer, an Irish Protestant girl, longs to get away from her undemonstrative family and her dull and backward part of the world. Like some scullery maid in a fairy tale, her ticket out is her ability to make lace. But Moore also reminds us that fairy tales can turn very dark indeed.

Beatrice is taken to Germany to make lace for the Metzenburgs, an aristocratic German couple who live on a Sansouci-esque estate with some servants. Unfortunately, the world is on the cusp of World War II, which doesn’t trouble this naive young Irish girl overly much. She knows nothing of war, after all. The worst thing she’s ever had to deal with is her unloving mother. Still, the Metzenburgs begin to secrete their family heirlooms, piece by piece, in the hope that these objects will remain untouched when what happens happens. They, their friends and their staff expect to resume their lives after the unpleasantness. But, by the time they realize their old lives are gone forever, it’s much too late.

Of course, the reader has no such illusions. We know what’s going to happen and we keep reading as Beatrice and the Metzenburgs endure one horror after the other, pulled along by Moore’s writerly skill and control. Beatrice is her narrator and her chronicler and she recounts all the ghastly things that happen to her with a surprising lack of outrage or terror. It’s as if Moore is saying that in times of war, people too become objects to be used and discarded. Still, we’re outraged on Beatrice’s behalf and on behalf of the German couple she’s grown fond of. One hesitates to use the word “love,” since Beatrice doesn’t seem given over to such powerful emotions, but what else except love would keep her from getting on the first transport back to neutral Ireland at the first sign of real trouble?

The Life of Objects is an unflinching look at both human cruelty and human resilience.

Yun Ling Teoh is an angry woman—and she has every right to be. The daughter of a wealthy ethnic Chinese family in Malaya, she and her beloved sister were taken prisoners by the Japanese during World War II. The camp where they were taken was typically miserable, but so obscure that even in her old age Yun Ling can’t find out where it was or what it was called. Her bitterness toward the Japanese remains relentless and even invigorating; in her career as a prosecutor and then a judge she’s sent a goodly number of Japanese war criminals to their deaths.

But Tan Twan Eng, author of The Gift of Rain, lets us know from the beginning that nothing in this tetchy, straight-talking woman’s life is uncomplicated. Yun Ling’s sister Yun Hong had a passion for Japanese gardens that was kindled by a family visit to Kyoto. When Yun Ling escapes from the camp, she vows to make one for her, despite her hatred of the Japanese. To do this she must apprentice herself to Aritomo, a mysterious Japanese gardener who once worked for the Emperor whose troops had brutalized her and her sister for sport.

Eng brings the same pleasing level of messiness to his new novel as he did to The Gift of Rain. In both cases the messiness is the result of war, which not only brings horror to the protagonists, but upends the societies in which they live and forces them to examine old beliefs and ways of life that were taken for granted. Once again, Eng transports the reader to a world that few people know about and reveals the complicated humanity of its inhabitants.

Is there any setting more exotic—or enticing—than 18th-century Russia, populated as it is by finicky empresses, brutish tsars and decorated soldiers of the royal court? Best-selling author Debra Dean, previously heralded for The Madonnas of Leningrad, imagines the life of Russia’s beloved “holy-fool” Xenia, breathing life into the now-revered woman who became the patron saint of St. Petersburg.

Narrated by Xenia’s devoted cousin Dasha, The Mirrored World follows the two girls beginning with their society debuts. Xenia—not known for following the rules—falls head over heels for an alluring singer in the Empress’ Imperial Choir, Colonel Andrei Petrov. Soon, though, Xenia’s devotion to her husband is taken over by an obsession to have a child. When her daughter passes away not one year into her life, Xenia, crushed by grief, slowly begins to remove herself from society. The Colonel responds by lavishing his attentions on the bottle rather than on his wife; Xenia cannot be comforted nor cajoled into making an appearance at the royal court. One evening, her second sight hints at her own death, but it is Colonel Petrov whose time is up, leaving Xenia widowed and childless at the age of 26.

Readers are left to debate whether it is madness stemming from grief or simple destiny that leads Xenia to wander the streets of St. Petersburg clothed in her husband’s tattered military uniform, doling out her worldly possessions. Surprisingly, amid all this drama it is the quiet portrait of Dasha that is the high point of The Mirrored World. While most will be drawn to the fictionalized account of one of Russia’s most holy saints, it is the all-too-human story about the woman behind the saint that truly captivates.

Lance Weller’s first novel, Wilderness, recounts the harsh world of the Civil War and its aftermath unflinchingly. At the same time, he redeems it with flashes of tenderness as bright and ephemeral as the shooting stars that fascinate his protagonist, Abel Truman.

Truman is an odd but interesting character to embody the era’s small glimmers of kindness. When we first meet him he’s a gruff, old, banged-up, frightful-looking Civil War veteran. He lives at the edge of the ocean in the Pacific Northwest with a dog who’s in only slightly better shape than he is. He can almost always be counted on doing and saying the wrong thing, sometimes to the point where he puts his own life in peril. Yet his compassion is unsullied, whether he’s easing a young soldier to his death, saving the life of a blind Chinese girl who still remembers him in her old age, or caring for his dog. In turn Abel is blessed, once in a blue moon, by the kindness of strangers.

Like so many Civil War tales, Wilderness is a story of journeys through a chaotic world. The war has destroyed the social order, and no one knows what will replace it. Even nature, described in Weller’s beautiful prose, has been unsettled, the trees blasted apart by cannonballs and meadows set on fire.

Trees, by the way, aren’t the only things blasted apart by cannonballs. Weller’s depictions of a battle Truman and his fellow soldiers find themselves in are as horrific as his descriptions of nature are gorgeous. The miracle is that Abel Truman keeps his gnarly humanity even after witnessing such things. With its acknowledgment of both horror and beauty, Wilderness is an impressive debut.

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Read Lance Weller's story of the inspiration for Wilderness.

It is tempting, in light of Jennie Fields’ novelization of Edith Wharton’s affair with Morton Fullerton, to start a review that asks the reader to imagine Edith Wharton with no clothes on. For most of her fans this is a daunting task; the woman seemed to have been born wearing layers and layers of velvets, lace, buttons, corsets and ribbons.

Fields, however, has no problem imagining Wharton in the altogether. Still, The Age of Desire is about more than adulterous hijinks. Indeed, the book’s primary relationship isn’t between Wharton and Fullerton, but between Wharton and her now mostly forgotten governess and secretary, Anna Bahlmann. Called “Tonni” by her boss, she’s mousy, self-effacing and infinitely forbearing. She needs to be; the sometimes imperious Wharton switches between treating her like a beloved family member and a house elf. Still, this is rather better than Wharton treats her husband, Teddy, who spends much of the book not only being cuckolded, but suffering from what is now recognized as manic depression.

Fields makes us understand why Wharton would fall in love with a bounder like Fullerton. Wharton married the older Teddy because he was a gentleman of some means and it was the thing to do at the time. Their marriage is arid. Fullerton is beautiful, he’s as indifferent to public opinion as the rest of her friends, and he wants her, a plain woman in her mid-40s. All the while Tonni lurks in the background, watching and disapproving, yet ever steadfast.

Inspired by Wharton’s letters, The Age of Desire is by turns sensuous—Fields’ descriptions of Wharton’s homes and apartments are far more mouth-watering than her depictions of Edwardian rumpy-pumpy—and sweetly melancholy. It’s also a moving examination of a friendship between two women.

RELATED CONTENT: Watch a video with Jennie Fields on our YouTube channel.

Before she became a heroine of the Crimean War, and before he had written a word of Madame Bovary, Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert each traveled to Egypt—and, reportedly, glimpsed each other on the Nile. Though the historical record suggests that they did not actually meet, in poet Enid Shomer’s rich and imaginative novel, The Twelve Rooms of the Nile, they do, igniting a passionate friendship that both inspired and repelled.

Though the enfant terrible of French letters and the Lady of the Lamp might not seem to have many similarities, in 1849 both were searching for a larger purpose to their lives. Nightingale had just turned down a marriage proposal and Flaubert had just dropped out of law school and was mourning the death of his sister. He had also written his first novel, deemed unpublishable by a group of close friends. Both suffered from maladies; Flaubert had recurring seizures, which were probably epilepsy, and Nightingale endured debilitating depression. A trip down the Nile was an opportunity to refresh their minds and stimulate their senses. Most importantly it was a chance to leave their families behind.

In The Twelve Rooms of the Nile, so called after the many rooms the sun god Ra was said to pass through on his sacred journey from sunset to sunrise, Flaubert and Nightingale are both traveling the river with arranged stops at archaeological sites such as Philae and Abu Simbel. Flaubert was traveling with his friend Max Du Camp, an amateur photographer and archaeologist; Nightingale was with family friends and a lady’s maid, Trout. Shomer suggests that the strange surroundings provided opportunities for Flaubert and Nightingale to confide their deepest wishes and fears to one another, and the intensity of the environment, with its extreme temperatures and strange fauna, encouraged their closeness.

The striking Egyptian ruins serve as a perfect backdrop for the intensity of the characters and the plot gets a comic, though not wholly successful, twist in an apparent desert kidnapping. But the novel shines brightly as a thoughtful study of these two singular geniuses, a story Shomer tells with a deep understanding of the poignancy of human connection.

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Read a Q&A with Enid Shomer for The Twelve Rooms of the Nile.

Stories enrich us in different ways. They entertain us and take us to faraway lands. They give insight into the lives of others, and aid us in our own introspection. For Raami, the child narrator of In the Shadow of the Banyan, stories bring salvation, giving her the strength to survive the Cambodian genocide. Raami contracted polio as an infant, and her father tells her stories from a young age, saying, “When I thought you couldn’t walk, I wanted to make sure you could fly . . . I told you stories to give you wings.” Raami holds these stories inside herself during impossible circumstances, maintaining the will to live.

This haunting debut novel is based on the amazing life story of author Vaddey Ratner, who was five when the Khmer Rouge came to power in the 1970s. Like Raami, she was born as minor royalty, forced out of her home in Phnom Penh, separated from family members and forced to perform hard labor until she nearly starved. In an author’s note, Ratner explains that she wrote a novel instead of a memoir because she wanted to reinvent and reimagine her experiences where “memory alone is inadequate.” Although the fictionalized story of Raami—who is seven when the story begins—stands on its own, the reader’s knowledge of Ratner’s close personal connection to the material makes the novel feel even more intimate and devastating.

Remarkably, In the Shadow of the Banyan is an uplifting story, as Raami’s humanity—her fierce choice of life—is juxtaposed with the cruelty around her. Ratner’s lyrical prose and graceful descriptions serve as a lovely counterpart to bleak situations, reminding us of literature’s ability to transcend. Her novel will no doubt inspire readers to learn more about this painful chapter in world history.