Fever tells the torrid tale of the life of Mary Mallon, an Irish-American immigrant who became the first known healthy carrier of the pathogen that causes typhoid fever, and the only one to be imprisoned long-term for her condition. She is better known to American history as the infamous “Typhoid Mary.” But readers will feel compelled to qualify that epithet after finishing Mary Beth Keane’s sympathetic portrayal of this woman scorned by circumstance.

Keane credits Judith Walzer Leavitt’s book Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public’s Health as her “starting point and . . . touchstone” during the four years she spent writing the novel. Thankfully, Keane takes a few liberties that bring Mary to life beyond the historical account, like the wonderfully drawn friends and fellow immigrant-occupants of her 33rd Street tenement building. Most prominent among them is her lover and companion of nearly 30 years, Alfred Breihof. Their relationship is Mary’s thread to the world as she is whisked away and isolated, in truly Kafkaesque fashion, on North Brother Island in the middle of the East River. And it is the thread running wildly through the narrative, threatening always to tangle or to snap. It’s a faltering, ultimately tragic love story that leaves just the narrowest gap for the light of hope—hope that a strong woman, who bravely refused to concede her inalienable rights but who could never shake the love of a hapless cad, could in the end find some peace within herself.

The history lesson alone is worthwhile: the rich portrait of New York City during the early 20th century, an era of sweeping change. Its class divisions and immigrant life, its awkwardly young public health awareness, its teeming growth, all create a veracious space in which Keane’s characters move. Their dilemmas are never easy and their decisions are often questionable, making for a read that is as morally challenging as it is quickly paced. Fans of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks will find stirring parallels in Fever. Ultimately, this is a story that provokes a deeper understanding of the tenuous relationship between love, personal liberty and the common good.

It’s 1919, and Vivien has spent 13 years mourning the loss of her life’s love. The last time she saw David, her married lover, was when he left her bed the morning of the San Francisco earthquake. She has spent the years since wondering whether he perished or is, by some miracle, alive but battling a case of amnesia.

To cope with her grief, Vivien helps others with theirs through her work as an obituary writer. The grieving come to her with broken hearts and memories of their loved ones. Over tea, toast and a comforting cup of broth, they share the stories of those they’ve lost. Vivien brings them to life once more through the written word.

It’s 1961, and Claire feels trapped in her marriage. Peter is a fine husband, though not particularly attentive. At some point, something snapped in Claire, and she found herself in bed with a married man—and Peter caught her there. Now she’s pregnant, unsure of whose child she’s bearing and feeling more isolated than ever. Will Peter forgive her? Does she even want him to?

It isn’t immediately clear how the two tales in Ann Hood’s new novel, The Obituary Writer, intersect, but parallels are evident. Vivien and Claire face individual challenges and quests for meaning in their lives as well as in their romantic relationships. Their compelling stories push the reader forward, to discover both how their lives may intertwine and how each resolves the unanswered questions in her relationships. Along the way, Hood, whose previous books include a memoir, Comfort, and a best-selling novel, The Knitting Circle, sensitively explores the complicated web of emotions associated with love, marriage, motherhood and the myriad expectations all women encounter.

Tracy Chevalier, of Girl with a Pearl Earring fame, shifts her focus from Europe and enigmatic works of art to 1850s Ohio and the Underground Railroad in her latest, The Last Runaway. Jilted by her fiancé, quiet Quaker Honor Bright departs safe England for untamed America, and learns there that living according to one’s principles is easier said than done.

Left suddenly alone on her new continent after a family tragedy, Honor seeks comfort in the meditative routine of her beloved quilting. Her talent for stitching gains her an unlikely friend: the whiskey-swilling, cursing Kentucky export Belle Mills, who, to Honor’s shock, is hiding runaway slaves. Opposed to slavery like other Quakers, Honor silently approves of Belle’s actions, but when she begins helping slaves herself, she is met with resistance from her new community of Friends—despite their passionate abolitionist speeches. Further complicating matters are Honor’s first stirrings of lust: Belle’s brother, Donovan, is coarse, violent and, worst of all, a slave hunter—yet Honor can’t get him out of her head, even as she’s drawn to red-blooded Quaker farmer Jack Haymaker. As Honor moves deeper into the risky world of aiding slaves, she is confronted with several difficult choices.

Evoking 19th-century Ohio life with a quiet lushness, Chevalier seamlessly seeds vivid period details into her writing. Though minor bits test patience—Honor can supposedly hear an eye blink—the conflicts of this young woman’s head and heart will pull readers to the last page. Chevalier questions the difference between bravery and foolishness and explores whether ideology should displace family ties, and her characters are drawn with satisfying shades of gray. Having lived in England for nearly 30 years, the American-born Chevalier calls this novel her “love letter home.” Warm and thoughtful, The Last Runaway gratifyingly probes America’s growing pains.

Australian writer David Rain debuts with a rather American novel, a sensitive, intelligent snapshot of a watershed moment in our country’s history. Woodley Sharpless and Ben “Trouble” Pinkerton meet as teenagers in boarding school just after World War I. Woodley is an orphan with a significant limp acquired when he was hit by a car, while Trouble is the son of the powerful Senator Pinkerton, a man who some people think will be the next president.

Trouble is consciously different, a James Dean loner who fascinates the other boys. Woodley, an outcast because of his limp and his dubious sexuality, naturally gravitates toward him. When Trouble’s stay at the school abruptly ends, the boys begin a pattern of losing touch and rediscovering each other that continues for decades.Their paths cross at key points: in 1920s New York City, where Trouble learns that he is half Japanese, an illegitimate child of the senator; in violently nationalistic 1937 Nagasaki; and back in America, where both become involved in the Manhattan Project. As the project races toward its conclusion, it becomes clear that as the bomb explodes, so will the lives of both men.

The Heat of the Sun is a sequel of sorts to Puccini’s famous opera, Madame Butterfly, which ends with the forsaken Japanese wife killing herself and leaving her young son to his father, Pinkerton, a former American naval officer who left her. Rain’s worthy novel is a touching, often searing tale of friendship, betrayal and love. His flawed characters are staggering beneath the weight of the past, which they carry like burdens even beyond the book’s chilling, operatic conclusion.

The “Octavo” is a set of eight cards that, when dealt by an expert, provides all the clues the subject will need in order to chart a successful path through life. One such expert is the visionary Mrs. Sparrow, who runs the Octavo for her well-heeled friends (including King Gustav himself) in the upper room of her famous Stockholm tavern. One fateful night, the subject of the Octavo is neither aristocratic nor regal, but the book’s dashing, scrupulous narrator, Emil Larsson. A customs official for Stockholm’s great port, Emil is doing his best to climb the complex and intrigue-ridden social ladder of 18th-century Swedish society. Mrs. Sparrow has had an urgent vision: She must lay out Emil’s Octavo immediately. The future of the nation itself is hiding somewhere in his cards.

Even the most stalwart fans of the genre would admit that historical fiction often relies on stereotyped characters. In The Stockholm Octavo, debut author Karen Engelmann turns a nifty card trick, transforming this convention into her novel’s supreme virtue. The Octavo encompasses every conceivable type, each one fixed in place within the mystical pattern: The central Seeker, the obscure Companion, the crafty Teacher, the suppliant Prisoner, the all-important Key, etc. Right at the start, through the medium of Mrs. Sparrow’s dealings, Engelmann literally lays her fictional cards on the table. The fascination of the cards’ unfolding gives way to even greater narrative magic, when Emil must wield all his intelligence and resources to identify the actual persons who embody the eight figures of his Octavo.

With flawless instinct, Engelmann conflates mystery and romance, as circumstances conspire to withhold from Emil the cards’ real-life counterparts. Most elusive of all—and most page-turning for the reader—is the identity of the woman he is meant to love and to wed. Misstep follows upon misdirection; it is not even clear which Octavo position his beloved will assume. The only certainty is that if Emil does not act quickly, the treasonous element in King Gustav’s court will have its dark way, sending Sweden, like France, into its own revolutionary nightmare. Is this historical, or is it fiction? The answer—the ace up Karen Engelmann’s sleeve—is yes.

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Read a Q&A with Karen Engelmann about The Stockholm Octavo.

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.