From the dusty and dangerous roads of China’s ancient city of Kashgar, circa 1923, to the immigrant underground in present-day London, Suzanne Joinson beckons readers with lush, evocative prose, yet never lets her gift for poetry interfere with a good story—or, to be more precise, two good stories. While eight decades divide the dual narratives of A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar, heroines Eva and Frieda are tethered by the timeless themes of love, loss and redemption.

The novel opens as Evangeline “Eva” English and her younger sister Lizzie arrive in Kashgar, where they have been dispatched as missionaries. The fragile Lizzie is driven by her religious fervor, but Eva is merely going along for the ride—literally. She hopes to channel her wanderlust and fledgling literary skills into a travel book titled, of course, A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar, offering up tips for bicycle riding which also serve as eloquent metaphors for life lessons.

Like the best bicycle rides, Joinson's literary debut is an invigorating delight.

Joinson brings us an equally enigmatic but distinctly different heroine in Frieda. The modern-day single woman is juggling an unsatisfying career, a toxic affair with a loutish married man and a budding friendship with Tayeb, a sensitive artist who also happens to be a homeless illegal immigrant on the lam.

Readers of A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar are certain to enjoy a literary journey that is not unlike the best bicycle ride—invigorating and challenging, with plenty of hills, vales and scenic views to keep one’s blood pumping and spirits soaring.

In The Red Chamber, a vivid, lively reimagining of the lengthy Chinese classic Dream of the Red Chamber, Pauline A. Chen brings to life three unforgettable women trapped by class, time and circumstance.

Set in Beijing at the end of the 18th century—which is when all 2,500 pages of the original were written—the novel is the story of Daiyu, her cousin Baochai and her uncle’s wife, Xifeng.

Daiyu, raised in simple circumstances in the country, is sent to her uncle Jia Zheng’s mansion after her mother dies of consumption. Baochai and her mother and brother already live on the Jia estate, which for all intents and purposes is run by their tight-fisted, capable aunt Xifeng, who handles the money and is in charge of the servants. Picture Downton Abbey in early modern China, and you won’t be too far off the mark. It’s a way of life that has gone on for centuries, but political intrigue, combined with the Jias’ personal conflicts, threatens to bring the entire household to its knees.

The aging emperor is growing feeble, and whether or not the Jias will continue to bask in imperial favor depends upon his choice of successor. Inside the Jia home, the turmoil is just as great. Childless after several years of marriage, Xifeng learns that her husband is going to take another wife. Despising her helplessness within the concubine system, she grows bitter in her need for money and reckless in her search for affection. In the meantime, the close friendship formed by Baochai and Daiyu begins to erode as they both fall for Baoyu, the pampered heir of Jia Zheng.

Chen, who holds degrees from three Ivy League schools, is the author of the well-received children’s novel Peiling and the Chicken-Fried Christmas. Her first novel for adults is skillfully written. Despite their Eastern origins, Chen’s enaging heroines seem like direct descendants of the doomed, repressed women of classic Western literature.

International excitement over Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee in June coupled with the current popularity of the television show “Downton Abbey” and, really, all things British, make this the ideal time for the release of Juliet Nicholson's Abdication.

It's the first novel written by the British historian and, like the 2011 Academy Award winner The King's Speech, it is set in 1936 England and involves King Edward VIII's love affair with married American Wallis Simpson. However, the novel has less to do with the royals themselves than with the lives they touch.

Edward, Wallis and the scandal their relationship caused serve as the backdrop for Abdication, which focuses on three characters: 19-year-old May Thomas, who grew up on a Barbados sugar plantation and has come to work as a secretary for Conservative Party official Sir Philip Blunt; Blunt's goddaughter and Wallis' school friend Evangeline Nettlefold; and the handsome and idealistic Julian Richardson, a recent Oxford graduate who both May and Evangeline are attracted to.

The granddaughter of famed British poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West and daughter of British author and politician Nigel Nicholson, Juliet Nicholson does an exquisite job bringing her engaging characters to life. She provides the details and backgrounds that show not just who May, Evangeline and Julian are, but how and why they're impacted by—and react the way they do to—the unease felt in Britain over King Edward's increasingly public personal life, as well as to the corresponding unease felt in Britain and throughout the world over the rise of German leader Adolf Hitler.

The author of three works of nonfiction about Britain in the early 1900s, Nicholson has used her vast knowledge of the time and its people to create a compelling story that takes readers from the bustling, crowded streets of London to the stately, luxurious gardens where Edward and Wallis host cocktail and dinner parties. In Abdication, even some of the homes and buildings have personalities as real as the people who inhabit them, though not all are likeable. The balding, overweight Evangeline is more grating than gracious, but interacting with people like her is part of real life, which Abdication does not shy away from. The novel is more focused on real life than idealized love.

Those hoping for an intimate, bedroom view of Edward and Wallis' relationship (factual or fictional) will not find it here. What they will find, however, are strong characters, a strong plot and a most enjoyable way to brush up on British history.

The challenges of historical fiction are plentiful—how to freely imagine a person who really lived, how to impart modern sensibility to a bygone era, how to do your research without exactly showing your research. And yet, when this feat is achieved artfully (we’re talking Loving Frank or Arthur and George artfully), it can transport a reader to another time and place. Laura Moriarty’s new novel, The Chaperone, falls into this category.

The story of silent film actress Louise Brooks’ first trip to New York, The Chaperone has the trappings of a typical fictionalized biography. But what makes this book so interesting is that Brooks is not the star. Rather, we are drawn into the world of Cora Carlisle, the middle-aged, midwestern woman who chaperones the wild and irreverent Brooks on her 1922 Manhattan adventure.

At the novel’s start, Cora is living a remarkably vanilla life in Wichita, Kansas—land of sexual prudishness, Prohibition fervor and Klan enthusiasts. What we quickly learn, however, is that Cora’s past is much more colorful: She was born in New York and raised in the Catholic-run “Home for Friendless Girls.” She has no idea who her birth parents are and no claim to “moral legitimacy.”

Thus, when she agrees to chaperone the 15-year-old Brooks during her summer training with a prestigious New York dance company, it is as much to investigate her own history as it is to play babysitter. As one might expect, the flirtatious and black-bobbed future starlet gives Cora a run for her money, and when the “adult” attempts to tame the “child,” she finds herself at the center of her own moral and romantic awakening.

It is, of course, impossible to discuss The Chaperone without mentioning The Artist, this year’s cinematic tribute to the silent film era. Much like the Academy Award-winning film, Moriarty’s book explores the challenges of a changing world. Progress cannot be stopped, she seems to say, and the survivors are the ones who agree to move along with it.

Read a Q&A with Laura Moriarty about The Chaperone.

Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel’s sequel to the spellbinding Wolf Hall, is one of the most anticipated books of the season. A uniquely told and utterly absorbing study of Thomas Cromwell, who rose to prominence from humble beginnings, Wolf Hall concluded with Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne Boleyn. Bring Up the Bodies plunges the reader back into the royal court just a few years later. Again, it is to Mantel’s credit that she makes this familiar story not only fresh, but a page-turner.

Though he fought for seven years to marry Anne Boleyn, by the spring of 1536, Henry was disenchanted with his new wife. Not only was Anne unable to provide him with a male heir, but the demure Jane Seymour had caught his eye and her family was moving into position as the next powerful clan. Cromwell, who masterminded the King’s divorce of Catherine of Aragon and bedding of Anne, is charged with managing another separation.

Mantel vividly paints the machinations integral to the undoing of the royal marriage. As one character remarks, “what was done can always be undone,” but this time the personal stakes are bloodier.

Shorter than Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies is also more concentrated, covering the tumultuous actions of a few months with a tight focus (the conclusion to the trilogy will take the story to 1540). Like the previous novel, it is told in the present tense and from Cromwell’s perspective, which brings an extraordinary immediacy to the storytelling.

Readers will remember Cromwell as an intriguing mixture of tenderness and ruthless politicking. His common origins and love of family make him a sympathetic character, even when the events he helps to bring about are heinous in nature. Watching Cromwell meet and even anticipate the cruel demands of his monarch, we are privy to the full strength of his political skills as well as the sense of wistfulness and loss that shadows his every move.

Christopher Tilghman’s latest novel, a sequel to Mason’s Retreat, has the feel of a Greek tragedy, but it’s not, quite. The tragedy that afflicts the Mason/Bayly families reflects the original sin of America itself. 

Before the Civil War, Ogle Mason, owner of Mason’s Retreat, a Maryland plantation, sold a portion of his slaves. The sale traumatized not only the slaves left behind, who were parted from family and friends, but Ogle’s daughter Ophelia, who goes through life with a darkness hanging over her. She marries an odd but gentle man who turns the plantation into a peach farm and treats his black employees and their families almost as equals. Ophelia and Wyatt Bayley—and their children Mary and Thomas—spend much of their lives trying to atone for the sin of Ogle Mason.

Mary and Thomas’ childhood is unusual, thanks to their father. Wyatt wants his daughter to be educated. He allows his son to be educated alongside a black boy named Randall, a son of one of the families he employs. Sometimes Wyatt seems more ambitious for Randall than he does for Thomas. Is this another way of making amends for his father-in-law? Then, there’s Beal, Randall’s sister, a fey child of not-quite-human beauty, and, for Tilghman, a catalyst for the hope and disruption that are motifs in this beautifully written novel.

Tilghman, the director of the University of Virginia’s MFA program, has long written about the people and places of the Chesapeake. Here, he plunges the reader into the daily lives of those who work and live on the Retreat. The plantation, with its fragrant orchards, then its sterile dairy barns, becomes as vivid as a person. Quietly and sadly, Tilghman uses this portrait of life on a Maryland farm to say much about what’s wrong and what’s right about America.

Even if the reader knows the sordid history of the period just after the Civil War, it’s doubtful that anything they have read will enrage them more than Leonard Pitts’ Freeman. The cruelty and depravity inflicted by the defeated white Southerners upon their former slaves is sickening; what's even more sickening is the idea that there are still people walking around today who think the same way and would perpetuate the same horrors if they could get away with it.

Be that as it may, this gripping and difficult novel remains a story of imperfect triumph for those former slaves and for the handful of whites who try to help them in this dangerous and bewildering postwar world. The protagonist is the former slave Sam Freeman, a Philadelphia librarian when the book opens. Though his job is relatively safe and his white employer is kind, at the end of the war he resolves, Odysseus-like, to return to the south and find his wife, Tilda.

Others are also determined to go south, either to find loved ones or right wrongs. One of them is Prudence Kent, the good-hearted but stubborn daughter of a passionate abolitionist and her “sister,” African-American Bonnie, who was raised with her. The two wind up in Buford, Mississippi, where they have the noble plan to open a school for freedmen in defiance of the white townsfolk. But even the denizens of Buford have nothing on the monstrousness of Captain James McFarland, the book’s Simon Legree. “Marse Jim” has no problem hunting down and murdering his ex-slaves who have the temerity to think they’re free. He doesn’t hesitate to blow away anyone who tries to help them, either.

A good story written by a good writer will keep you turning the pages and staying up past your bedtime, whether you want to or not. Pitts, a Pulitzer-winning columnist and the author of Before I Forget, keeps the reader hooked through outrage after outrage. The ending does not satisfy. It doesn’t slake one’s rage against the injustice of the whole ghastly era. Still, the ending Pitts gives us is honest and true. This, too, is the mark of a very good writer and a very worthwhile book.

There is an air of faded gentility hovering around Sterne, the old manor house at the heart of Sadie Jones’ third novel, The Uninvited Guests. But don’t be fooled: The house and its inhabitants harbor dark secrets that are slowly revealed over the course of this quirky story. Well known for her previous works, especially the award-winning The Outcast, Jones goes down an unexpected road with The Uninvited Guests, featuring elements drawn from ghost stories and period comedies, though her humor is more bitter than sweet.

The events in The Uninvited Guests take place over a single day in the isolated and crumbling Sterne. Charlotte Torrington Swift lives there with her second husband, Edward; two adult children from a previous marriage, Emerald and Clovis; and one younger and oft-ignored daughter, Imogen. The family is at risk of losing the house, and as the novel opens, Edward is leaving to borrow money from a “dreaded industrialist” so he can keep the family on the estate. It is also Emerald’s 21st birthday, and just as guests are arriving to celebrate, a train derailment occurs nearby. Sterne becomes a way station for the displaced passengers, one of whom seems to know a good deal about the family—Charlotte in particular. His presence brings out the worst in all concerned.

Despite the charming opening scene and lyrical language, The Uninvited Guests is filled with a kind of prickly menace and biting wit. The house is remote and decaying; Charlotte is self-centered and neglectful; and the stranded passengers are injured, odorous and distressed. Every character harbors a secret. The class divide between the residents of Sterne and the hapless but encroaching passengers is sharply drawn. The ambiguity of the place and time—somewhere in England, sometime at the beginning of the 20th century—adds to the air of menace that drifts in from the beginning and builds to a horrible crescendo in a scene with echoes of the war to come, which will irrevocably change the lives of these young people.

The macabre plot and acerbic tone of the novel harken back to fiction by earlier British writers such as Saki, Ivy Compton Burnett and Sylvia Townsend Warner. But Jones looks to Edwardian England with a modern sensibility, and she is more likely to slyly subvert than to wax nostalgic. In this way, The Uninvited Guests is the anti-“Downton Abbey,” and Jones’ readers are all the luckier for it.

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Read an interview with Jones for The Uninvited Guests.

In his new novel, Trapeze, Simon Mawer explores the secret world of British Special Operations Executives (SOE), the agency that recruited citizens to work behind enemy lines during World War II. It was the women of the French Section who most captured Mawer’s imagination: women from all walks of life who were united simply by their ability to speak perfect French and willingness to risk their lives for their country. Mawer based his lead character Marian on a friend of his parents who was recruited as a Special Op and disappeared behind enemy lines for the duration of the war.

Nineteen-year-old Marian Sutro is a native French speaker, having grown up in Geneva as the daughter of a British diplomat and a French mother. She is doing her bit for the war effort, working with codes and ciphers for the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, when she is recruited by the bland Mr. Potter for the SOE. Soon she is undergoing commando training in the Scottish Highlands, attending a “school for spies” in New Forest and learning to parachute out of planes. When she lands in occupied France in 1943, it is to join the local resistance network.

But there are complications. Marian’s brother is a well-known scientist, and Marian herself was close with French physicist Clement Pelletier—she once harbored a schoolgirl crush on him. Before leaving England, she was approached by an even more secretive organization than the SOE, one that wants her to convince Pelletier to leave France and work with the Allies on plans for an atomic bomb. Though her initial instructions keep her in southwestern France, she realizes she must get to Paris if she is going to reach Pelletier. Even if she finds him, will he want to return to London with her?

Trapeze sets a thriller-like pace, and Mawer writes compellingly about the deprivations of wartime France as well as the everyday dangers of occupied Paris. His background as a science teacher gives him a facility with integrating scientific ideas; in Trapeze, he uses concepts drawn from physics as metaphors for Marian’s evolving sense of self. Though very much a story about the intricacies of the spy network, Trapeze is also about a young woman who is called upon to do something extraordinary and is thus forever changed.