Fact and imagination waltz arm in arm through N.M. Kelby’s genre-bending novel White Truffles in Winter. Measure by measure, the personal history of the renowned, real-life chef Auguste Escoffier (1846-1935) spins whimsically into fictive memories—intricate scenes of passion and taste. When the music finally stops, readers are left dizzied but alert to a tantalizing swirl of the senses.

The Escoffier of this story is a man torn between two loves: his wife, the poet Delphine Daffis, and his lover and longtime friend, the actress and international sensation Sarah Bernhardt. The novel is set in the last year of Escoffier’s life, in Monte Carlo, where he has retired and reunited with his wife after decades apart. Time has eroded his fame, fortune and health, and Delphine withers on her death bed. When an insolent Sabine arrives as their caretaker and cook, looking like a young Sarah (her father, who arranged the situation, is hoping to win Escoffier’s favor), memories are aroused in both Monsieur and Madame. Bottle by bottle, dish by dish, the story of their marriage surfaces: its perfect moments, its epic failures. And Delphine has a final wish: to be immortalized as her husband has immortalized so many others. After a lifetime of want, she would like to have the great Chef Escoffier create a dish in her honor.

Much of the book is spent reveling in the alchemy of flavor for which Escoffier was so known—the essences, the combinations, the transformational power of food as nourishment for body and soul. Cutting along the grain, not against, Kelby reveals her characters slowly, wrapping her readers in sensuous prose that, ultimately, seems as concerned with recreating the experience of a glorious meal as it does with narrative.

Foodies will no doubt enjoy the lush epicurean treatment as well as the historical elements of the novel, which explore the origins of today’s commercial kitchens and a host of culinary techniques. But ultimately this is a classic romance, the story of a transcontinental marriage doomed from the beginning, yet held together by the complexities of love.

No, it’s not a sequel to The Help. “The Maid” in question in Kimberly Cutter’s debut novel is Jehanne, Joan of Arc, and this beautifully conceptualized story of her few years of glory puts flesh and blood on the long-stereotyped image, giving readers an unexpected shiver of connection with a mostly forgotten icon.

In the 15th century, when the only way a woman could make a difference in public life was through religious exceptionalism, Jehanne’s guiding spirits—Saint Catherine, Saint Margaret and Michael the Archangel—empowered this 17-year-old peasant who was “unschooled, simple as a thumb,” instructing her in what God expected her to do. But sainthood is not an easy road, and the terms are never quite clear.

Cutter limns the development of a saint about as well as a person who presumably isn’t one can: the beyond-life experiences, the beyond-death dreams, the beyond-endurance reality. “She could feel the Godhead growing inside her now . . . like a secret plant. . . . Feeding her and feeding off of her . . . she knew that the winds were with her and the stars in the night sky . . . that holy waters were coursing through her veins and ancient caves of knowledge were yawning open inside her skull, and she loved God then in a way she never would again, for her love was the naïve, untested love of a new bride—perfumed and dreamlike. Blind as a mole.” Somehow that last dry phrase seems to capture the ultimate riddle of sainthood in a way that more idealistic comments might not, although Cutter does not attempt to solve it, only imagine it.

Eventually, Jehanne, trying to take back the town of Margny with precious little (that is, no) help from her God-designated hero, King Charles VII, is captured by the Burgundians, turned over to the English and meets her famous fate in Rouen.

“More books have been written about Joan of Arc than any other woman in history,” admits Cutter (a writer for Elle, Harper’s Bazaar and Vanity Fair, among other publications), but the quality of The Maid justifies the author’s decision to add yet another to the list. Multiplying the dimensions of understanding of what it must be like to be subjected to theophany, Cutter has produced an exaltedly down-to-earth account of the kind of experience most readers will never have—and afterward maybe, deep down, they’ll be grateful about that.

After Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, his coffin was placed on a train and transported from New York, where his funeral was held, to Washington, D.C., where he was to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Thousands of ordinary people stood for hours in the unseasonable heat just to get a glimpse of the train passing. David Rowell’s insightful, gently humorous and compassionate debut tells the stories of a handful of these people. For those who were alive and remember the traumatic spring of 1968—Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated only weeks before Bobby Kennedy—the book might bring back memories both disturbing and strangely innocent. Along with the Vietnam War, riots and assassinations, there were only a few channels on TV, Walter Cronkite told everyone the news and everyone believed him, and the Beatles had not yet begun their slow and terrible four-way divorce. For those who weren’t around, The Train of Small Mercies is a snapshot of a time when all certainties about race, gender, parenthood and America’s place in the world were undergoing upheaval.

The stories of Rowell’s characters are largely ones of disappointment and dislocation. They include the family of a veteran who has lost a leg in Vietnam; when he returns, they struggle to reintegrate him into their lives. A Kennedy-worshiping mother is obsessed with her daughter to the exclusion of her husband and sons, and tragedy ensues. A young Pullman porter is following in his father’s footsteps. His first job? He’s serving on the funeral train, and while he’s excited, proud and a little scared, his mind is largely on what’s going to happen between him and his pregnant girlfriend. Later, he gets into a brawl that threatens his job. An Irish immigrant learns the job she was about to start has fallen through; she was supposed to be the nanny to one of the late senator’s many children. A little boy tries to come to terms with the fact that the nice time he’d spent with his father in a cabin in the woods wasn’t what it seemed.

The funeral train takes all of these people momentarily out of their lives and gives them something else on which to focus their grief. These are the small mercies of the title, and at such a fraught time in American history, small mercies are everything.

Stella Tillyard is a seasoned and respected historian with a number of acclaimed nonfiction works under her belt, so it makes sense that she would pour her expertise and historical passions into her debut novel. Tides of War, a sweeping story of aristocrats and soldiers, artists and scientists, generals and lovers, is rich with historical details of Regency England and the final years of the Napoleonic Wars. But it’s much more than a catalog of famous faces. In her first fiction effort, Tillyard has crafted an epic tale that rides the line between romance and adventure, filled with gripping characters and gorgeous descriptions.

Tillyard takes the classic scenario of the young man leaving his wife to go to war as her novel’s starting point, but Tides of War goes on to defy all predictability. Tillyard builds her plot in slow layers, introducing a massive cast of characters—among them the Duke of Wellington and the legendary Spanish painter Goya—in chapters that traverse the parlors of London and the battlefields of Spain. Her focus is on James and Harriet Raven, newlyweds who part ways in London when he goes off to battle. The two spend the rest of the novel fighting the temptations of the modern world and the passions—the tides, as it were—of war. While Harriet is swept up in the heady discoveries and wealth of the home front, James is enchanted by Spain. This is only one of the contrasts Tillyard explores throughout the novel: war and love, practicality and reckless emotion, reason and impulse.

The result is a book meant to be savored; Tides of War is a work of often staggering richness that begs its reader to be patient and dig deep. Fans of novelists like Cecelia Holland and Philippa Gregory will delight in the romance and immersive language of Tillyard’s work. Tides of War is a rewarding, engrossing debut from a bright new force in historical fiction.

Sharon Kay Penman transcends beloved-author status: among lovers of historical fiction, she is cherished. Her latest offering sets out to capture the larger-than-life Richard I—crusader, king of England and member of the colorful Angevin family—and she does not disappoint.

The stage for Richard’s story is the Third Crusade, a quest to retake Jerusalem from the hands of the sultan of Egypt, Salah al-Din, called Saladin by the Westerners. As Richard embarks on this all-consuming quest in concert with the rest of Christendom, he rescues his sister, Joanna, from a precarious political position after the death of her husband and marries Berengaria, daughter of the king of Navarre. And so the two women join Richard in the Holy Land, bearing witness as the plot clambers over the highs and lows of history—scandalous political intrigue, battles won and lost and the thrills and heartaches of maintaining a life in the midst of war.

Richard’s profile in history is that of a bold, boisterous warrior-king, a character that seems almost too exaggerated to be real. Penman reaches beyond the hero, not to imbue him with flaws, but to find the man behind the legend. Penman’s Richard I is hot-blooded with incredible military prowess, but capable of being humbled and moved. His commitment to act with honor is not outsized, but real.

Richard’s spotlight, however, is very nearly stolen by his tough-minded sister and quiet, yet strong new wife, two women who become compelling characters in their own right in Penman’s hands.

Penman is often commended for writing about the medieval world without passing judgment on its characters and the value system that makes them so different from modern readers, and she does that again in Lionheart. She also succeeds at depicting the odd nature of holy war. Both Richard and Saladin, a shrewd commander famous for both might and mercy, believe they are serving God with each clash of swords, and yet each respects the other’s military skill and strategy.

The author is also known for her meticulous research; it’s as if she sees herself more as a historiographer than a novelist. Lionheart is no departure from this reputation, and the richly imagined dialogue and story are intercut with snippets from primary sources. The truth of the events makes the novel all the more fascinating and worthy of several reads.

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Meet the Author interview with Sharon Kay Penman

Herbs and potions, love charms and secrets, the complex intimacies between mothers and daughters: It’s clear from the outset of The Dovekeepers that we are firmly in Alice Hoffman territory. But instead of the safe suburbs of New England, we have been transported back to the first century at Masada, the mountain fortress south of Jerusalem where 900 Jews held out against the Romans before committing mass suicide rather than submit to foreign rule. For The Dovekeepers, Hoffman was inspired by a trip to Masada and research into the classical world, including the work of Josephus, the Roman-Jewish historian who recorded that the only survivors of this tragedy were two women and five children.

Hoffman retells this ancient story through the voices of four unique women, each of whom arrived at Masada and worked in the dovecotes—caring for the birds, collecting eggs and gathering fertilizer. Red-haired Yael, the daughter of a master assassin, becomes pregnant with the child of her father’s colleague. Revka, the baker’s wife, lost her husband and daughter at the hands of Roman soldiers and is now determined to protect her motherless grandsons. Young Aziza was raised as a warrior; she wants nothing more than to fight alongside the men in this last stand against the Romans. Finally there’s Shirah, Aziza’s mother, who grew up as the beloved daughter of a consort to the high priests and is the lover of Masada’s charismatic leader. Initially suspicious of one another, the women gradually grow close, sharing their secrets and developing a fierce loyalty to one another.

An ambitious novel, dense with vivid description of daily life in ancient times, The Dovekeepers combines archaeology and research with Hoffman’s own interest in the often untold lives of women and her passion for stories of magic and the natural world. Even though the tale’s outcome is well known, the story­telling is bound to satisfy any reader.

The Hangman’s Daughter, written by a descendent of the very family this historical mystery features, was already an international bestseller before being released in the U.S. And it’s not hard to see why; the novel’s page-turning plot keeps readers guessing, and the setting—1689 Bavaria—is no slouch, either.

While the book is called The Hangman’s Daughter, the character who seems to interest author Oliver Pötzsch the most is the hangman himself, Jakob Kuisl. A hulking creature who is ambivalent about his career as a state-approved murderer, the hangman proves to be smarter, faster, stronger, more sensitive, more decisive and (against all odds) the best doctor in town. Despite these remarkable credentials, he is also an outcast: lowly, disrespected and considered a sign of bad luck.

Our hangman has an unusual case on his hands. A group of orphans is being murdered one by one, and the town suspects the midwife of witchcraft. Tattoos that feature a witch’s sign in elderberry juice on the shoulders of the victims terrify the townspeople and stir up talk of a witch hunt. Meanwhile, a certain treasure has gone missing, and a group of itinerant soldiers seems to be pulling off all kinds of minor disturbances. Can the hangman and his friend Simon, a physician, figure out who really killed the orphans in time to save the wrongly accused midwife? Or is the midwife perhaps not what she seems?

Readers who like a plot-driven story with identifiable heroes and villains will be drawn to this ambitious novel. And unlike some stories in the genre, The Hangman’s Daughter only gets better as the climax approaches—an exciting duel between the hangman and his nemesis. It truly delivers the thing so many of us look for in our novels: entertainment.

There have been countless novels over the years about the rampant wave of Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe to the United States during the 19th and early 20th century. So many, in fact, that it’s almost difficult to imagine a story on the subject that feels unique. Anna Solomon’s fascinating debut, about a mail-order bride sent to join her Orthodox husband in rural South Dakota, is a rare, stunning exception.

Minna Losk is a 16-year-old orphan living in 1880s Odessa when she answers an ad from a Russian-American man looking for a wife. She, like so many others, dreams of an urban, cosmopolitan life and of opportunities unheard of for a Jew in Cossack-ridden Russia. But when Minna arrives, she is whisked off not to New York or Chicago but “Sodokota,” a barren, desolate territory far from civilization. Minna’s betrothed, too, is not what she expects, but rather, a rigidly religious man more than twice her age, with two teenaged sons in tow. With literally nowhere else to turn, Minna must learn to make this fledgling family work under the most trying circumstances.

The Little Bride is a riveting portrait of a community not often documented in history.  Shunned both by their mother country and by the American Jews who had already assimilated into secular life, the first wave of Eastern European Jews who immigrated in the mid-19th century were often forcibly sent to the Great Plains—a narrative now largely eclipsed by the massive wave of immigration that followed shortly after. But this is far more than just a different twist on the same story. Solomon’s prose is bold and often gritty, and she creates complicated, surprising characters that completely defy expectations, displaying the depths of the author’s careful research and rich imagination. 

Rebecca Shapiro writes from Brooklyn.