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.

The moment he catches a glimpse of that familiar silhouette, Lucien Lessard’s world begins to change. After a two-year sabbatical from their relationship, his beloved lady, Juliette, has unexpectedly returned to Paris. With dark tresses and the fairest skin, Juliette inspires Lucien in both work and play, but is she really what she seems?

With equal parts humor and mystery, Christopher Moore’s Sacre Bleu brings to life the French Impressionist art movement in late 19th-century Paris, exposing the painters’ colorful personalities through Lucien, a baker-turned-artist who interacts with various real-life artists of the movement—including Monet, van Gogh and Pissarro. To judge by the adventures of Lucien and his closest friend, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, it seem that the artist’s life away from the canvas usually involves booze and brothels.

Lucien’s career path is not only motivated by his late father’s love of painting, but also the mysterious Juliette. After Juliette’s countless requests, he ignores his misgivings and agrees to paint her nude figure using a special aquamarine color. This “Sacred Blue” is only provided by an odd little man known as The Colorman—who just might be connected to the unexplained death of Lucien’s friend Vincent van Gogh. The result of his capitulation results in an unpredictable tale that is woven around shorter chapters about other French Impressionists and the history of the Sacred Blue, a color that, like Juliette, has hidden depths.

While Moore’s satire of the Parisian art world is entertaining and whimsical, this is not a laugh-out-loud novel. Much like his novel Lamb, he combines historical research with an intelligent sense of humor, resulting in amusement rather than gut-busting laughter. An imaginative trip through Paris filled with comedy, death, love and mystery, Sacre Bleu has something for everyone.

In her debut novel, The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R., author Carole DeSanti has crafted an evocative story of a young woman’s courageous and reckless coming of age amid the rollicking mayhem of France during and after the Second Empire. While Eugenie’s escapades unfold in the tumultuous era between 1860-1871, her refusal to relinquish her passions and determination to survive are contemporary themes, as is the heroine’s struggle to define her roles as daughter, mother, lover and friend.

While the travails and tribulations afflicting young Eugenie and her compatriots might prove a bit daunting for some readers, DeSanti’s narrative is infused with poetry, lending an earthy realism to even the most complex scenarios.

“To wear mourning is not necessarily to mourn,” writes DeSanti. “To walk at the head of the procession, to bow one’s head over the grave is not necessarily to understand the weight and change of death. Silk or crepe, leather or kid gloves, paste or true jewels . . . a mix of gray and lavender in half a year, or scarlet in a week, whatever the latest fashion codes dictated—none of it is to mourn; for me, it was a reawakening.”

Indeed, DeSanti, the vice president at large at the Penguin Group, who is said to have been “clandestinely” writing this novel for more than a decade, has clearly done her homework. Prior to starting chapter one, readers will certainly want to pore over two special sections tucked at the back of the book: a historical timeline of France, circa 1848-1871, and a brief glossary of French terms. But one need not be a fervent Francophile to appreciate the injection of little known terms like ami-coeur, a term for partner in an intimate relationship.

The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. is far from a sentimental homage to the lost France of the 19th century. DeSanti’s Paris is exhilarating and art-loving, albeit absinthe-drenched and riddled with venereal diseases and violence, while France’s foie gras country is a pastoral paradise that’s plagued by provincial mores and superstitions. 

Above all, readers will appreciate DeSanti’s aptitude for capturing the timeless themes of youthful insouciance, lost innocence and the ties that bind mothers and daughters, for better or for worse.

I have to say—reluctantly, like I’m bad-mouthing a friend made of words and paper—that I found the first 30 pages or so of Regina O’Melveny’s debut novel, The Book of Madness and Cures, somewhat clunky. But like a good friend who made an awkward first impression, the book is well worth pursuing past that phase. Stick with it, for it opens up into a vividly imagined and alluring space, becoming a warm, thoughtful and sure-footed companion.

O’Melveny’s heroine, Gabriella Mondini, is a doctor during the Renaissance, a time when attempting to heal the sick could get a woman burned as a witch. Mentored by her physician father, Gabriella nonetheless brings her own keen instincts to the table, and, before her father left home with nary an explanation 10 years before the novel’s start, the pair treated patients together in Venice and were co-authoring an encyclopedic tome of diseases. When his sporadic, increasingly peculiar letters suddenly cease, and a local edict forbids her to practice medicine, 30-year-old Gabriella—who has begun to feel as insignificant as the window through which she stares—comes to an invigorating decision: she will set off across Europe and northern Africa to find her missing father. The trek that follows is life-changing, testing her mettle in the mountains, bringing her more than one chance at love and confronting her with heartbreak, guilt and the muddy question of when a quest becomes obsession.

The text has a gentle feel as it explores parenthood, gender, the consequences of leading and following and the two-sides/same-coin experience of human togetherness and solitude. O’Melveny’s poetry background shines through: walking a populated path on a foggy Holland morning is like being “alone in a pale room of indeterminate dimensions.” Lush scenic detail and the tenderness between Gabriella and her traveling partners—her former nursemaid Olmina, and Olmina’s husband, Lorenzo, who double as surrogate parents—make the journey a pleasure to follow. While her father’s descent into madness illustrates that we never really know the ones closest to us, Gabriella knows that one must comfort even when one cannot cure. This shared humanity at the heart of the novel is its brightest strength.

Robert Olmstead, author of the national bestseller Coal Black Horse, delivers another work of prose with language so painstaking and exact it reads more like poetry. The Coldest Night is a treasure as lean and stripped as the desolate, frozen peaks of Korea where much of the novel takes place.

In rural West Virginia, teenager Henry Childs leads a quiet, contemplative life until a violently catastrophic love affair leaves him broken in body and spirit. Unwilling to return home, Henry lies about his age and joins the Marines. It is 1950 and Korea is on fire, and almost immediately Henry finds himself in the middle of the push north to China that will result in the infamous battle of the Chosin Reservoir.

Henry’s task is one warriors have faced since the days of Odysseus: to stay alive, come home and forget not only the terror of battle, but the beauty of it, its insidious seduction.

This is the third novel featuring the warrior Childs family. Robey Childs’ search for his soldier father among the blood-soaked battlefields of the Civil War was the subject of Coal Black Horse, and in Far Bright Star, Napoleon and Xenophon Childs hunted for Pancho Villa’s raiders in the scorched Mexican desert on the eve of World War I.

If those two acclaimed, award-winning novels are journeys, then The Coldest Night is the destination. Henry’s metamorphosis from child to a man old beyond his years provides truths as cauterizing as a red-hot poker touched to the spot of an amputated limb. Like those of Cormac McCarthy, another writer unafraid of wading through the gore of America’s baser nature, Olmstead’s characters are laconic and their dialogue is spare. Unlike McCarthy, his descriptions of nature are lush and bountiful, lending a measure of beauty to even the most forbidding of landscapes.

All three of Olmstead’s books featuring the Childs family have been written while America was at war, and all three pointedly ask why, if war is so unspeakably awful, it has been as constant as birth in the history of humankind. Olmstead weds the nature of armed aggression to the nature of man without apology, even with compassion, seeking only understanding, which, during our second decade of continuous war, is no insignificant goal.

We’ve seen the Watergate story imagined and re-imagined from every possible angle. After nearly four decades it would seem we’ve run out of new ways to tell this ubiquitous tale of America’s seedy underbelly. Thomas Mallon is here to prove us wrong.

Watergate is a bold, sweeping retelling of America’s most famous scandal by a gifted historical novelist, but it’s perhaps more notable for what it’s not. It doesn’t rely on thriller-style twists or far-fetched conspiracy theories to ratchet up the entertainment value. This is character-based historical fiction, a peek behind the walls of power as they’re slowly collapsing. This is a different kind of Watergate novel.

Watergate is populated with the characters who committed and witnessed the crimes: Howard Hunt, Nixon’s secretary Rose Mary Woods, Fred LaRue, Charles Colson, First Lady Pat Nixon and even President Richard Nixon himself. Using the immense quantity of research material as both inspiration and evidence, Mallon constructs a new version of the story. The players are the same, the events do not change, but the level of depth is astounding.

With Watergate, Mallon has constructed a panoramic view of the scandal, with settings throughout the United States and beyond, and dozens of powerful characters. This is no longer a detective story or a parable about American politics. This is an epic, pure and simple, an ambitious novel about the perils of power told with unrelenting skill and prowess. Mallon’s big ideas, big names and big events are balanced out by well-crafted prose, pitch-perfect dialogue and gripping pacing.

But perhaps the greatest achievement of Watergate is that it does not have to simplify the implications of the scandal to create a page-turner. Mallon has crafted a fictional re-examination so rich with detail that the events don’t feel as though they happened more than 30 years ago. Watergate feels new and thrilling again in his hands, and that makes this a can’t-miss book for historical fiction fans.

Perhaps best known for her provocative memoirs, Kathryn Harrison triumphantly returns to her historical fiction roots with Enchantments, the sweeping (and wholly imagined) story of love between two unlikely allies: Maria Rasputin, daughter of “Mad Monk” Grigori Rasputin, and Tsarevich Alexei Romanov, would-be heir to the Russian empire. As with her previous novels Poison and The Binding Chair, Harrison takes a particular moment in time and brings it to stunning life.

It is 1917 in St. Petersburg when a diver pulls Grigori Rasputin’s battered body from the Neva River. That much is historical fact, but afterwards Harrison’s story becomes an alternate history: In the wake of their father’s brutal death, Maria—Masha—Rasputin and her sister, Varya, are sent to live with the Romanovs in the royal palace. Before his murder, Rasputin served as a healer to Alexei—here called Alyosha—Romanov, and the Tsar and Tsarina feel compelled to care for his children after his passing.

Tsarina Alexandra has other motives, too: Alyosha suffers from hemophilia, and she hopes Masha might care for her son as Grigori did. But when the Bolsheviks place the royal family under house arrest not two months after the Rasputin sisters arrive, something entirely different happens. Masha and Alyosha become friends and confidants, distracting each other from the world outside and Alyosha’s condition with stories of their families’ histories, their hopes for the future and the creation of a rich fantasy world only the two of them share. Masha and Alyosha begin to fall in love, but before that love can be fully explored, they are separated—first by distance, then by death.

Harrison is strongest when she writes about Masha—not just as Rasputin’s daughter, but as a living, breathing, feeling young woman in an impossible situation. The relationship between Masha and Alyosha is complicated, confusing and often all-consuming, as most young loves are.

Much has been written about Rasputin and the Romanovs, but Harrison brings her unique narrative perspective to Enchantments, re-imagining history—and a love story—in a completely new way.