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.

Their names are Laura, Ester, Maria, Rosemary, Florence, Gwen, Jeannine, Sincerity and Cloud. Separated by place and defined by the context of history, together their stories weave the rich narrative tapestry of Katie Ward’s debut novel, Girl Reading. Divided into chapters that deal with the trials and triumphs of each particular protagonist, the novel proves a fascinating testament to the universal themes of art and literature and the spirit of femininity, despite the limitations of time.

Impressive research and a dynamic voice combine in Katie Ward's compelling debut novel, which tells the stories of women in several different eras.

In each section, Ward imagines the hidden story behind an actual artistic representation of a woman reading. She explores each individual’s background, dreams and personalities—the intimate truths that their portraits do not reveal. The birth of the Renaissance in Siena marks the opportunity for a young girl to pose for a triptych. A Dutch maid is desired by her master. In 1775, artist Angelica Kauffman makes a journey to finish a portrait for a reclusive heiress. Victorian England provides the setting for the saga of estranged twin sisters, where photography and mysticism intertwine. A young girl falls in love with Impressionism and an artist during the Great War; a woman in modern London questions her choices in life and love before being snapped reading at a bar by a photographer. And in the near future, the experience of art is reformulated by an artist and engineer, herself troubled by the effervescent nature of technology and truth.

With each woman’s story, Ward adds layers of significance and depth, crafting her prose with a beauty and vitality that matches the scale of art entwined in her work. Readers are engulfed in the distinct world of each heroine through extensive detail and rich characterization, enhanced by larger ideas about women’s positions as mothers, lovers, muses, leaders and survivors. Impressive research and a dynamic voice create an unforgettable story that will leave readers pondering the mystical relationships between women, literature and art.

A slim narrative with much of the story told through letters written by and to widow and lifelong Parisian Rose Bazelet, Tatiana de Rosnay’s The House I Loved is a tale as dark and haunting as the Edgar Allan Poe stories full of ghastly secrets that Rose so admires.

Readers learn early on that Rose has a ghastly secret of her own—and it’s not just that she’s hiding in the cellar of her beloved, three-story home on the rue Childebert while Emperor Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte and Baron Georges-Eugene Haussman tear Paris down rue by rue in order to rebuild a modern city.

Replacing interweaving streets and medieval buildings with straight boulevards and modern facades appalls Rose. Even though her home is in the path of destruction, she refuses to leave, relying on a ragpicker to bring her food, water and coal to keep warm. Also sustaining her are memories, as revealed in the letters she writes to her dead husband.

Fans of de Rosnay’s Sarah’s Key will not find the same kind of compelling, page-turning urgency in The House I Loved. Its pace is slow—meandering even, like the walks Rose used to take along the Seine on warm summer evenings. However, the details de Rosnay provides allow readers not only to see Rose in her fine silk bonnets, but to feel her emotions.

The aftermath of the Civil War—specifically, the Reconstruction era in Alabama—comes to vivid life in Taylor M. Polites’ debut novel, which dispels some of the myths associated with that period of our history.

The Rebel Wife opens in 1876 with the gruesome death of Eli Branson, the local mill owner, from what his doctor calls blood fever. Eli had been shunned in the small town of Albion for being a Yankee sympathizer—and indeed, the town’s Negroes turn out for his funeral in far greater numbers than the whites. Eli’s young widow Augusta, or Gus, wasn’t privy to his political activities, or even his finances, though she assumed she and Henry, their son, had been well provided for at his death.

Gus quickly learns how mistaken she has been—not only underestimating the negative feelings of the town’s whites toward Eli, and now her, but also their wealth, which, according to her cousin Judge, the executor of Eli’s will, has dwindled to practically nothing.

Polites has peopled his well-researched account with an intriguing cast of characters, each of whom contributes to Gus’ awakening to the postwar realities she now must face alone. There is Judge, whose greed surpasses their blood ties; Mike, Gus’ conniving brother who expects a share of the mill profits; Rachel, who has cared for Gus since childhood; and Simon, a loyal freed slave who knows the details of Eli’s finances, including a secret stash sought also by Judge and Mike.

Gus is perceptively portrayed as she gradually moves from feeling “irrelevant and disregarded” to taking charge of her altered life, and grows in her awareness of what the slaves have been through. She is ashamed of having accepted their treatment “as the way things are”—a far cry from the usual image of the Southern belle in fiction and film. Polites’ debut is a historically accurate and compelling depiction of the postwar South, in all its divisiveness and discord.

The Quality of Mercy is Unsworth’s long-awaited sequel to his 1992 Booker prizewinner Sacred Hunger, a game-changer of a historical novel which concluded with several major character arcs left unresolved. Picking up just months after the earlier book left off, The Quality of Mercy offers a cast of British miners, bankers, abolitionists and landowners struggling to define their ideas of property, wealth and personal responsibility in a changing world.

Sacred Hunger followed the passage of the Liverpool Merchant, an 18th-century slave ship that disappeared off the coast of Florida, and the obsessive attempts of Erasmus Kemp, the son of the ship’s owner and himself a well-established banker, to determine what happened to slaves and crew. When Kemp travels to Florida and discovers that the survivors had formed a makeshift community—black and white together—he sends the slaves to the Carolinas be sold, bringing the remainder of the crew back to England to be charged with mutiny and destruction of property.

The Quality of Mercy opens after Kemp’s return to England, where he is pursuing the trial with a singularity of purpose, but no more peace of mind than he had before his trip. One of the jailed crew members, Sullivan, slips out of jail and heads north for a mining village in County Durham. He has pledged to find the family of his old shipmate Billy Blair, who died in the course of Kemp’s attack, and to inform Blair’s sister of the death of her brother. Kemp wants to find Sullivan but is distracted by a burgeoning relationship with Jane Ashton, the sister of a prominent abolitionist, whose philosophy forces to re-examine his own desire for revenge. Another chance relationship interests him in mining opportunities in County Durham and he also begins to make his way north.

That Kemp and Sullivan will eventually meet and confront one another is no surprise. It is in the telling and not the plotting that the book is strongest. The dramas in and around the mining village and the trials in London offer Unsworth a chance to explore once more the complicated relationship between those who work the land and those who own it. Though slavery plays a smaller part than in Sacred Hunger, the moral limits of ownership are never far from Unsworth’s mind.

The Quality of Mercy is historical fiction at its best. The ideas are thoughtful, but the writing flows easily and the research, which must have been plentiful, is integrated seamlessly into the storytelling. Though you don’t necessarily need to be familiar with Sacred Hunger to enjoy The Quality of Mercy, reading both novels would be the perfect way to kick off a new year of reading.

Being a princess—especially being a Russian princess—isn't everything Disney would have you believe. In this adroit third novel (following her prize-winning debut, Necessary Lies, and the historical Garden of Venus), Eva Stachniak has produced a strikingly readable, even mesmerizing, story of the politics of personal power in the 18th century, and the influence of individuals in the political affairs of Russia, one of the most cryptic nations in the world then—and yet today.

Following Robert K. Massie's authoritative biography (Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman) by a couple of months, The Winter Palace uses a fictional narrator, Varvara (or Barbara), to give readers a spy's-eye view of the Russian Court during the last years of the Empress Elizabeth. Catherine, whose rise to prominence was somewhat Cinderella-like—she was born a minor German princess of the small municipality of Anhalt-Zerbst—is married to the putative heir, Grand Duke Peter, and cagily waiting in the wings as the novel opens.

Taking it all in, as a spy, or “tongue,” is Barbara, who manages to get close to several centers of power in the Russian court—including the young Grand Duchess, on whose activities she has been hired to report. Barbara is Polish (like Stachniak), but close enough to the center of Russian royalty to supply details of the day-to-day court customs, intrigues and imperial hubris that surround Russian power. Many of these are weird and fascinating: For example, the Empress Elizabeth has a “Mad Room,” where she goes to watch the “amusing” antics of the insane.

Adjusting rather too easily to a court in which “life is a game and every player is cheating,” Barbara soon allies herself with Catherine. The problem is that Catherine possesses overweening ambition herself, which Barbara, in these early days, only gets disturbing glimpses of from time to time.

Stachniak has produced a novel for which readers will turn off the television. (I did.) Better yet, they will want to continue Catherine’s journey in the implied second installment. Here’s hoping the sequel will be a worthy successor to this shrewd novel of historical human folly and extravagance.

“Scintillating” and “titillating” are two words that barely begin to describe Ellis Avery’s beautifully written, erotically charged second novel, The Last Nude. Avery—previously acclaimed for her historical novel set in late 19th-century Japan, The Teahouse Fire—now successfully takes her readers to Paris in the roaring ’20s. There, she fictionalizes the true story of sensational Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka and her rapport with 17-year-old model Rafaela, the inspiration behind one of the century’s most famous nude paintings, Beautiful Rafaela.

The Last Nude opens as Rafaela—an Italian Jewish immigrant from New York City—prowls the infamous Bois de Bologne neighborhood, in search of “financial aid.” We learn that Rafaela has escaped her strict Italian family with mere pennies in her pocket; she has been resorting to prostitution in order to make ends meet. Instead of a man, though, she encounters the extravagant Lempicka, a deposed Saint Petersburg countess who is currently raising her young daughter in France. Lempicka convinces Rafaela to model nude for her, and it is there in her salon that Lempicka’s best work is produced, along with the burgeoning of a passionate—and somewhat hidden—love affair.

Avery weaves historical fact with electrically charged narrative, creating scenarios in which Lempicka and Rafaela cavort with Sylvia Beach (owner of Shakespeare & Company, Paris’ famous English bookstore), Beach’s partner Adrienne Monnier (co-publisher of Joyce’s Ulysses), and boxer-turned-Nazi-collaborator Violette Morris (to name a few). As Lempicka’s paintings generate buzz in the art world, Rafaela finds herself falling deeper for the unobtainable, recently divorced painter who is hiding a few secrets of her own.

Though the book’s final section (told from Lempicka’s point of view) feels like something of an afterthought, it is fascinating to observe the once-powerful painter, now in her 90s and obsessed with memories of Rafaela. Filled with fabulous literary anecdotes and characters that seem to leap off the page, The Last Nude is a novel perfect for lovers of the 1920s, of Paris or simply of love stories.

It took Luis Alberto Urrea 20 years to write his mystical bestseller, The Hummingbird’s Daughter, which was released in 2005. Lucky for readers, it did not take him nearly as long to return to his beloved heroine Teresita in this captivating sequel, Queen of America. With deft humor and a poetic lyricism that seamlessly folds one scene into another, Urrea unfolds the story of his real-life great-aunt Teresita, a teenage saint who was known for healing miracles.

This book picks up where The Hummingbird’s Daughter left off, at the turn of the 20th century. Following the catastrophic Tomochic rebellion, mystic Teresita (“The Saint of Cobora”) is banned from returning to Mexico. Together with her lush of a father, she traipses from one state to the next, hiding out from deadly assassins. But it’s not only the Mexican government that is after her. Many are desperate to find Teresita, whether they are attempting to kill her, exploit her as the spiritual leader of the Mexican Revolution, or simply be physically cured by her.

While Teresita’s bawdy father attempts to drown his loneliness in liquor, Teresita encounters and befriends two dashing brothers, a surrogate mother, some medical charlatans and a sociopathic singer who holds both lust and murder in his heart. Torn by her familial bonds and her allegiance to her lover, Teresita must figure out how she can handle both saving the crowd and indulging her romantic whims.

Each scene in Queen of America unfurls gracefully like delicate wisps of smoke. Whether Teresita is being held captive in Northern California by a band of profiteering medical professionals, or being feted like a queen in New York’s social circles, this epic novel paints a portrait of America—and its inhabitants—with grace and style. It will spark fire in readers’ hearts.