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.

Esmeralda Santiago captured readers’ hearts in 1994 with her memoir, When I Was Puerto Rican, and was heralded for her proud account of her Nuyorican upbringing and her deep connection to the little Caribbean island. After a novel and two more memoirs, Santiago returns to Puerto Rico in Conquistadora, a historical novel that tells the story of the island itself.

Conquistadora begins at the very beginning—or at least the beginning for one woman—with Ana Larragoity Cubillas as a bright-eyed and curious child in search of adventure in 1800s Spain. Ana grows into a tough, stout woman, and after she falls in love with her best friend Elena, she arranges marriages for both of them to a set of twins. She coerces the husbands to plan their future in Puerto Rico and hopes they will claim their wealth on a sugar plantation, La Hacienda los Gemelos. However, Puerto Rico greets Ana and her new family with stifling heat, disease epidemics and desolation. Much like the Spanish dream of Puerto Rico as a colony, Ana’s own life loses its mystique as her success on La Hacienda becomes “erected on corpses.” Her devotion to sugar is far greater than her connection to her husband, to Elena or even to her own son. In time, it seems as though Ana’s plantation is cursed, though she cannot deny it is where she belongs.

The novel spans nearly her entire life, through child-rearing, ruined marriages and many deaths, leading to an open-ended conclusion, as though to suggest the story of Puerto Rico has just begun.

Styled much like a romance novel from the Civil War era (which in timing it parallels), but told with a stoniness that separates it from more romantic, sweeping novels, Conquistadora is simple in its purpose: to tell the story of those who lived and died in Puerto Rico. Readers may not sympathize with Ana, the book’s hardened hero, but her unflinching devotion to her dream of living with the valor and beauty of her conqueror ancestors is compelling.

Woven together with Ana’s tale are the lives of all those around her, and they are each given time for their own perspective—Elena, the twins, her second husband and business partner, her son, even the slaves, one at a time. The result is a broad and multidimensional account of the little island of Puerto Rico.

Pam Lewis’ latest novel sprawls from Amsterdam to Argentina to the United States, carrying along a slim, quiet protagonist who is swept wherever fortune takes her. In the opening pages of A Young Wife, our protagonist Minke is sent from her rural home in the Netherlands to serve as a nursemaid to the dying wife of a wealthy stranger. After the wife’s death, Minke is shocked when the bereaved husband proposes to her. Nevertheless she accepts his proposal, and the pair set sail for Argentina days later. The remainder of the novel details the arc of their relationship, which is loosely based on the relationship of Lewis’ grandparents.

While there are singular moments of beauty in A Young Wife, a quick and tidy resolution to several central conflicts may leave some readers unsatisfied.One of the bright spots is the moment Minke has on a moonlit beach in Argentina. “A great deal had changed in her,” the narrator tells us. And then, wonderfully, we see the change. Rather than the homesick girl she used to be, she is “glad for the raw expanse of sea,” so different from the Netherlands with its “buoys and boats and noises.” The writing here, as in other places in the novel, is so very fine. We hear the beating of the ocean, and our hearts catch as we imagine the contrast between Minke’s two worlds.

But occasionally, despite these glorious moments, the story simply lags. And then rather abruptly the novel simplifies and solves all our heroine’s problems. While we’re supposed to attribute Minke’s triumphant breakthrough to her realization of a strength that lay dormant throughout the early years of her marriage, critical readers may find Lewis’ solutions far-reaching.

Nonetheless Lewis takes readers on a stirring journey. The opening chapters of A Young Wife are especially strong as we meet Minke and practically feel her fall in love with an older, mysterious and very romantic man. For all the qualms readers may have about the trajectory of the book, its images are undeniably alluring, like the image of Minke in Argentina, holding her child in her arms, enjoying a warm night on a foreign shore.