For more than 20 years, Jean M. Auel has enthralled readers with her prehistoric novels in the Earth’s Children series, starting with The Clan of the Cave Bear, where Auel first introduced the enigmatic outsider Ayla. The series has followed Ayla through several Ice Age European cultures, and her strange accent, animal companions and foreign knowledge have always placed her in the spotlight. The much-anticipated sixth and final book, The Land of Painted Caves, takes Ayla into a new country with her blue-eyed mate Jondalar, and she begins her training to become a Zelandoni—one of the community’s spiritual leaders and healers—to the people of Zelandonia.

The Land of Painted Caves follows Ayla as her mentor leads her across the land of Zelandonia. Their tour through the caves, which are carved and decorated by unknown ancestors, is meant to bring Ayla closer to the Great Mother Earth. Her training intensifies to near-intolerable levels, and as Ayla draws closer to the Great Mother Earth, her roles of mother, lover and Zelandoni brew a small storm in her mind. She pushes the boundaries of the Spirit world, and her revelations will set in motion a completely different world for the men and women of the land of painted caves.

Like all of Auel’s books, the research is extensive, with brilliantly re-imagined scenes of daily life and early forms of religion. The realism feels just as important as the mysticism, and the painstaking detail grounds the story with a sense of familiarity. Readers will find the people charming for their early discoveries, such as learning to count and creating glue. Those who have never read the Earth’s Children series may be a little confused, especially concerning Ayla’s extensive backstory, but will be no less entertained and touched by Auel’s careful representation of early people.

Paula McLain’s fictionalized study of the starter marriage of Hadley Richardson and Ernest Hemingway, The Paris Wife, is a pleasure for anyone who wonders what it was like to be a broke, ambitious writer in Europe in the 1920s. Or, more specifically, a broke, ambitious writer’s wife.

Hadley meets Ernest at a friend’s house in Chicago. She’s in her late 20s, nearly a decade older than he is, and on the verge of permanent spinsterhood. He deflowers her, they marry and flee to Paris, where they can live cheaply and meet all manner of big shots, including Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. They have a baby, nicknamed Bumby. There’s some drinking, though Hadley doesn’t hit the sauce nearly as much as Ernest. In McLain’s hands, he’s nicer than one would think, and the word that comes to mind for Hadley is “earnest” as she struggles to make homes for them in dinky little rooms while Hem tries to make a living. In clear and unfussy prose, McLain makes the reader long for their Lost Generational squalor.

Indeed, McLain’s talent is such that the fact that few of the characters are likable doesn’t mar her story. Characters need only be interesting, and well-drawn creeps are the most interesting of them all. Exceptions to the overall badness are the Murphys, the rich, cosmopolitan and compassionate couple who adopt both the Hemingways and the F. Scott Fitzgeralds like some folks adopt ugly pound puppies, and of course Bumby, still a child when his parents’ marriage detonates. Even Hadley repels with her love of bullfighting—a woman who gets her kicks from watching an animal tortured to death is simply not someone one can like. When the appalling Pauline Pfeiffer, who will become Ernest’s second wife, crawls into bed with them one drowsy Mediterranean afternoon one doesn’t know whether to cheer or gag. Hadley, like so many of her revered matadors, ends up pretty badly gored, but survives, and lives well into her 80s.

Restrained, perceptive and a bit sad, The Paris Wife is a look at a time and a marriage that weren’t as glamorous and carefree as we’d like to believe. 

Jennifer Chiaverini has made quite a name for herself with her best-selling Elm Creek Quilts series. From the Civil War to the roaring ‘20s to contemporary settings, these novels have offered suspense, romance and, at times, in-depth looks into the social, political and cultural differences that helped shape a nation.

In the latest Elm Creek Quilts novel, The Union Quilters, readers are introduced to Dorothea Granger—beloved wife of Thomas—as she stands in her kitchen, swallowing her tears, watching the man she loves prepare to cross Pennsylvania to enlist in the Union army in 1861. Dorothea is a true leader in her small town: She’s constantly helping other families, running the sewing circle and even using her home as a station on the Underground Railroad. But having to keep the tears from her eyes as Thomas departs is almost impossible.

Constance Wright and her boys live in the small town of Elm Creek as well. Her husband, Abel, is also packing to join the men on their march into battle, but Abel has an obstacle the others do not. He’s African American, and the Union has yet to let men of color wear the blue uniform and stand up for their rights. Among the other residents in town are Gerda Bergstrom, a slightly bitter woman who’s in love with a man she can never have, and her sister, Anneke, whose own husband refuses to join the fight, choosing instead to stand by his opinion that you should never kill your fellow man.

Like the quilts that are created by these fantastic ladies’ hands, Chiaverini’s storylines are seamlessly united. Between the sewing circle becoming an organization that will do all they can to support their noble fighting men to the in-depth accounts of frightening battles to the vivid look at the intense prejudice that existed in a world teetering on the cusp of freedom, every moment of this story is truly unforgettable. Chiaverini has once again written an intense and beautiful book—so much so that readers will almost hear the hollow echo of the fife and drum as they immerse themselves in every compelling page.

Good songwriter that he is (under the alias John Wesley Harding), Wesley Stace knows the emotional value of repetition. Just as the melodic “hook” keeps the listener listening, the narrative “hook” keeps the reader reading. The more the composer (or author) varies that same little bit of tuneful (or eventful) stuff, new regions of expression arise out of telling the same story over and over again.

The musical principle of repetition saturates every aspect of Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer, from its characterization to its structure. Charles Jessold is introduced to us as a gifted composer and the bright hope of English music in the early 20th century. His more fateful and titular role, however, is to reincarnate Carlo (Charles) Gesualdo (Jessold), the brilliant and infamous 16th century Italian composer, who caught and murdered his wife and her lover in bed. Thanks to Stace’s supple blurring of fact and wild invention, it makes no difference that Gesualdo is “historical” and Jessold “fictional”: both figures take one and the same imaginative shape as avatars (two among so many) of a certain great folk song, in which a Lord kills his Lady and her lover over the course of dozens of heartbreakingly repetitive stanzas.

The novel itself takes shape as a tour de forceof musical redundancy. The music critic Leslie Shepherd—Jessold’s friend and champion—first gives an “exposition” of the facts of the composer’s rise and fall, right up to the horrible night of Jessold’s double murder and suicide, on the eve of his operatic debut. Then, with astonishing fortitude, Shepherd presents a broader “recapitulation” of the entire story, this time told in the darker, more tragic key of Shepherd’s own life, and (even more tellingly) of Shepherd’s own wife. To say any more would betray the abiding spirit of folk song, which demands that we repeat, not reveal. Read this book. I’ll say it again: read this book.

In England in 1862, there was little cure for the racking, bloody crawl of tuberculosis. When Lady Duff Gordon faces death as her lungs collapse beneath consumption, she has no choice but to escape the chill of London. Her maid Sally Naldrett, whose loyalty edges on childlike adoration, follows her Lady in her descent into Egypt, where the two women find themselves completely out of touch with their surroundings. The Lady hires a dragoman, Omar Abu Halaweh, to help them acclimate to their new foreign home.

It is not long before the three characters fall into familiar rhythms. The women shed their heavy British garb for the lighter clothing worn by Egyptian men, gain very dark tans and learn Arabic. They become more like friends than lady and servant, and soon neither woman can be recognized as her former self. Most of all, both women experience a type of freedom that they had not previously encountered—Lady Duff Gordon with her condemnation of the Egyptian community leaders, and Sally with her sudden discovery of love and all its freedoms. Their glowing little world cannot remain, however, and a mistake could cost Sally everything she ever had—or could dream of having.

Winner of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Award, The Mistress of Nothing is inspired by the true story of Sally and Omar, whose lives were hidden between the lines of Lucie Duff Gordon’s book Letters from Egypt. There is little known about Lady Duff Gordon’s maid and dragoman, and Kate Pullinger illuminates these blank spaces to create serpentine connections between the three characters. Pullinger offers them neither judgment nor amnesty, and the book’s commitment to a historical and pragmatic voice is its true gem. Even with its soft voice, The Mistress of Nothing is a tough story of the unavoidable tragedies and celebrations that three simple, yet extraordinary, lives may yield.

Folks who think the political discourse is fraught right now might take a time machine back to the 11th-century British Isles. Everyone—the Gaels, the Normans, the Saxons and other little tribes—was at war, with towns pillaged and burned, farmland sown with salt, and women, children and the elderly force-marched to the lands of their conquerors and sold into slavery (if they were lucky). This is the backdrop for Susan Fraser King’s absorbing historical novel, Queen Hereafter, which imagines the life of Queen Margaret.

Margaret, the Hungarian-born Saxon/Scottish saint, was a refugee herself, thanks to the chaos surrounding the Saxon revolt and the Battle of Hastings. After enduring a miserable sea passage from the continent, she and her mother and sister wash up in Scotland, and are taken in as guests/hostages of King Malcolm II. He’s sort of on the side of the Saxons, whose leader is the very young and uncrowned Edgar, Margaret’s younger brother. In due time Malcolm marries Margaret in what is largely a political deal. He also insists on having Princess Eva from north Scotland as another guest/hostage, the better to rein in her ambitious grandmother, known to us as Lady Macbeth. Malcolm, by the way, killed not only Macbeth but his stepson Lulach, Eva’s father. She’s not as happy to be in the King’s redoubt as she could be.

Yet Eva and the Queen form a friendship. They’re both royal, and the spirited Eva is also a bard whose singing and harp music soothe the gentle, often lonely but deeply pious Queen. But Eva is also a spy for her grandmother, and she’s torn in her loyalties.

Fraser King is good at depicting the particulars of life in this savage time, though much of the savagery is kept in the background. She describes the linens, silks and wool worn by the royal ladies. The food is often coarse and plain, even at the royal table. People drink ale and wine instead of water, which may be contaminated. Her characters draw the reader in, though the devout Margaret can come across as a bit wispy. Fraser King’s Malcolm is not the pious and virginal boy of Shakespeare’s Scottish play. He begins as a ruffian who allows himself to be civilized, but not overmuch, by the wife for whom he cares and who does her duty by bearing him sons—lots of them.

Gracefully and tastefully written, Queen Hereafter gives the reader a glimpse into life as it could have been lived during a fairly obscure and turbulent time in world history.

In 1692, after the overthrow of James VII of Scotland and the installation of William and Mary on his throne, a child-sized woman, abused, malnourished and probably half-crazy, tells her story to a priest sent to convert the “barbarians” of the Scottish Highlands. The woman, Corrag, has fled England to escape the fate of her mother, Cora; like so many wild, strange women versed in herblore, Cora was deemed a witch by their intolerant community and hung. Riding “north and west” on a trusty gray mare, Corrag finds refuge and hospitality among the fierce, Jacobite MacDonald clan of Glencoe. Because their clan leader was late in signing a loyalty oath to the new king, some of them are slaughtered on a snowy winter night by the king’s soldiers, who, appallingly, were their guests. Enough of the MacDonald men, women and children flee to keep the clan going but Corrag, named as the one who warned them of the oncoming massacre, is imprisoned and condemned to burn.

The story is based on both fact (the MacDonald massacre) and legend (Corrag’s warning). The book’s chapters alternate, mostly, between Corrag’s narration and the priest’s letters to his beloved and longed for wife. We see Mr. Leslie’s transformation from a man who unthinkingly supports Corrag’s upcoming execution, since she’s a “witch” and there’s nothing more to be done about her, to a man who feels compassion for her and would like to save her if he can.

Corrag’s narrative is riveting. Fletcher describes her reverence for nature with astonishing beauty, whether Corrag is watching a sky full of stars, or gently picking spiders out of her hair, or befriending a stag who finally takes half an apple out of her hand. Her friendship with the mare who brings her from England to Scotland is vividly told, and heartbreaking—the reader will think of that brave mare long after she’s left the scene.

Fletcher’s characterizations of the people of Glencoe are no less moving. There’s the MacIain, the clan’s gruff leader, who Corrag first meets when she tends his headwound. There’s his son Alisdair, whom Corrag chastely and fiercely loves, and Alisdair’s lovely wife, whose baby Corrag helps deliver. One is tempted to describe Corrag as “fey”—tiny, blackhaired and strange, you can see her being played by somebody like Bjork. But she has a mighty heart, and Fletcher has written a novel worthy of her.

Kathleen Kent has a unique talent for early American storytelling, as proven by the smash success of her 2008 debut novel, The Heretic’s Daughter. Kent is back with a prequel to her bestseller, which digs into Colonial Massachusetts after the English Civil War. The Wolves of Andover, a story of love and British-American mystery, embodies the struggles of an entire young nation through the tale of 19-year-old Martha Allen.

Martha, unwed and nearing spinsterhood, is sent to work as a servant in her cousin’s home in hopes of finding a husband. Similar in spirit to the ceaselessly roaming wolves of New England, she gains a reputation for her sharp tongue and stubborn brow. She attracts the attention of the towering Thomas Carrier, a former soldier with portentous ties to the death of King Charles I. A young but hardened love materializes between them as it becomes all too clear that the Colonies are not as safe from the past as is believed. It is not long before danger circles the little homestead in the forms of beast, man and death.

The Wolves of Andover combines the steadfastness of well-researched historical fiction with the organic mien of oral storytelling. Less intimate voices are silenced as Kent gives one young woman the ability to represent herself independently. The Colonies, a pubescent and fiery version of what would eventually become America, provide the ideal backdrop for a story of deception and harrowing passion.