Needlepoint, corsairs, Cornwall’s coast – such subjects and setting seem like an echo from the past. Yet in The Tenth Gift, Jane Johnson makes plot relevant and characters sparkle as contemporary heroine Julia Lovat flees from heartbreak and her historical counterpart Catherine Tregenna seethes in the hold of a vessel on pirate-infested seas. The dual stories dramatically alternate, with Johnson creating verisimilitude in both the 17th and the 21st centuries.

The storyline springs from rumors of a congregation kidnapped from a Cornwall church during a slave trader’s Sunday raid. As Johnson discovered while researching a family legend, the rumors were true. Few records remain of those English captives’ experiences in North Africa. Johnson recreates their ordeal through the observations of Catherine both as character and as a diarist, since Catherine’s journal has fallen into Julia’s hands as a farewell gift from her married boyfriend. Julia studies the archaic language and imagines Catherine’s plight, described in lines like these, written from the ship: “This verie mornyng old Mrs Ellys expired at last from weaknesse &andamp; shock of losyng her poor husbande, but no one has taken her bodie, she lyes in the ordure &andamp; addes to the stink.” To learn more about Catherine’s plight, Julia leaves London for Cornwall in a rush and then, even more impulsively, takes off for Rabat. Johnson’s storytelling skills are great. Almost 200 pages pass before either character gets to Morocco – Julia by air and Catherine in chains – and yet the stories of their daily lives enchant from page one.

Johnson, publishing director at HarperCollins UK, comes by her knowledge of Morocco honestly. She met and married a man on a trip to Morocco, and they now live part of the year in a Berber village. Her writing is mostly free of stereotypes. Even the archvillain Al-Andalusi, Catherine’s chief captor, exposes his softer side. His murderous passions spring from the Inquisition’s destruction of his own family.

The Tenth Gift explores love, forgiveness, work, captivity in its various forms and the meaning of life. Characters strive to build their faith whether they understand everything that happens to them or not. A based-on-true-life plot makes for a riveting tale, all the way to the improbable if emotionally satisfying ending.

Andrea Brunais writes from Tampa, Florida, and Bluefield, West Virginia.

The catastrophes that human beings can endure – genocide, holocaust, slavery – and not only live through but thrive in spite of, is one of the more impressive things about our species. In Breena Clarke’s latest novel, Stand the Storm, the Coats family, most of them born into slavery, prosper despite the odds against them in pre- and post-Civil War Washington, D.C.

The family matriarch is Annie, spared the most backbreaking aspects of slavery because of her genius at sewing. She passes on the skill to her adored son Gabriel and her somewhat less adored daughter Ellen. The family, with the grudging permission of their master, Jonathan Ridley, go into business in a Georgetown shop run by Ridley’s nephew Aaron. So feckless is Aaron that he largely leaves the Coatses alone to grow the business and practice their art – and sewing and embroidery are not only art forms, but the way Gabriel purchases his family’s freedom.

Clarke excels in showing the ways the communities of both slave and freedmen communicated and helped each other – the way a curtain was knotted in a window, for example, could be a sign of safe passage. Her language is formal, which harkens back to the novels written during the period she covers, but her take on her characters is startlingly modern. Annie’s love for her son has something vaguely incestuous about it, enough for her to keep other men at bay. Gabriel, though upright and moral, has a hard side. He never quite warms to the mixed-race child his sister is forced to adopt to save what little reputation belongs to the child’s white mother. Jonathan Ridley is probably the most complex and sad of the characters. Though he’s always cared for Gabriel, he is, in the end, a monster. Still, the reader feels that his position in a society as warped and inhumane as the Southern slavocracy has made him so.

The book ends not with tragedy, exactly, but an act of such plain bad luck that it’s a perverse sort of triumph. What happens to the Coatses doesn’t happen because they’re black, and the victims of evil white agency, but because they’re human. Clarke celebrates that humanity in all its flawed beauty.

Arlene McKanic writes from South Carolina.

One of the lesser-known horrors of war is the way it can pervert human relationships and loyalties, whether between parents and children, teachers and students, or friends. In Tan Twan Eng’s amazing debut novel, which was long-listed for the 2007 Man Booker Prize, we’re presented with societies whose sense of loyalty, duty and honor are already intense, and easily twisted by the depravities of World War II.

The protagonist of The Gift of Rain is Philip Hutton, the youngest child of a British planter and his young Chinese wife, who, like Eng, was born and raised in Penang, off the coast of Malaysia, then called Malaya. The story is told inretrospect when Philip is an old man, and his memories of his beloved martial arts teacher Hayato Endo have been revived by the arrival of an equally elderly lady who also once loved Endo-san, though chastely.

Because he is half Chinese and his half-siblings are fully British, the Philip we encounter as a boy is something of a loner. Then, when he’s 16, just before the start of the war, he meets a Japanese man on the beach who asks to borrow his boat. Philip not only loans the boat but becomes Endo-san’s pupil, though the relationship is disapproved of by Philip’s family and community; even before the war the Japanese aren’t trusted in Malaya. The effect pupil and teacher have on each other, and their societies, is incalculable, both catastrophic and redemptive by turns. Indeed, sometimes catastrophe and redemption are so intertwined that they can’t be untangled.

Eng’s writing is beautiful and sensuous, whether he describes a temple full of slithering snakes, the smells of cooking food or the light of hundreds of fireflies caught in mosquito netting. Interestingly, The Gift of Rain also shares many of the qualities of a boy’s adventure story. The most intense relationships are between men, there’s no sex and no swearing and there’s even a scene involving the threat of torture and a ticking time bomb that could have been plucked out of “24.” But these are in no way flaws. The Gift of Rain is a splendidly written tale about the consequences of war and friendship.

Arlene McKanic writes from Jamaica, New York.

Erin McGraw has made her mark with short stories peopled by quirky yet thoroughly believable characters caught up in the vagaries of familial relationships. In The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard, her second novel, McGraw has taken the skeleton of her own grandmother’s story and turned it into a frank and engaging depiction of one young woman’s attempt to reinvent herself.

At 17, Nell Plat is immersed on a Kansas farm, married to Jack, a dull, thoughtless mama’s boy who is disdainful of Nell’s lack of culinary skills and unappreciative of her increasing renown as a seamstress. Nell is completely unprepared for motherhood, and her first child, Lucille, leaves her mired in depression. As Nell sews fashionable dresses for the town’s upper crust, she begins to imagine another life – “where no baby cried and no wind blew.” After the birth of her second daughter, Amelia, Jack becomes scornful of her mothering; when he sells her sewing machine out from under her, Nell is gone. She takes the dollars she has painstakingly socked away, leaves Jack and the girls to his mother’s care, and heads to Los Angeles, her vision of paradise.

Nell works as a “shoppie” in a succession of clothing stores, and spends her nights as Madame Annelle, sewing dresses for the fashion-conscious matrons of Pasadena. Eventually she quits her day job and becomes self-employed, pushing thoughts of her daughters into the background.

McGraw’s research into Hollywood in the ’20s and its burgeoning movie business blends seamlessly with Nell’s saga, as she first sews, then designs, costumes for the stars. She marries George, an oil man, and gives birth to Mary, her first truly wanted daughter. But George is resentful of her career, sarcastically referring to her as “the seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard.” The inevitable reckoning with Nell’s past arrives unexpectedly when Lucille and Amelia suddenly appear. The ways in which Nell copes with the revelation of her past brings McGraw’s enlightening novel full circle, and brings her tribute to her grandmother’s gumption to a hopeful, if bittersweet, conclusion.

Deborah Donovan writes from La Veta, Colorado.

Some writers’ grasps fall far short of their reach. Not Brian Hall’s. In his fearless second novel (after telling the story of Lewis and Clark in I Would Be Extremely Happy in Your Company), he takes a great risk by entering the mind of the tragic and irascible Robert Frost – and the reviewer’s oft-used term tour de force has never been more applicable. This book is a remarkable achievement.

Fall of Frost is not a breezy read, nor is it a salacious “tell all” list of lovers and licentious behavior. What Hall has managed to achieve is a serious, but highly readable, piece of detective work into the mind, spirit and work of one of America’s most recognized poets. After reading Fall of Frost, you’ll wonder how the poet ever managed to put one foot in front of the other, so tragic and tortured was his life. Robert Frost lost his own father at the age of 11 and his only sister was institutionalized. Frost went on to bury his wife Elinor and only one of his five children survived him.

Hall opens the book toward the end of Frost’s life, in Moscow, 1962. Frost is there to meet Khrushchev and make life miserable for anyone not helping that to happen. His story is told in short chapters that move through different stages in the poet’s life with just the turn of a page. What happens in between is Hall’s intimate interpretation of a fallible man, quick to anger, and quicker to recognize his own shortcomings.

Hall delves deeply into Frost’s poetry as well, and yet we never feel lost in a scrum of didactic paragraphs – one of Hall’s great achievements is that the novel never seems like a performance, though in reality it is a brilliant one. Hall’s life of Robert Frost shows us how art can resurrect us from tragedy, how the seemingly insurmountable grief of loss can be placated with a line here or a stanza there.

Michael Lee is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.

Writing with the family stories of her own grandmother’s struggle to raise two girls on a mud-slogged Southern farm reverberating in her memories, debut novelist Hillary Jordan has crafted an unforgettable tale of family loyalties, the spiraling after-effects of war and the unfathomable human behavior generated by racism.

Mudbound is told in six first-person voices, starting with Laura, a city-raised teacher who is beginning to consider herself a spinster when, in 1939, she meets Henry, that “rare and marvelous creature, a forty-one-year-old bachelor.” They marry, and Laura loves their quiet domestic life in Memphis. But Henry has yearned since childhood to farm his own land, and when the opportunity presents itself, he buys a cotton farm in rural Mississippi, dragging Laura and their daughters there in the middle of rainy season. Resenting being dropped, Dorothy-like, in a foreign land – “a dirt yard with a pump in the middle of it . . . a pig wallow, a chicken coop and an outhouse” – Laura names their new home Mudbound. And it is not only lack of running water that Laura has to deal with, it is Pappy, her cantankerous father-in-law who comes to live with them – a “sour, bossy” bigoted misogynist.

At this point it is 1946, and two returning war veterans enter the story: Jamie, Henry’s dashing but emotionally scarred younger brother, and Ronsel, the son of two of Henry’s black tenant farmers. Jordan perceptively sets the stage for the novel’s seemingly predetermined denouement by giving each of these characters a voice.

Ronsel seethes with resentment that his black comrades who gave their lives in the war are just “dead niggers” in white Mississippi’s eyes. Jamie is a vulnerable soul who befriends Ronsel, opening himself to the town’s prejudice-fueled rage.

Jordan’s debut novel has been given the Bellwether Prize – an award founded by Barbara Kingsolver to recognize literature of social change. Mudbound fits that description to a tee – and leaves the reader anticipating the author’s next endeavor.

Deborah Donovan writes from Cincinnati and La Veta, Colorado.

Readers, meet your narrator: Agnes Shanklin, a plain, unmarried schoolteacher of 40 living in Ohio at the end of World War I. Although she is a spirited woman with a real thirst for knowledge, Agnes is accepting of, even mildly content with, her unremarkable place in life, and she has no reason to think things will change. But then they do. Drastically.

Mary Doria Russell, acclaimed author of such novels as Children of God and The Sparrow, brings us a delightful – and completely fantastical – story in Dreamers of the Day. When Agnes loses all of her living family members in the influenza epidemic and comes into a bit of inheritance money, she decides to realize her lifelong dream of visiting Egypt and the Holy Land. With her dog Rosie in tow, Agnes makes her way to the Middle East, where she will be far more than a mere tourist.

As rich in history as it is in character development, Dreamers of the Day gives its readers a backstage look at the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference and its players, whom Agnes finds herself surrounded by during her stay at the Semiramis Hotel, the site of the conference. Before she knows it, this small-town schoolteacher is mingling with the likes of T. E. Lawrence, Winston Churchill, Percy Cox and Gertrude Bell as they hammer out plans to transform the Arab world. Not only does Agnes get a glimpse of history in the making, she also gets her first real taste of romance – something she assumed she would never experience – as she is courted by German spy Karl Weilbacher.

Russell perfectly captures the political and social milieus of the 1920s, driving home how important it is to consider history when dealing with present-day issues. As Agnes says at the book’s opening: "My little story has become your history. You won’t really understand your times until you understand mine." The fact that Agnes is telling her story after she has – yes – already died does not come across as a literary conceit but as perfectly fitting for this perfectly enchanting tale.

Rebecca Stropoli writes from Brooklyn.

Karl Iagnemma was declared an innovative voice in American literature when his award-winning collection of short stories, On the Nature of Human Interaction, was published in 2004. His spellbinding first novel, The Expeditions, is certain to draw similar acclaim for the engineer-turned-author, who merges science and fiction in surprising ways.

Sixteen-year-old Elisha Stone loves nothing more than the secret beauty of nature, and in the summer of 1844 he is about to begin a transformational journey into the untamed wilderness of northern Michigan. Having run away from his home in Newell, Massachusetts, Elisha has worked his way across the country to Detroit. Now the sensitive and artistic young man has landed himself what he believes will be a dream job with an eclectic expeditionary team that will include Mr. Silas A. Brush, an entrepreneurial though duplicitous surveyor; professor George Tiffin, an agenda-driven and relentless anthropologist; and Susette Morel, a singularly beautiful but mysterious half-breed Chippewa guide. Before leaving on his demanding journey into unexplored Indian country, Elisha writes a poignant letter to his mother that will forever transform more than one life.

When Elisha’s estranged father, the spiritually and emotionally conflicted Rev. William Edward Stone, receives the letter, he understands suddenly that he must leave Newell and go to his son, to tell the boy about his mother’s death. After three years of knowing absolutely nothing about his son’s whereabouts, the acutely ill Reverend finally has a clue as to where his son might be, and so hoping and praying for reconciliation and forgiveness he begins his own harrowing expedition westward to Michigan and northward into the primitive wilderness.

Iagnemma’s debut novel is provocative, elegiac and highly recommended. The Expeditions is something of a Transcendentalist Bildungsroman: The characters must navigate through hazards and obstacles real and imagined in a quest for truth. At the end of their pilgrimage each person will discover that the natural world might be the one place other than deep within the self where a person can begin finding answers to life’s most perplexing mysteries. Tim Davis writes from Alabama.