The years before the Revolutionary War were a tumultuous and fascinating time, especially in the larger cities and towns of what was to become the United States of America. In Sally Gunning’s latest novel, The Rebellion of Jane Clarke, this ferment is seen through the eyes of Jane Clarke, a young woman from Satucket, a place of routine and petty rivalries that sometimes turn ugly; in the latest kerfluffle, her father, a miller, is suspected of cutting the ears off a rival’s horse. And Mr. Clarke is not only difficult with his rivals, he’s difficult with his own family. His young wife, the latest in a string of wives, is overburdened and neurasthenic. He barely notices his younger children and exiles Jane, his beloved eldest daughter, because she refuses to marry a man he wants her to marry. He sends her to attend a dotty, elderly aunt in Boston, but instead of the experience breaking her will, Jane blossoms.

The strong will that inspires both love and exasperation in her father helps Jane hone her political and moral conscience. Her training as a nurse in a time of poxes, carbuncles and “gangrenous sore throats” has already made her tough. She rejects the knee-jerk hatred the Bostonians have for the occupying British soldiers. She witnesses what will be known as the Boston massacre and during its particpants’ lengthy trial (which lasted more than a day, a shocking rarity back then) tells the truth of what she saw, a singularly brave act. She weathers a betrayal and grows confident enough to decide what sort of man she will, or will not, marry. She just might even go back to Satucket and stand up to her father.

Gunning fills her novel with believable and complex characters, some of whom are historical figures. She gives us John Adams, passionate, principled and even tenderhearted, and his prickly cousin Sam. We see Paul Revere’s propagandistic engraving of the massacre, and of course, the massacre itself, in its confused rage, musket smoke and splashes of red blood on white snow. Gunning is also good with the particulars of 18th-century colonial life, with drafty keeping rooms and parlors, candles made of grease, guests served cider or beer in place of water that’s probably too dirty to drink. The dialogue can be formal without being too flowery. Best of all, she’s created an intriguing and admirable witness to history in Jane Clarke.
 

The title character in Robin Oliveira’s Civil War novel My Name is Mary Sutter is an accomplished midwife with aspirations to be a surgeon, thwarted at every chance by men who discourage her goals. But when the soldiers are wounded at a rate faster than hands can set a tourniquet, Mary’s desire to be a surgeon becomes a necessity, and she leaves her family in Albany to lend a hand in Washington, D.C.

Oliveira’s debut novel is magnificent historical fiction. She skillfully advances the plot with Mary’s experiences—the losses of an unrequited love and family members, the doubts about continuing on her medical path—while making each character and his or her life during the war feel intrinsic to the storyline, from Mary’s twin sister to President Abraham Lincoln.

Oliveira’s characters are hushed and contemplative, yet strong and enduring. The novel is well-researched, particularly the standards for medical practice during the Civil War, and Oliveira doesn’t skimp on studied details. Instead, My Name is Mary Sutter is beaten, bloodied and sorrowful, and at times it feels as though this story will end without Mary’s shining achievement. But this isn’t simply a book about a girl who wants to be someone else; it’s the story of a woman who must summon all her strength and skill to succeed. Her skirts are weighted down by blood and a bone saw is placed into her hand while piles of limbs surround the makeshift operating table. The war requires that Mary be a surgeon, and she rises to the challenge.

It would be easy to call this novel gritty, because at times the streets are slicked by filthy snow and the battlefields scattered with bloody, fly-covered bodies. Still, Mary glows; despite her tired eyes and dirty clothes, she is floodlit from the inside with a passion to mend.

To say that Parrot and Olivier in America, Peter Carey’s newest novel, is prodigiously researched is perhaps to miss the point. For while Carey is known for his at once wry and reverent take on historical fiction, and while his scrupulous study and vast knowledge of the 19th century is apparent on every page, it is rather the Booker Prize winner’s thoroughly unquantifiable ability to inhabit his setting that so distinguishes him as a writer.

Based on the life of Alexis de Tocqueville, Parrot and Olivier in America tells the story of Olivier-Jean-Baptist de Clarel de Barfleur, a lovably priggish French noble who, after narrowly escaping the Revolution’s wrath, is shipped off to America under the pretext of studying the New World’s progressive prison system. Also sent, as Olivier’s servant and spy, is an Englishman known simply as Parrot—the son of a printer-turned-forger and survivor of an Australian penal colony. Almost immediately the two clash, and each feels himself quite unfortunate to be in the company of the other. Try as they might, the two foils just cannot seem to shake each other, and what begins as animosity gradually grows into a loving and harmonious camaraderie.

Alternating between Olivier and Parrot’s distinct viewpoints and voices, Carey takes readers on a picaresque and galloping romp through bygone times with delightfully antiquated dialogue and prose. The plot itself is too wonderfully convoluted to recount here, but suffice it to say there is an one-armed Marquis, a hysterical artist mistress and her dour mother and no shortage of colorful schemers along the way. The electricity and pace is exhilarating, rather than exhausting, and ultimately Carey’s enthusiasm and energy become our own.

As much as Parrot and Olivier in America is a wickedly brilliant novel of events, it is also a tender paean to American democracy. After all, if insurmountable class is allegedly what separates our heroes to begin with, it is their eventual shared belief in egalitarianism that allows them the greatest gift Carey has to offer: friendship.

Louisa May Alcott became famous for her well-loved classic, Little Women, but her success as an author did not happen overnight. The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott, a bittersweet, stirring debut novel byKelly O’Connor McNees, explores the possibility that Alcott, who wrote so passionately about romantic relationships, did in fact have an affair of her own and that her success as a novelist came at a high price.

The novel was sparked by a quote from Julian Hawthorne, the son of Nathaniel Hawthorne and neighbor of the Alcotts, who speculated that Alcott could not have written so compellingly about romantic love in her novels had she not experienced it herself. “Did she ever have a love affair?” Hawthorne asked. “We never knew. Yet how could a nature so imaginative, romantic and passionate escape it?” McNees speculates that Alcott burned many of her letters not only to protect her privacy, but to “erase all traces” of her love affair.

Deftly blending fact and fiction, McNees imagines an affair that could have taken place during the summer Alcott and her family spent in Wolcott, New Hampshire in 1855—one that would have threatened Alcott’s writing career and perhaps inspired the story of Jo and Laurie in Little Women.

Alcott’s father’s transcendentalist friends, Emerson and Thoreau, influenced her childhood, but his philosophical beliefs brought the family to the brink of financial ruin—motivating Alcott to earn a living as a writer and be free from her family’s financial struggles.

Alcott is initially unmoved by Joseph Singer, her fictional lover who owns a dry goods store in town, until he gives her a copy of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Swept up in a passionate love affair once he makes his feelings clear, she discovers a devastating truth that may prevent the lovers from marrying. Soon after, Alcott makes a difficult choice that will forever change the course of the lovers’ lives.

The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott reverberates from a time when women’s options were few. Alcott’s yearning to be a writer and an independent woman made her an anomaly in her day, when the prospect of marriage to a man of means was considered de rigeur. Even if readers have never read Little Women, they will enjoy this historical novel—a compelling, heart-wrenching story about the difficult choices women face. It resonates with themes that are as timely today as they were in Alcott’s day.

RELATED CONTENT
Read our interview with Kelly O'Connor McNees about The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott

Read our review of Harriet Reisen's Louisa May Alcott biography

Watch the trailer for the novel

A clever insert came with my copy of Ellen Horan’s novel. It’s a folded piece of blue notepaper, with a written request for legal representation. A respected dentist, Dr. Burdell, has been gruesomely murdered in his Manhattan office. The suspected murderess is his lodger, the widowed Mrs. Emma Cunningham, the lady who penned the note.

From here this thrilling book becomes not only a murder mystery, but a Wharton-esque examination of the mores and customs of antebellum New York society. The press coverage of the crime is lurid, with Emma all but found guilty in the court of public opinion. Emma may be a good woman, but she’s not a particularly nice one (she comes across as a tougher and coarser Lily Bart). And if she is a gold digger, then a gold digger was what a widow with two daughters and dwindling finances had to be in that time and place—since a lady of her social class could not go to work. Horan is brilliant at showing just how vulnerable such a woman was to male predation.

The other characters are just as memorable. There’s Henry Clinton, the idealistic lawyer who comes to Emma’s defense, and his loving wife, Elisabeth. There’s Sam, Burdell’s African-American coachman, who goes on the run after the murder. And there’s Burdell himself, who is, frankly, a miscreant, his real character masked and excused by his social standing. Horan’s portrait of Manhattan is also remarkable; she reminds us that in 1857 the island was still half wild, the vulgar mansions of the newly rich just blocks away from forests, farmland and a river teeming with fish and oyster beds.

Horan wraps up her story with an ending that one doesn’t see coming, but is perfectly, tragically right. Rich with historical detail, 31 Bond Street is one of the best debut novels in a long while.

Arlene McKanic writes from Jamaica, New York.

RELATED CONTENT

Read a behind-the-book essay about Ellen Horan's inspiration for 31 Bond Street.

Imagine what it would feel like to travel with a wagon train of pioneers, joining the great march to America’s western frontier in 1846. Why would you take such a risk, and how would you cope if the worst happened? Author Gabrielle Burton explores these questions and others in her richly imagined, harrowing tale of death—and survival.

Impatient With Desire, a fictional account of the travails of the very real Donner Party, is framed as a diary kept by Tamsen Donner. Donner was one of 87 actual pioneers who, against the advice of several who had gone before, formed a party of nine wagons that left a much larger wagon train moving west, and struck out on what they had been told was a shortcut to reaching California.

They encountered rivers too swollen to be forged, mud-filled tracks that destroyed their wagons, a desert wasteland, and, at last, terrible snows that imprisoned the party in the Sierras for nearly four months, where nearly half of them perished from cold or starvation.

The story of the historical Donner Party became riveting news after it was learned that in order to survive, some of the party had resorted to eating the flesh of others in their party who had already succumbed. But in this novel, Burton departs from the merely sensational, and explores the fate of the party from a different perspective—that of a woman who, along with her husband, is following a dream shared by thousands at that time: a wanderlust and desire to leave familiar surroundings behind and move on to the edges of what was then an unknown wilderness. Tamsen’s diary captures the pull of this great adventure, in all its combined glory and folly, heady successes and tragic turns.

As her family huddles, close to starvation in the snowbound Sierras, Tamsen describes to her children, who cannot really remember them, the cherry orchards, apple trees and gentle spring breezes in the Illinois town they’ve left behind. The children ask, “Why did we leave?” To this, their parents have no answer, though they have ample time to revisit their decision again and again. Earlier, when given a choice, Tamsen admits they “could not bear to go back.”

Near the end of the diary, Tamsen and her husband sit together, looking out at the spectacular wilderness stretching before them. Tamsen, who has not entirely lost her spirit, reflects, “I knew that behind us lay the shadowed detritus of five months of survival, but our view was spectacular and uplifting.”

Barbara Clark writes from West Yarmouth, Massachusetts.

Sadie Jones returns to the past in her new novel Small Wars, a psychologically probing story about a British military family posted to Cyprus in the 1950s. Like her first award-winning novel The Outcast, which explored the lives of two young people struggling to break free from the expectations and conformity of village life, the families in Small Wars are defined by the rigid expectations and rules, this time those of the military. But here, Jones takes things to a deeper level, showing how the principles of war affect an honorable soldier, husband and father. The political circumstances, rife with terrorism and torture, also mirror the current geopolitical situation in a striking parallel.

The Trehernes are a military family—husband Hal is the last in a long line of army men and his wife Clara fully understands what is expected of her as a military wife. They live with their two small children on the army base in Episkopi, Cyprus during the Emergency that pitted Cypriots who wanted to unite with Greece against the occupying British government. The bombings, shootings, and bloody demonstrations begin to take a toll on Hal. His sense of right and wrong is severely tested, especially after witnessing the torture of a young Cypriot. When in a moment of despair he takes out his rage on Clara, their relationship beings to disintegrate. Things worsen as terrorist actions increase and, as a safety measure, Clara and her daughters move off base to Cyprus’ capital, Nicosia. But violence follows them there as well, leading to an unexpected personal crisis for both husband and wife.

Though Clara quickly gains our sympathy, Small Wars is really Hal’s story. An experienced, dedicated soldier proud to serve his country, he moves from unquestioning obedience to an almost grudging defiance and it is a painful journey to follow. Without the military to structure his life and his thoughts, he is adrift, questioning everything that has made him the person he is. A young novelist writing about something that happened long before her lifetime, Jones shows remarkable empathy for this man whose core is badly shaken by the brutality of this ‘small war’ and so will the reader.