A single bottle rocket sends flaming flickers of white light into the air. Soon after, a dotted line of fire travels silently and slowly to a great height, where, with a heart-thumping blast, it explodes into brilliance. Firefly-like bursts fall gracefully to the ground while another stream makes its way north to awe spectators with its beauty. A fireworks display may begin unassumingly, but as it builds momentum toward the grand finale, the oohs and aahs ensue. The Book of Fires, the debut novel by British author Jane Borodale, follows a similar pattern: Expositional descriptions build the framework for a layered narrative that moves toward a striking finish.

Born in the English countryside, Agnes Trussel is a young woman who finds herself unexpectedly pregnant at 17. Fleeing the ignominy of her situation to seek refuge on the unfamiliar streets of mid-18th-century London, she finds an unlikely haven in the home of a widowed pyrotechnist, John Blacklock. Agnes soon falls into an improbable career as his assistant, finding her quick and nimble hands adept to the task of helping Mr. Blacklock with his trade. He, too, is taken with her aptitude for the work, entrusting her with more and more responsibility in the shop. Immersed in the science and production of fireworks, she encourages his quest to discover how to add vibrancy to his colorless pyrotechnics.

All the while, Agnes keeps her growing secret under wraps. Her appetite for learning, coupled with the shame associated with her unwed pregnancy, fuels her crazed search for a solution to her seemingly impossible lot. The hope of a new life begins to illuminate what was once dismal.

The Book of Fires is a quietly beautiful novel. Borodale’s elegant use of language and inventive storytelling captures the tale of a young woman smoldering with desire for a life painted with vivid colors.

Cory Bordonaro is a freelance writer, crafter and barista in Birmingham, Alabama.

With 40 books behind him, the 65-year-old British-born author Bernard Cornwell is at the top of his game. But interestingly, his profession came as a sort of happy accident. As a young man, Cornwell married an American and moved to New Jersey. When he was unable to get a green card, he decided to try his hand at writing. The rest, as they say, is history.

The Burning Land is the fifth volume in Cornwell’s Saxon Tales series about the battle for supremacy between the Saxons and the Danes in ninth-century Britain. Uhtred of Bebbanburg, a fictional character loosely based on a Cornwell Saxon ancestor, is the star of Cornwell’s story and the battles fought to unify Britain under Alfred the Great. The book is written in Uhtred’s voice as he looks back on an exciting life that, in his opinion, has not been well-documented.

Historically, Cornwell’s major contribution is to tell the story of Ethelflaed, an actual heroine forgotten by most scholars. She interacts with Uhtred in the fictional sense, but figured prominently in the history of the Danes’ ongoing struggle with Britain. Yet it must be said that the few other women in the story are portrayed with a tinge of sexism, as is the case with the fictional Skade, a woman of exceptional beauty who is captured by Uhtred and stripped naked with a rope around her neck to entice her Danish lover, Harald Bloodhair, into battle.

Cornwell is adept at enveloping his fictional characters in British history. His use of geography, instruments of battle, strategy and ancient vocabulary is faultless. In Cornwell’s hands, Uhtred appears as a highly charismatic, heroic figure who accomplishes great things with his superior physical abilities and sheer force of will. Even if you haven’t read the previous books in Cornwell’s popular series, The Burning Land stands on its own two feet; no knowledge of early British history or of his earlier Saxon volumes is necessary for a reader to enjoy his dexterous approach to historical fiction.

Dennis Lythgoe is a writer who has lived in Boston and Salt Lake City.

History comes to life in The Postmistress, a novel that takes readers back to the early 1940s, when the war raging in Europe showed no end in sight and America was on the brink of joining the fray. Through the eyes of three very different women, author Sarah Blake traces America’s journey from willful ignorance of the fight overseas to eventual understanding.

Emma is a young newlywed in Franklin, Massachusetts, searching for security and the sense of family she has always been missing. For her, the war becomes all too real when a local tragedy prompts her husband, the town doctor, to go abroad in order to provide medical aid to the wounded and the dying. Each day she listens to dispatches on the radio from Frankie—a young reporter in Britain, desperate to give her fellow Americans a sense of the tragedy and horror that she witnesses daily—and brings a letter for her husband to Iris, the local postmistress. Ironically, it is the ravages of war, rending countries and families apart, that ultimately join Frankie’s story with those of Emma and Iris, each woman sharing a part of the others’ sorrows and losses, and each lessening the burden of the horrible truths they all carry.

It is with graceful tenderness that Blake provides readers with this heartbreaking examination of the devastation of war. Her tenure as a poet serves her well, with each sentence painstakingly crafted, her prose packing an impressive emotional punch that belies its unassuming and gentle tone. Much as the spirited Frankie seeks to do throughout the novel, Blake manages to give a face to a war in which so many were lost, all the while seeking to restore order and sense to a world mired by devastation and sorrow that defy easy explanation. More than just a novel about love and loss, The Postmistress is an expansive epic about the stories we tell and the secrets we guard—all as we search for the truth, sometimes blindly, sometimes bravely. This is a thoughtful novel, quiet in its catharsis, and best read with a box of tissues on hand.

Stephenie Harrison writes from Nashville.

RELATED CONTENT
Read an interview with Sarah Blake about The Postmistress.

If you’re making lists of classic science fiction, horror, fantasy, mystery and historical fiction, works by Ray Bradbury and Dan Simmons must appear on every one. Only these two authors have had the skill and the nerve to excel in every one of these genres. But there is more to the Bradbury-Simmons connection than mere range. What binds them together most poignantly is their fierce love and explicit regard for the literary tradition. For instance, Charles Dickens often haunts Bradbury’s works. Now it is Simmons’ turn to raise the ghost of the creator of Ebenezer Scrooge, Oliver Twist and, of course, Edwin Drood.

In Drood, Dickens is ironically overshadowed by his close friend and collaborator Wilkie Collins, the brilliant but lesser-known mystery novelist. Collins narrates a detailed, “revisionist” account of Dickens’ final years after his near-fatal railway accident in 1865. Through the voice of Dickens’ jealous friend, Simmons manages to fuse all his genres, and then some. Drood is at once an intimate view of the amours of two beloved Victorian writers, an extensive and meticulously researched piece of English historical fiction, a fantasy of doppelgangers and Egyptian rites, a quaint exercise in 19th-century science fiction (including mesmeric trances and the technology of London sewage), a dark and bloody detective story, a novel of purest horror (with brain-eating beetles and walking Undead), and the latest in a long line of impossible efforts to finish Dickens’ last, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

Simmons’ splendid pastiche is all the more engaging because we can never really know why Dickens was inspired to make such a radical departure in his final work, let alone how he would have completed it had he lived.  Drood will shock and delight readers as a plausible Amadeus fable: the mediocre artist (Collins/Salieri) spirals into a murderous rage against his nemesis, the Inimitable Genius (Dickens/Mozart), whose greatness only he is close enough to fully understand and articulate. There’s only one flaw in the Amadeus model, and it’s a decisive one: in real life, both Salieri and Collins produced genuinely beautiful work. Simmons’ self-evident hope for his wildly macabre Drood is that it will lead a new flock of readers to Collins’ wonderful Woman in White and Moonstone.

Michael Alec Rose is a composer and Vanderbilt University music professor who owes his lifelong love of literature to Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins.

Jackson Taylor weaves an affecting—if at times disturbing—and ultimately hopeful tale while tackling issues of gender, class, family and race in his first novel, The Blue Orchard, based upon the remarkable life of his grandmother, Verna Krone. In 1954, Verna, a white nurse, and Charles Crampton, an African-American physician, were arrested in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for performing scandalous “illegal operations”; in Taylor’s hands, this is the pivotal point from which Verna looks back on her life.

Born into poverty in rural Pennsylvania, Verna, a bright student, is pulled out of school in the 1920s to support the family. Thus begins her journey from home to home and job to job, endlessly searching for some control over her life. During her term as a hired farm girl, her boss takes advantage of her, leaving her pregnant at 14, but under the guidance of a local midwife, her “trouble” is taken care of.

Pregnancy, parenting and children’s fates are major themes in The Blue Orchard, as Verna later becomes a mother, leaves her newborn son to be raised by her own unwilling mother, marries a man who has abandoned his children and becomes the vigilant caregiver for thousands of women of all ages, incomes and situations, who surreptitiously stream through her door to recover from abortions performed by Dr. Crampton—an occupation that brings her financial security beyond her wildest dreams but invokes new stresses and fears.

Verna is a flawed but strong woman whose self-examination is uncompromising. Her association with Dr. Crampton, a pillar of Harrisburg’s African-American community whose ties to the Harvey Taylor political machine build him up but tragically leave him a broken man, exposes her to dirty politics, deceit, injustice and emergencies that bring out the best and worst in her. Taylor’s unflinching and gracefully written novel brings us face-to-face with ugly national and personal realities, not only helping us to understand our collective history and family dynamics, but also helping to frame the contemporary abortion debate. A moving and important novel, The Blue Orchard is a fine read.

Sheri Bodoh writes from Eldridge, Iowa.

Girl with a Pearl Earring made Tracy Chevalier a household name in the historical fiction world. And now, with the dazzling Remarkable Creatures, Chevalier gives us another intriguing celebration of women and friendship.

Elizabeth Philpot, a middle-class spinster, has just moved to Lyme Regis, a town on the southern coast of England, with her sisters. She falls in love with scouring the beaches for fossils, and meets a young girl and fellow fossil-hunter, Mary Anning. As Mary grows up and the two follow their shared passion, they find themselves making discoveries that cause a stir in the scientific community and hold implications for science and religion that they could never have foreseen.

The novel weaves together many fascinating elements, not the least of which are the fossils themselves. Chevalier captures their beauty and mystery perfectly and allows readers to feel her subjects’ obsession with them. As Mary and Elizabeth diligently and excitedly uncover these messages from another era, the reader sees how little was initially known about fossils and how they affected the way we view the world.

Of course, the fossils are not the only stars of the novel—Mary and Elizabeth, based on real historical figures, will fascinate readers as well. At age 11, the real-life Mary Anning discovered the first ichthyosaurus skeleton ever found. Despite little education and even smaller means, she somehow managed to engage middle-class men of science in her pursuit of fossils and helped pave the way for Darwin’s evolutionary theory. Less is known about the real Elizabeth Philpot, only that she was an avid collector of fossil fish—one species is even named after her—and, given their differences in age and class, a somewhat unlikely friend of Mary’s. But Chevalier brings her to life. Both women will enthrall readers with their aspirations, fears and obstacles and, above all, their admirable determination.

The story unfolds gracefully and will keep you eagerly turning pages until the novel’s close. There’s humor, romance and a down-to-earth kind of suspense. But most of all, there are the believable and well-crafted personal triumphs and tragedies of two women who defied convention and changed their corner of the world. Indeed, Mary and Elizabeth are remarkable creatures.

Jessica Inman writes and edits in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

In Michael Crichton’s posthumously published Pirate Latitudes, the grog is strong, the wenches are saucy, the blood is spilled by the bucket and the cutthroats do their slicing with fiendish regularity. The hero of this fast-paced novel is Charles Hunter, a Harvard-educated swashbuckler who is a privateer captain of some renown. He does not like to be called a pirate—a point he makes by nearly drowning a man in a plate of gravy—but in Jamaica’s Port Royal in 1665, that distinction is a fine one.

Port Royal is a city of riches that is little more than a den of thieves. It also is Great Britain’s precarious toehold in a Caribbean dominated by Spain. Hunter, like other privateers in the sometime employ of the British, earns his living by raiding Spanish merchant ships. Now a storm has separated a Spanish galleon holding untold riches from its escorts, and Captain Hunter has his eye on the prize. With the blessing of Port Royal’s British governor, Sir James Almont, Hunter and his picaresque crew sail off to capture the treasure.

While the galleon El Trinidad is nearby, it rests in a harbor protected by an impregnable fortress. The Spanish commander of the harbor at Matanceros is the ruthless Cazalla, who tortured and murdered Hunter’s brother. To steal away with the galleon, Hunter must first figure out a way to silence the cannons of Matanceros without meeting the same fate as his brother.

An assistant discovered this completed manuscript in Crichton’s computer after the best-selling novelist’s death in 2008. Crichton appears to have done a good deal of nautical and political research for his old-fashioned adventure yarn. With its numerous battles, hurricanes and even a Kraken-like monster that rises from the depths to block Hunter’s path home, it’s rather different from the author’s normal fare (Jurassic Park, The Great Train Robbery, The Andromeda Strain). But action on the high seas is always fun, especially guided by the talented—and gone-too-soon—Michael Crichton.

Ian Schwartz writes from San Diego.

Historical novels, according to author John Smolens, are “a unique amalgam of fact and fiction, conjecture and illusion,” and that’s certainly what he gives us in his sixth novel, The Anarchist. The titular figure, Leon Czolgosz, was a disgruntled Polish American from Cleveland, only in his 20s when he took on the cause of anarchy in America, inspired by the work of Emma Goldman and other turn-of-the-20th-century ideological rabble-rousers who fomented revolution against the political and industrial status quo, in particular in northern midwestern cities like Chicago.

Czolgosz went down in history as the assassin of President William McKinley, and that event is the main focus of Smolens’ dogged piece of fiction, which early on traces the movements of both men until leading up to their fateful encounter at the Pan-American Exhibition in Buffalo in September 1901. Smolens’ third-person account is driven by the surrounding activities of federal agents and a local lawman, immersed in the tawdry bordellos and gruff canal life of multiethnic Buffalo, striving to keep tabs on underground political activities and, at the story’s outset, investigating the grotesque dockside murder of a prostitute. The historical details of  McKinley’s demise—he lived on for more than a week after his shooting, medical doctors somewhat confused about how to treat his fatal wound—are joined alternatingly with the account of Czolgosz’s finals days and his rather swift prosecution and execution, the latter taking place a mere six weeks after the crime. Smolens focuses the wind-up and climax of his book on the exploits of the feds—along with a key civilian informant, Moses Hyde—who become embroiled in an attempt by Czolgosz sympathizers to trade hostages for the assassin’s release.

Only one perceived hiccup in this well-researched historical novel: Smolens has the crowd singing “God Bless America” during one of McKinley’s public appearances; that song wasn’t written by Irving Berlin until 1918, and didn’t spread to the American consciousness at large until more than two decades after that. Nevertheless, The Anarchist is a well-rendered, credible mixing of documented events with imaginative projection into the tenor of a teeming American era, when the nation was embroiled in vaguely imperialistic activities abroad, the business world was booming and immigration was at its peak.

Martin Brady writes from Nashville.
 

Jeff Shaara, one of the grand masters of military fiction, returns with the final novel of his acclaimed WWII trilogy. No Less than Victory concludes the epic tale of the war in Europe from the Battle of the Bulge through the German surrender.

Shaara’s plump third installment illuminates the final six months of the war as told by a handful of men on both sides. The battles and timeline themselves are painstakingly accurate. As Shaara himself says, the only reason he is forced to call his work fiction is because he must use dialogue. And he uses it well. While battles may be enough for military buffs, it’s the dialogue and thoughts of Shaara’s characters that make the book a narrative success. On the American side, the story is mainly told by a trio of soldiers, two of whom you may have heard of: Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower and Gen. George Patton.

Eisenhower comes across as wholly human and singularly humane. You’ll feel his exasperation when dealing with British Gen. Montgomery—whom Shaara absolutely skewers—and have a lump in your throat as Ike gets his first glimpse of a German concentration camp. Patton does not entirely shed the famous portrayal by George C. Scott, but we do get a glimpse beneath the bravado.

No story of WWII is complete without GIs. Their story is told by Private Benson, a raw recruit unlucky enough to arrive just before the Bulge. Benson is scared and confused, but draws courage from his fearless buddy Mitchell, whose hatred of the Germans grows along with his love of war.

The Germans are mostly represented by Gen. Karl Rudolf Gerd von Rundstedt, who knows by the winter of 1944 that he is merely following Hitler into the abyss, but has little choice but to continue. Curiously, Shaara is gentler with much of the German military hierarchy than he is with the English. His empathy is fitting—on the front lines, where Shaara’s writing is limpid and concise, politics do not exist, only soldiers.

Ian Schwartz writes from San Diego.