Colum McCann’s previous novels have vividly demonstrated his ability to delve into the obscure corners of history and emerge with compelling and memorable characters. In Dancer it was Rudolf Nureyev; in This Side of Brightness it was the early 20th- century subway workers who risked their lives tunneling under New York City.

The central character in his latest novel is Zoli, an exotic singer and poet steeped in her ancient Gypsy traditions. Most of the novel is told in Zoli’s words, beginning with her indelible memories of her family being killed by fascist Hlinka guards when she was 6, their carts driven out onto cracking lake ice.

Now a famous singer among her own people, Zoli begins to write poetry, but keeps her poems hidden, for fear of persecution. When Czechoslovakia is liberated by the Russians at war’s end, Zoli is in her early 20s, and is becoming a symbol of the country’s movement toward socialism.

At this point McCann introduces the character of Stephen Swann, a half-Slovak Marxist and publisher who considers Zoli the perfect proletarian poet. Swann and Zoli meet and eventually fall in love, but their relationship seems doomed, enmeshed as it is with the political upheaval swirling around them. After Swann publishes her poems against her will, Zoli is deemed a traitor by her people and banished, sentenced to Pollution for Life. McCann’s story is loosely based on a real Gypsy poet, Papsuza, who was exiled by her people when her poems were published. He has enriched that story with insightful and evocative prose, and in Zoli has created a vibrant character who is able to maintain her identity and proud heritage, even when abandoned by those she loves. Deborah Donovan writes from Cincinnati and La Veta, Colorado.

Lauren Willig’s third installment in her Pink Carnation Series (after The Secret History of the Pink Carnation and The Masque of the Black Tulip) is another entertaining blend of chick lit and historical fiction. The Deception of the Emerald Ring explores the world of espionage and intrigue in 1803 England, when Napoleon supported a group of Irish rebels in their efforts against the British government, and continues the present-day tale of American doctoral candidate Eloise Kelly, who is researching 19th-century British spies. Eloise discovers that the spy known as the Purple Gentian may have been connected to Letty Alsworthy and Geoffrey Pinchingdale-Snipe, and begins researching their lives.

Geoff marries Letty after an elopement gone awry makes it impossible for him to wed her lovely older sister. Initially, Geoff believes he has married the wrong sister, but he soon finds that Letty has hidden depths. When the War Office requests Geoff’s help in Ireland, he leaves his new bride and travels to Dublin to uncover the identities of insurgents supported by Napoleon. But Letty follows him and ends up involved in the dangerous search.

The growing attraction between Geoff and Letty interspersed with Eloise’s own romantic adventures is very real and believable as the tension comes to a boiling point. Though the tone of the novel is decidedly modern, Willig, a Harvard Law School graduate, weaves in plenty of history (the Irish rebellion actually happened, though the floral spies are her own invention). Light and frothy fun, The Deception of the Emerald Ring is a delightful third third act.

Readers of Huckleberry Finn might remember the scene where Jim, the runaway slave, breaks down in tears because he’s worried about the wife and children he’s left behind. The poignant scene forces Huck to acknowledge Jim’s humanity. Now novelist and playwright Nancy Rawles has written a slender but wrenching novel about Sadie, the hapless wife Jim was forced to abandon.

My Jim is an “as told to” story narrated by Sadie to her granddaughter, Marianne, who, unlike her grandmother, is literate and able to write the tale down. It’s 1884, and 16-year-old Marianne has received a marriage proposal. The two women sit down to sew a quilt for her from bits and pieces of the people Sadie has loved and lost. There will be scraps from her mother’s apron as well as “That red for your daddy. Red what they calls him. And that yellow dress I wears into the ground. . . . Black for Jonnies eyes. Brown for Jims hat,” Sadie tells her. As they sew, Sadie shares the story of her life.

That story, to be blunt, is ghastly, and Rawles tells it with great power and compassion in authentic slave vernacular. Sadie’s life reminds us that for every Harriet Tubman or Sojourner Truth or Frederick Douglass, there were 10,000 slaves who didn’t rise up and get away, whose lives were ground to powder, and whose only release from bondage came through death or, if they lived long enough, the Civil War. We marvel that Sadie survived with her sanity and that she’s able to give her “first heart” as she puts it, to anyone. Slavery robs her of everyone she loves: her mother, Jim and their children Lisbeth and Jonnie, and several of her children by other men. Only emancipation allows Sadie to live a settled life with the gentle Papa Duban, and even that has its own perils: Marianne’s father is murdered by an early version of the Klan. Yet Sadie survives. “You take that quilt wherever you go,” she tells Marianne. “When you old and wore you think on me and all the others love you.” My Jim is a tale of hope beyond endurance.

No one is more surprised by the success of her first two novels – The Sparrow and Children of God – than Mary Doria Russell. "God knows, writing about Jesuits and space was not a sure thing," Russell exclaims, laughing, during a call to her home in "an unfashionable suburb" of Cleveland where she lives with her husband, a software engineer, and their son, Dan. The family moved there in 1983 when Russell, a paleoanthropologist by training, got a job teaching anatomy at Case Western Reserve University. She became a novelist by accident when she lost her teaching job. "Not only did I not want to be a writer when I grew up, the last time I took an English class was when Sonny and Cher were still married!" she says. "I didn’t know that I’m not supposed to be able to get away with the stuff that I get away with."

The stuff Russell gets away with is a spellbinding, provocative mix of believable characters, compelling plotlines, good – often great – dialogue, and moral philosophy. The Sparrow and its sequel, Children of God, dazzled science fiction fans and general readers alike with the story of Jesuit priest Emilio Sandoz’s catastrophic mission to the planet Rakhat and his return some years later to find the extraterrestrial civilization in turmoil as a result of its contact with humans.

In her new novel, A Thread of Grace, Russell turns her attention and her considerable talents from the future to the past to vividly dramatize the little-known story of how a wide network of Italian priests, nuns, villagers and farmers saved the lives of nearly 43,000 Jews in the final years of World War II.

"That Italy – an ally of Germany, a Fascist country – would have the highest survivor rate of all the countries in occupied Europe was fascinating to me. I felt the desire to understand what went right," Russell says. Researching the book, she spent a great deal of time in Europe talking to aging Jewish survivors and their Italian rescuers. Her sense of obligation to the people she talked to sustained her through the seven long years it took her to complete the book. "I felt such a sense of responsibility to the people who had taken the time to let me into their lives and tell me what happened to them in their youth," she says. "I needed to make sure those stories weren’t forgotten, that I wasn’t the only one to hear them and be moved by them."

Drawing on these true-life stories, her own imagination, her great skill as a storyteller and a compulsion to get it right, Russell fashions a moving and suspenseful novel that also manages to convincingly explore the most challenging moral and ethical questions of our times.

Russell’s story begins on September 8, 1943, the day that Italy’s surrender to the Allies unleashed a flood of Jewish refugees struggling over the Alps from France to safety in Italy. Among these are 14-year-old Claudette Blum and her father Albert, Belgian Jews who have barely managed to stay ahead of the advancing Nazis. Their hopes for safety, however, are quickly dashed as the Nazis occupy Italy and force the Blums into hiding in a rural village whose inhabitants have never before met a Jew. That Claudette eventually survives the war – though emotionally and psychologically scarred – is a bright moment in an otherwise wrenching tale. Others from Russell’s vibrant palette of heroic, kind, likeable characters are not so lucky.

"I was concerned that I was writing a feel-good Holocaust book," Russell says with passion. "I was afraid that in writing about Italy, where 85 percent of the Jews did survive, that it would be another opportunity for people to think that they would have been clever enough or plucky enough or imaginative enough to survive. But all the survivors tell you that it was just blind dumb luck. It wasn’t intelligence. It wasn’t bravery. You just turned left instead of right without knowing you’d made a decision."

Discussing the problem with her 16-year-old son Dan on the drive home from school one day, they decided they would simply flip a coin to determine the characters’ fates. At home, Dan flipped for each character heads he lived; tails she died. "And then it was my problem," Russell says wryly.

The impact of these unexpected outcomes is powerful, casting into high relief the moral questions about World War II or any war that are so important to the emotional force of A Thread of Grace. Russell presents a complex moral universe: her most appealing character, Renzo Leoni, a resourceful, funny, brave Italian Jew whose actions save the lives of many, is consumed by guilt over his participation in the Italian conquest of Ethiopia during which he became a decorated war hero. And Werner Schramm, a Nazi doctor who is responsible, by his own count, for the deaths of 91,867 people, is, quite simply, a very likeable guy.

"Schramm," Russell says, "was remarkably easy to write, and I find that one of the scariest pieces of self-knowledge that this book provided. I understand Schramm in ways that I find really distressing. At different points in my life I would have been far more amenable to the idea of a master race. I can understand how I might have been willing to think that I was extra special. There but for the grace of God go I."

But despite the complex moral picture Russell presents in A Thread of Grace, she expresses unreserved admiration for the Italian peasants who took in and hid the Jewish refugees. "Would I have had the guts to do what they did?" she says. "Not a chance. To do what they did when they took in these Jews – these strangers, these foreigners – would be as though it were September 12, 2001, and a Muslim family knocked on your door and said, the FBI is looking for us but honest to God we are innocent. Can you help us? And you did. If nothing else, I wanted to show how dangerous it was. And how courageous these people really were."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

Last year, Jennifer Haigh impressed readers with her brilliant debut, Mrs. Kimble. With her second novel, Haigh does it again differently, but just as well. Baker Towers focuses on an immigrant family from the company coal town of Bakerton, Pennsylvania. The mines were not named for Bakerton; Bakerton was named for the mines, Haigh writes. This is an important distinction. It explains the order of things. Her characters at first appear to be stereotypes, but soon display their uniqueness. The mother, Rose, is Italian-American and forever cooking pasta and having babies. Yet she had the courage to marry Stanley and become the only Italian wife living on Polish Hill. Even more unexpected is their quiet, studious daughter Joyce’s ardent desire to join the Women’s Air Force.

Stanley’s untimely death in early 1944 leaves Rose a widow with five children. Georgie, the oldest, is serving in the South Pacific; Lucy, the youngest, is a baby on the hip. In between are Dorothy, Joyce and good-looking little Sandy. How the family manages the life they inherit is the story Haigh tells so compellingly, demonstrating how a small town can both smother people and give them comfort. The female characters in Baker Towers prove especially interesting as they meet the challenges of changing mores. Dorothy finds that her true path has little to do with the straight and narrow; Lucy discovers that education and a career can take her away, but will also serve her well if she decides to go back home. The towers in the title describes tall pillars of smoldering coal. They seem a permanent part of the landscape, yet, in the end, Haigh shows that permanence lies not in the mine, but in the impression made on the rich mix of people who grew up in old Bakerton. Anne Morris writes from Austin, Texas.

In the beginning of Abundance, Sena Jeter Naslund’s astonishing, richly imagined novel, 14-year-old Maria Antonia stands naked on an island in the Rhine River, neutral territory between her Austrian homeland and France. Poised to marry the heir to the French throne, the princess must shed every thread of her Austrian existence and be remade into Marie Antoinette, future Queen of France.

It’s a fitting metaphor for a woman who would spend the rest of her life in the prying public eye. Long before Princess Diana was chased by paparazzi, Marie Antoinette gave birth to her first child in front of hundreds of people and was dressed and bathed each day by bickering noblewomen. Tabloid-like pamphlets filled with false allegations of the queen’s scandalous sexual escapades regularly papered the streets of Paris.

Bolstered by meticulous research and delivered in glowing prose, Abundance reminds us why Marie Antoinette remains one of history’s most beguiling, contradictory women. Naslund, the author of the bestseller Ahab’s Wife, digs deep into the queen’s story, exploring her loving yet ultimately unfulfilling marriage to the ineffective King Louis XVI and her often frivolous pastimes, including a serious gambling addiction. We all know how this story ends, yet Abundance will have you holding your breath until the final march to the guillotine.