You don't have to be a lover of war literature or a fan of historical fiction to appreciate City of Thieves. Author and screenwriter David Benioff's second novel, set during the siege of Leningrad, crosses genre lines (even as his characters cross battle lines) to become a story with universal appeal.

Virginal 17-year-old protagonist Lev Beniov possesses a Woody Allen-esque charm—full of immaturity, precocious intelligence and desire for accomplishment. Having fallen into Russian military hands for breaking curfew and looting in his native Leningrad, Lev is deployed on an impossible quest in exchange for having his life spared, accompanied by a charmingly grandiose young soldier-turned-deserter, Kolya. His implacable sense of the absurd accompanies him throughout a forced sojourn into the frigid Russian countryside, where starvation and cruel Einsatzkommandos await.

Despite the obvious similarity of the Benioff-Beniov names, Benioff says City of Thieves is not his grandfather's life story. Yet the work offers not just verisimilitude but also truths: It carries the hallmarks of intensive research, including interviews with his grandfather, enabling depiction of the time period in detail. Cannibalism, casual bullets to the brain, dead soldiers serving as frozen signposts, dogs loaded with armaments in a futile attempt to thwart German tanks—Lev encounters these sights and more in a book that is, incredibly in the face of such details, fun. It is as riveting as the Odyssey, and, like Homer, Benioff is a master of rising and falling action. Just when the blood and snow and mayhem seem unendurable, Lev and Kolya stumble upon a warm house and a meal with Russian beauties held hostage, forced into pleasuring their German captors. Of course soul-searing horrors soon rear up as the girls recount how the Germans punished the 14-year-old who ran away.

With deft phrases like "the plane's burning carcass falling like an angel cast from heaven," Benioff puts the action in grand context. Lev says of his own people, the Russians, "we were the children of a thousand lost battles and defeat was heavy in us." And yet the tale holds many moments of humor, and heartbreak yields to hope.

Andrea Brunais is a writer living in Tampa, Florida, and Bluefield, West Virginia.

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In 1903, the wilds of Montana and Alberta, Canada, and the frozen peaks of the Rockies challenged the most adventurous and experienced explorers. Only someone desperate, perhaps even mad, would dare consider them a viable escape route, but then Mary Boulton, most often referred to in Gil Adamson’s suspenseful debut, The Outlander, as “the widow,” is surely both.

After the death of her infant, Mary slowly begins to work her way out of a crippling depression, only to be confronted with evidence of her husband’s infidelity. Alone in a desolate and friendless landscape, Mary loses her last shred of sanity and kills him, living with his body while sewing her mourning gown. Her reckless act is discovered soon enough, sending the widow fleeing across the harsh land with her twin brothers-in-law, seeking revenge, hot on her trail.

Throughout her travels the widow suffers from frightening delusions, as well as the ever-present threats of starvation and frostbite, but she presses onward and upward, making her way through treacherous mountain passes, dodging wolves, deadly arrows and capture. A host of interesting characters cross her erratic path, providing shelter, company or simply an opportunity to steal provisions, and her encounters with a notorious mountain man known as the Ridgerunner are especially compelling.

As the widow’s wilderness knowledge and competence improves, so does her mental condition, and by the time she arrives in Frank, a mining town in southwest Alberta, she’s nearly got a grip on her sanity. But nothing will stop her husband’s brothers, and soon after the famous Frank Slide, when 74 million tons of mountain crashed to the valley below, they manage to catch up to her.

Readers will feel as breathless as Mary as they follow her frantic dash across the snow-bound mountains. Combining the best escape-over-hazardous-terrain action from novels like Cold Mountain with moody, literary prose, The Outlander is an utterly gripping debut.

Kristy Kiernan writes from South Florida and determinedly avoids all snowy mountains.

In his latest novel, Skeletons at the Feast, Chris Bohjalian takes his readers to World War II-era Europe in a gripping tale told from various viewpoints. This is a departure for Bohjalian, whose previous novels, including Midwives and The Double Bind, are largely set in bucolic New England, where the author himself resides.

Bohjalian was inspired to delve into the last days of the Third Reich after reading the real-life diary of Eva Henatsch, an East Prussian matriarch who recorded her family's trek West ahead of the Red Army in 1945. With this and other acknowledged sources serving as his background material, Bohjalian demonstrates an intricate historical knowledge and impressively illustrates the stark horrors of the time.

Bohjalian's mix of characters brings a human face to the historical depiction. Eighteen-year-old Anna Emmerich exemplifies one of the newer victims of the war; until now, she and her upper-class family have lived in relative luxury on their Prussian estate, where the parlor wall boasts a signed, framed photograph of Adolf Hitler (though the family had taken in a family of Jewish friends five years earlier). But now that the brutal Russian army has invaded, their reality has drastically changed, and as they make the harsh journey to reach the British and American lines, their former life (described in flashbacks) becomes a distant memory.

Also on the road with the Emmerichs is Callum Finnella, a Scottish prisoner of war who has been laboring on the family's estate. He and Anna are engaged in a furtive affair that Bohjalian describes in sometimes torrid detail. Also on the journey is German Corporal Manfred—otherwise known as Uri Singer, a Jewish escapee from an Auschwitz-bound train in disguise. And then there is Cecile, a Frenchwoman on another trek: a death march from a concentration camp.

Skeletons at the Feast is a compelling read, with its mix of history, romance and portrayals of strength in the midst of severe adversity. War really is hell, the book says, but the human spirit is ultimately salvageable.

Rebecca Stropoli writes from Brooklyn, New York.

April 17, 1861, was the date on which the state of Virginia seceded from the Union. In Nick Taylor's richly detailed historical novel The Disagreement, it is also the 16th birthday of the young narrator, John Alan Muro. Muro is swept up in the excitement of the moment, only to realize later that the possibility of war could shatter his secret dream of attending medical school in Philadelphia.

After a cousin is critically injured at the battle of Manassas, Muro's parents choose to send John Alan to medical school at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, more to get him out of the line of fire than out of interest in his studies. As the war progresses and more and more wounded soldiers arrive, Muro is pressed into service at the Charlottesville General Hospital. Despite his lack of expertise, Muro saves the life of a Northern lieutenant, earning the contempt of his peers but starting a lifelong professional and personal relationship that grows in significance over time. In addition, Muro becomes infatuated with Lorrie Wigfall, the capable niece of one of his professors. As they begin a tentative romance amid the battle-scarred soldiers and frightened civilians, Muro is forced to make some very adult decisions regarding what he truly wants and where he belongs.

Taylor's major achievement lies in the creation of a believable narrator whose personality and tone read true to both the time period and his youth. Muro is neither academically gifted nor mature for his years, but he is smart enough to understand that for every road taken, there are an equal number left untraveled. Though comparisons to Charles Frazier's Civil War novel Cold Mountain seem inescapable, The Disagreement holds its own – smaller in scope, but also more personal, closely following one man's emotional and professional development in the midst of a war that offered him both possibilities and limitations.

Lauren Bufferd writes from Nashville.

Retrospective history meets dramatic fiction in Resistance, Welsh poet Owen Sheers' first foray into fiction. How would Britain have fared in 1944 if the Allies' invasion of Normandy had failed and Hitler had captured Moscow? What if Britain had been forced to enact plans for a resistance force to counter the invading Germans? Sheers imagines the effects of such a scenario within the rocky walls of the remote Olchon Valley in Wales, as five women awaken to discover that all the men among them have left during the night, and soon six war-weary German soldiers arrive on a reconnaissance mission.

The story centers on a cleverly imagined interplay between the abandoned women and the uprooted soldiers. Sheers draws from his own childhood in the valley as well as his intricate research into Britain's resistance plans to create a plausible alternate universe. Even as Resistance suspends historical fact for the subjunctive, its true focal point lies in the characters' experiences of isolation and struggle. Resistance is lavishly written, with details of the landscape and the hardships of rural life that bolster the plot without overburdening it. Sheers achieves intensity and depth with carefully crafted scenes and characters. The domestic and military elements of war intersect, particularly in the characters of Sarah Lewis and Albrecht Wolfram. Sarah is a young wife doggedly clinging to the hope of her husband's return, struggling to maintain the household crops and flock despite wartime restrictions, a harsh winter and her husband's absence. Albrecht, the German commanding officer, arrives in the valley numbed by war but intent on reviving his humanity and intellectualism.

Resistance is a novel of dichotomies: the beautiful and benevolent yet harsh and ominous landscape; the soldiers young and hopeful yet marred by experience and entangled in the mechanics of war. Sheers' realistic portrayal of individuals' resistance—to the hardening of war and to the loss of a sense of self—make Resistance a debut glimmering with intrigue and promise.

Jackie Hansom, a former middle-school language arts teacher, lives in Nashville.

And we thought Lady Macbeth was a terminal basket case, mad with fury and ambition, who stopped at nothing and was stopped by practically no one. Well, we’re mistaken, according to author Susan Fraser King, and, truth be told, King is very persuasive indeed.

King gives us in Lady Macbeth a portrait of an 11th-century heroine, strong in all the right ways. The real Lady Macbeth, Queen Gruadh of Scotland, whose name sounds like “rue” and translates as “sorrow,” narrates her own story here in believable prose, cherishing the “old tradition of warlike Celtic women,” and “trained in the ‘steel-game.'” She had learned to love her first husband, later killed by Macbeth, who agonizes over it for the rest of his life. Gruadh recovers more quickly, and the two manage to make their own forced union into a love match with some of the panache of a standard romance novel (which King also writes under the name Sarah Gabriel), but with more resounding overtones. This Lady Macbeth is capable of mercy beyond the norm of her times, even refusing personally to kill hares for the supper table. What’s more, King cites, at fascinating length, the historical evidence supporting this surprising transformation in an Author’s Note as compelling as the fiction it follows.

Readers will be drawn to this revised version of an ancient villainess. King manages to challenge all our preconceptions without turning the strongest female character in literature into a pantywaist. Her footwork on this fictional ground is sure and graceful, and the occasional glimpses of Shakespearean catchphrases (“the thane of Cawdor,” “the day Birnam Wood came to Dunsinnan,” “if this must be done . . . best it be done quick”) found in the novel stir the high school literature student in all of us.

Of course, nothing will wipe Lady Macbeth’s traditional portrait from our souls. Still, the Lady Macbeth of these pages is a welcome and worthy, if extreme, makeover.

Maude McDaniel writes from Maryland.

Southeast Asian jewels were prized throughout Europe during the Renaissance, and traders regularly made the precarious, multiyear journey across the seas to trade for precious rubies and sapphires that would grace the crowns of kings and the necks of noblewomen. In The Jewel Trader of Pegu by Jeffrey Hantover, Abraham is an Italian Jew sent by his uncle to the Burmese kingdom of Pegu to buy gems. The story is told through letters he writes to his cousin Joseph. At first he is frightened by the bizarre tattoos and adornments favored by the local heathens (mostly Buddhists), but he feels his first taste of freedom on these shores far from the ghettoes of Venice. Culture shock sets in as his broker, Win, explains the local custom that foreign men are expected to take the virginity of women before they officially join their husbands' homes. Abraham struggles to find balance between what his religion tells him is right and what will help his business prosper. As Abraham becomes immersed in Pegu's culture and its political problems, he begins to see the beauty in the people's religion, their customs and in the people themselves. When a widowed bride comes to live at his house, he finds that there is much more to the world than he ever imagined, and that belonging can be found even among people who outwardly have nothing in common.

The novel, Hantover's first, is a beautiful, if somewhat slowly paced, story of love overcoming obstacles and the ways in which travel and immersion in another culture can change lives. Through Abraham's letters, readers see him become a different and better person as a result of his experiences in Pegu.

One would expect the setting to be a main character in a book like this, but there's actually not that much description of the lush surroundings in which this story takes place. Instead, readers are treated to a long look at the interior landscape of a man of faith whose world is shaken by the power of unexpected love.

Sarah E. White writes from Arkansas.