Elizabeth Frank deftly explores a singularly ignoble era of American history with her towering debut novel, Cheat and Charmer. Frank, whose 1986 biography of poet Louise Bogan won a Pulitzer Prize, now brings to life 1950s Hollywood its superficial morality and its seamy underbelly. It is 1951, and the government’s witch-hunt to destroy communism is in full swing. Dinah Lasker, wife of a popular screenwriter and one-time member of the communist party, is ordered to testify against her sister, a former starlet who also was a communist.

Dinah, a housewife with two children, knows she is merely a pawn to the politicians. They’re hunting bigger game, and have made it quite clear that if Dinah doesn’t give the names they want, her husband will be blacklisted and never work in the film business again. Whatever her choice, Dinah must betray someone she loves. Like a pebble tossed in the ocean, her decision touches off a chain of events that profoundly affect her life and the lives of those around her.

From glitzy Hollywood to sultry Broadway to the glamorous and superficial existences of the literary haute monde of post-World War II Europe, Frank captures the era’s incongruous mix of naivetŽ and decadence. Yet it’s in the quiet moments that the book truly soars. Dinah and her husband Jake, who is little more than an overgrown boy with talent, are introspective people, and it is when they are inside of themselves or performing mundane tasks that they truly become human. That is also when Frank’s colossal talent shines through. Twenty-five years in the making, Frank’s richly packed tale can be deemed no less than a magnificent achievement on par with any Hollywood novel ever written. With a master’s brush, she paints a mural of human folly that is breathtaking in its scope, yet marvelous in its simplicity. Ian Schwartz writes from New York City.

Called the “forgotten war” by at least one of its chroniclers, the Korean War had consequences that are rather more difficult to forget: a hostile and impoverished North Korea run by a pudgy dictator, and one of the largest concentrations of American soldiers abroad. But in his new novel War Trash, award-winning author Ha Jin has chosen to focus on an even less-remembered aspect of that war: Chinese POWs faced with the choice between repatriation and resettlement in “Free China,” aka Taiwan.

Ha Jin presents War Trash as the memoir of Yu Yuan, a Chinese officer. As an English-speaking intellectual and graduate of the Nationalists’ famed Huangpu Military Academy, Yuan fears reprisals from the Communists. But China is Yuan’s home, and home also to his fiancŽe and long-suffering mother. Ha Jin makes the point that well after China’s war with itself concluded in 1949, the war continued to divide families and friends.

Much of the novel takes place in POW camps administered by Americans as dubious of the war’s aims as were their Chinese adversaries, who believed that their invasion of Korea was intended to preserve China’s territorial integrity. At times War Trash reads like “Ha Jin’s Heroes” for its depiction of the various schemes the POWs employ to harass their American captors, sometimes with comic effect. And while the Americans were not unknown to torture their inmates (giving lie to the surprisingly prevalent notion that Abu Ghraib was unprecedented), Ha Jin concedes that “the Chinese and Koreans were much more expert” in “the art of inflicting pain.” In previous works like Waiting, which won the National Book Award, Ha Jin tended to view history as an ocean upon which individuals bob like abject buoys; in War Trash, a mood of resignation likewise prevails, reflected in simple, nonjudgmental and unsentimental prose. War Trash may not be his best novel, but it confirms Ha Jin’s dedication to telling the stories obscured by statisticians or the evening news. Kenneth Champeon is a regular contributor to ThingsAsian.com.

Howard Bahr, author of the critically acclaimed novels The Black Flower and The Year of Jubilo, offers another remarkable Civil War tale. Three veterans, former soldiers of the doomed 21st Mississippi, are the focus of The Judas Field, and the highly sympathetic Cass Wakefield serves as their reluctant leader. Twenty years after the battle of Franklin, Tennessee, Cass is persuaded to retrace his regiment’s journey to that battlefield by a dying childhood friend, Alison, who wants to bring the remains of her father and brother home. As they travel, Cass recalls his fighting years and what they cost him and the men he served alongside. Bahr’s superb handling of battle scenes won’t surprise readers of his first two novels, and in The Judas Field he brings an extraordinary emotional depth to the brutality. Cass as a soldier seems nearly apathetic to the cause, but despite the terror and exhaustion, when the band plays, the flag is raised and the bayonets are strapped on, he is a fierce warrior. He is joined in battle by his cousin’s fiancŽ, Roger, a sensitive pianist, who protects his fingers even as he kills, and 14-year-old Lucien, an orphan with a warped sense of God and little reason to believe in his own worth or inherent goodness.

Cass’ sense of responsibility to his two brothers-in-arms carried him through the war, and he expressly forbids them to accompany him and Alison back north, but Lucien and Roger follow them to Franklin. Once there, the foursome discovers that the war is as fresh and devastating a wound to the people and landscape of Franklin as it is for them, and they are drawn into a tragic, inevitable confrontation. Bahr is at his poetic best here, every word chosen and placed precisely and beautifully. The Judas Field presents us with a heartbreakingly realistic picture of the madness born of violence and war, and the redemption to be found when the past is finally put to rest. Kristy Kiernan, a native of Tennessee, writes from Naples, Florida. Her debut novel will be published next year by Berkley.

In this winning debut set outside Victorian-era Edinburgh, Bessy Buckley should, perhaps, have given more pause to the fact that the mistress of Castle Haivers, Arabella Reid, hired her without a reference. But Bessy, eager to flee from the dark life her mother had forced upon her, isn’t about to question her luck at so easily finding a position. That is, not until the missus begins making strange requests of her new maid. The young Irish girl has been hired, despite her inexperience, because she can read and write. Mrs. Reid gives her a notebook and implores her to record in it every detail of her daily life as a domestic servant. It is this journal that drives much of the plot of the novel.

As the story progresses, Bessy develops a deep affection for Mrs. Reid an adolescent sort of crush. When she discovers that these feelings are not mutual, and that the lady of the house held a previous maid, Nora, in higher esteem, Bessy grows jealous, and plots to get revenge on her disloyal employer. What ensues is the best sort of Gothic tale, replete with ghosts, locked rooms, intriguing questions, mysterious strangers and suspicious deaths. Author Jane Harris excels at creating fascinating, flawed characters. Bessy is unsure of her age her mother was vague about when she was born but her past makes her, in many ways, older than her 14 or 15 or 16 years. Her wry commentary on life at the rundown manor house is wonderfully comic. But Bessy is not simply mature and worldly beyond her years. She’s simultaneously na•ve, and this duality makes her an all the more appealing narrator. Her voice is engaging, darkly humorous and always authentic. Harris skillfully recreates dialect and grammar appropriate for the period without making it difficult to read. The Observations has already created a stir in the U.K. Harris’ British publisher, Faber, ran its largest first printing for a debut novel, and the book has received no shortage of critical acclaim. Original, bawdy and touching, Bessy’s story is sure to find legions of fans on this side of the Atlantic, too. Tasha Alexander is the author of the historical suspense novel And Only to Deceive.

Left alone and penniless in 1935, 18-year-old Rose Meadows accepts a position working in the New York household of the peculiar Mitwisser family. Soon, she is drawn into their drama and becomes one of them for a time.

Cynthia Ozick, whose brilliant story, The Shawl, depicted the consequences of the Holocaust, again takes on the situation of people forever altered by what happened to them in Hitler’s Germany. Told in a roundabout way, Heir to the Glimmering World has the power to make readers take a fresh look at what can seem a too-familiar story.

Bit by bit, the reader learns the full story of who the Mitwissers were and how they came to be in a house on the outskirts of the Bronx. Once a prominent physicist, Frau Elsa Mitwisser now spends her days in bed, afraid of what waits outside. Her husband Rudi, once a famed religious scholar, toils in obscurity researching an arcane Jewish sect. Their numerous rowdy children appear trapped between the family’s old and new lives.

The destitute refugees are sponsored by a disturbed young man named James A’bair. James will one day alter the Mitwisser family’s fate as suddenly and as whimsically as history once did. Coincidence rules in Ozick’s world, bringing together unlikely characters whose principal commonality is that they are all outsiders. Sometimes funny, always intelligent, this novel will make new fans for Ozick. Anne Morris writes from Austin, Texas.

<B>A Southern family’s fading fortunes</B> Regina Angela Riant, the heroine of Helen Scully’s first novel, <B>In the Hope of Rising Again</B>, is the fifth child and only daughter born to Colonel and Regina Riant, prominent citizens in turn-of-the-century Mobile, Alabama. The favorite of her father, a colorful Civil War hero who was lucky enough not only to survive the war unscathed but also to marry well and fall into great wealth, young Regina is well educated, beautiful, devout and indulged in every way. Yet it’s soon clear that Regina’s early privileges are no buffer against hardships to come: a troubled marriage, a dying child, the onset of the Great Depression and worse. It’s as if the Colonel’s good fortune in life is destined to be repaid by his daughter, in a story that’s almost Dickensian in its downward spiral of misery. The novel begins with Regina’s marriage to a delicately handsome man named Charles Morrow, who whisks her away to Choctaw Bluff, Alabama, where he has a fledgling lumber company. But almost overnight, the sensitivity that first drew her to Charles spirals into full-fledged depression. Pregnant, miserable in Choctaw Bluff and unnerved by Charles’ growing moroseness, Regina persuades him to return with her to Mobile. Here, Scully weaves suspense out of lurking disaster.

With the Colonel now deceased, the remaining Riants are held together by name and money but little else. Regina’s mother is bitter, obsessed with her sons but resentful of her daughter. Regina’s hard-drinking brothers are playing fast and furious with their collective inheritance. Charles abandons lumber for a series of short-lived entrepreneurial ventures. Regina sees the family flying into ruin and is powerless to stop it. But then, to paraphrase Tolstoy, happy families are all alike and the unhappy ones make better stories. So it is in Scully’s impressive debut novel, which starts slow but then takes you by surprise with its rich detail and idiosyncratic characterizations. Scully makes a tragic journey thoroughly compelling, while allowing just enough hope for redemption to sustain Regina, and her readers, along the way. <I>Rosalind S. Fournier writes from Birmingham, Alabama.</I>

1909, north central Montana. In the year since their mother died, 13-year-old Paul Milliron and his younger brothers have all found ways to cope. When their attentive but overworked father spies a newspaper ad for a housekeeper willing to trek from Minneapolis to Marias Coulee, Montana ( Can’t cook, but doesn’t bite, reads the headline), change sweeps in like the wind whistling down the Rockies on to the wide, dry prairie.

Rose Llewellyn can’t cook, but she can clean and whistle. And when the teacher in the one-room school runs off with a tent show preacher, Rose’s brother Morris Morgan is drafted to replace her. The fifth teacher in four years, Morrie appears to be a dandy with a mind full of trivia. Can he manage three dozen youngsters including farm boys, ditch diggers’ kids, the battling Swedes and Slavs? With a quick wit, a willingness to conspire and an uncanny ability to discern hidden needs and talents, Morrie is an unlikely success. When the state inspector shows up just in time for the school’s celebration of Halley’s comet, the children rise to the occasion and ensure the school’s future. But then Paul unexpectedly discovers the secret of Rose and Morrie’s past, and the whistling season threatens to end.

Ivan Doig’s memoir of a dryland boyhood, This House of Sky (1978), helped define modern Western literature, and he’s one of its masters. While other writers revel in Montana’s mountains, Doig gives us the plains in all their hard beauty. The Whistling Season, Doig’s eighth novel, returns to territory he first plowed in English Creek and Dancing at the Rascal Fair the deceptively simple stories of lives shaped by the land. Paul narrates The Whistling Season from his perspective nearly 40 years later as the state superintendent who must decide the future of Montana’s one-room schools. Adult Paul intervenes only when necessary, to tell the reader what the boy is still learning: that some of our greatest influences are people we loved for just a season. Leslie Budewitz is a native Montanan who still lives under the Big Sky.