In May of 1904, when Thomas Edgar returns to England from his butterfly-collecting expedition to Brazil, his young wife Sophie expects that their happy life together will resume its familiar contented course. Instead, she is faced with a different man altogether, one whose eyes are colder, and who hardly acknowledges her. The Amazon can be a challenging place, the company agent tells her. I've heard of men losing their possessions, their faith, and their virtue. But I've never heard of anyone losing his ability to speak. In the mordantly magnetic The Sound of Butterflies, New Zealand author Rachael King rings all the changes on the theme of staid Englishmen exposed to the passions of the steamy jungle and its fire ants, jaguars, and piranhas, both human and animal. Thomas' almost sacred quest for a particularly beautiful and elusive butterfly sets up an unforgettably bittersweet story, with its elliptical search for meaning in a world where one kills the thing one loves, and the victim is silent.

King's jungle descriptions are masterful. (In fire-ant territory, always remember to keep your feet moving while standing still.) Her rippling prose builds to a wave of intrigue and danger as the narrative unfolds long-hidden revelations of steamy encounters and power plays in this godforsaken place of de facto slavery and disease. Thomas finds himself ineffectual in accomplishing the good things he yearns for, and helplessly conniving with the evil he abhors. Meanwhile, the cool counterweight of Sophie's story while Thomas is off exploring sets mild English village life against the major mayhem of the ruthless Amazonian rubber empire, headed by the pitiless rubber baron Jose Santos.

Does Thomas find his beloved dream, the Papilio sophia? That's left to the reader to decide. In the end, though, a battered butterfly does emerge amid the moths from Pandora's box. No doubt, the endless seductions of the Amazonian rainforest are as enchanting as they appear to be on these pages. Nevertheless, many readers, like this one, may well prefer to explore them from one's own comfortable easy chair.

Lillian Leyb, the heroine of Amy Bloom’s latest novel, gives the appearance of a young woman who’s practical to the point of a sort of animal amorality. The survivor of a massacre that took the lives of her parents, husband and, she believes, her little daughter Sophie, she sets sail in 1924 for America, where she’s taken in by a cousin, gets a job as a mediocre seamstress and quickly becomes the mistress of not one but two theater bigwigs who happen to be father and son. Lillian is prepared to let this comfortable state of affairs continue until another cousin tells her that Sophie just might have survived the pogrom and is now living with a family in Siberia. Here the novel, which could have been subtitled “Sophie’s Mother’s Choice,” stops being the somewhat offbeat story of an immigrant looking for a better life in America and becomes an almost Homeric quest.

What makes Away especially appealing is that Lillian, who can’t afford a transatlantic trip, decides to go west, across the continental United States, up to Alaska and over the Bering Strait and into Russia to find her daughter. The grueling journey, which takes years, leads Lillian, like Ulysses, to meet all manner of folk, most of whom help her in one way or another.

The heroine handles all the twists and turns of her travels with her usual practicality; placid, unbreakable optimism; and steely will. Bloom’s writing is clear, rich and shot through with moments of humor, as when a prostitute Lillian befriends bursts into song after the gruesome murder of her pimp. After an inmate in the women’s prison Lillian is sent to is beaten unconscious, all the matron can say is, “Ladies, tidy up.” Lillian herself is not quite the naif most people take her for and, like a force of nature, her impact on the people she meets even briefly can be profound. Some prosper, as we see in brief flash forwards; others don’t. But most find Lillian unforgettable, and so will the readers of this absorbing book.

Arlene McKanic is a writer in Jamaica, New York.

Stef Penney's mesmerizing debut novel, winner of Britain's Costa Book of the Year Award (formerly the Whitbread Award), entertains on several levels. The Tenderness of Wolves is in part a murder mystery, opening with the brutal killing of a French-Canadian trapper near Dove River, a small settlement in Canada's northern territory. It's also a historical family saga, focusing on Mrs. Ross, who discovers the murdered trapper, and who came to this remote part of Canada with her husband Angus from Scotland as part of the mid-19th-century Highland Clearances. They were two of countless immigrants who fanned out from the landing stops at Halifax and Montreal like the tributaries of a river, and disappeared, every one, into the wilderness. Mrs. Ross and Angus lost a baby daughter; they later adopted Francis, an Irish orphan, who is now 17 and as much a stranger as ever to his parents. His mother is worried, for Francis has been gone since the day of the murder. Constantly encompassing the novel's multilayered plot is the landscape itself vast and unpopulated, with dangerously frigid temperatures and endless stretches of snow and ice where first Mrs. Ross and a half-breed tracker, then two Hudson Bay Company men, set off to find Francis and the murderer, assuming they're not one and the same.

Penney is a Scottish screenwriter who has drawn this landscape so realistically that the reader feels he is accompanying her stoic characters despite the fact that she has never traveled to Canada herself. She immersed herself in research at the British Library, and has sprinkled her captivating debut with such diverse characters as two young sisters who disappeared 15 years earlier; the searcher employed by their parents who is now obsessed with discovering evidence of a written Native language; and various Hudson Bay Company hangers-on, debilitated by drugs and drink as trapping profits have dwindled. Penney is at work on her second book. This one set in is Britain, and sure to be eagerly awaited by readers of this haunting melange of mystery, history and adventure.

She's shaken the boughs of her family tree (Cousins), won the Canadian Governor General Award for poetry (Celestial Navigation) and chronicled the brutality of the Civil War in the Missouri Ozarks (Enemy Women). Now Paulette Jiles turns her discerning eye and poet's ear for language to the rough-and-tumble early days of the West Texas oil fields, where Jeanine Stoddard grows up with her two sisters, Mayme and Bea, and her parents, Elizabeth and Jack.

Jeanine is a tomboy, and her reckless father's favorite, accompanying him to horse races and poker games. When he dies after an accident on the oil rig, the family returns to Elizabeth's birthplace, taking charge of the family farm just as the Depression hits. The four women struggle to make ends meet and keep the farm and the racehorse, Smokey Joe, that was Jack's only legacy. Each sister reacts to the crisis in a different way. Resourceful Jeanine pores over farming manuals from Texas A&M; Mayme takes a job in the oil field office; and preteen Bea loses herself in her writing. Meanwhile, Elizabeth puts her hopes (and the last of the family's savings) into speculating on an oil-drilling outfit that might never see a return. But the period touches, not the plot, lend this novel its charm. Jiles includes carefully chosen background details—Model Ts, saddle shoes, number three washtubs, Disney's Snow White, Movietone news shorts and the songs that play on the family's console radio—giving the reader a real sense of time and place that makes Stormy Weather seem more like a novel written in the 1930s than a historical novel about the 1930s.

Jiles chronicles the Stoddards' struggles in an understated prose style. Horrific events (drought, dust storms and hailstorms; Jeanine's near-strangling when her scarf is caught in farm machinery) are described vividly, but also with a sense of removal, echoing the characters' stoicism in the face of hardship: something expected, coped with and moved on from. Stormy Weather is a remarkable look into America's past, full of characters you will both admire and remember.

Sicily, 1149 A.D. The Second Crusade has just ended in the Christians' defeat. The balance of power between the Western empires and the Arab world is unsettled. Thurstan Beauchamp, a young man of Norman heritage, serves King Roger of Sicily as Purveyor of Pleasures and Shows a traveling entertainment scout. In his not-so-public role as purse bearer, he also conveys official bribes. When his supervisor, the insightful, secretive Arab Yusuf Ibn Mansur, sends him to buy herons for the king's falcons to chase, Thurstan discovers a troupe of Anatolian musicians and belly dancers and arranges their performance at court in Palermo. Then, on a political errand, he encounters Lady Alicia, a wealthy young widow whom he'd loved when both were teenagers. Blinded by promises of love, marriage and land, Thurstan becomes an unwitting pawn in an assassination plot designed to destroy the kingdom he respects.

Three times shortlisted for the Booker Prize and 1992 co-winner for Sacred Hunger, Barry Unsworth never writes the same novel twice. The British-born author, who now lives in Italy, scatters his stories throughout time and geography. His 15th novel, The Ruby in Her Navel, takes readers to a 12th-century Mediterranean pulsing with political, religious and racial tensions. Do a young man's hopes to claim a knighthood stand a chance when ambitious men are all too ready to sacrifice others' desires for their own plots and goals? Any human life lies in the future as well as in the past, Thurstan says. It also lies in what one cannot see and the reader, being less innocent, will glimpse some of Thurstan's future before he does. But that only adds suspense and keeps the reader alert, knowing that harm will befall our courtly narrator, but unsure of its precise nature and how he will respond. In the early chapters, Unsworth's dense sentences require close reading, but the effort reveals a story of the past with parallels to our own present and future.

Every year, a traveling friend brings Leslie Budewitz a jar of capers from Sicily.

Meet Will Cooper, a singular fellow whose life began in early 19th-century America. He was indentured as a 12-year-old orphan to work at an isolated trading post in the southern Appalachians, where a land-hungry America was fast encroaching upon the world of the Cherokees. Throughout his life, Will a voracious reader especially fond of tales of chivalry amassed adventures that would have impressed even Sir Thomas Malory and Sir Walter Scott. In fact, the indefatigable Will became famous as a senator and a colonel in the War. And, most romantically, white chief of the Indians. Now in his 90s, Will knows that he is leaving soon for the Nightland, where all the ghosts of men and animals yearn to travel. And with time running out, Will understands memory as now being about the only intoxicant left in his long and remarkable life.

Thirteen Moons, Charles Frazier's powerful, lyrical second novel (after the National Book Award-winning Cold Mountain), is an extended dramatic monologue in which Will remembers the saga of his life. As we immerse ourselves in Frazier's mellifluous prose, we meet among dozens of fascinating characters the man known as Bear, Will's adoptive father and the loquacious chief of the Cherokees, a damaged people living in a broken world like everybody else. We also meet Claire, the provocative, elusive adolescent beauty who would forever be the unattainable Guinevere to Will's devoted Lancelot. Reading Thirteen Moons is an intoxicating experience in which the author invites us to take a different view of America's transition from the romantic 19th century to the modern 20th century. This is not an elegiac, Proustian remembrance of the past. Instead, we must uncomfortably acknowledge the disturbing ways in which so-called progress has forever altered important parts of the American cultural landscape. This is 21st-century literary fiction at its very best.

Tim Davis is a literature instructor at the University of West Florida.