Joseph Kanon has made his mark in the literary thriller genre, starting with 1997’s Edgar-winning Los Alamos. His fascination with the post-WWII era continues in Stardust, which blends one man’s search for the reasons for his brother’s death with an eye-opening look at the machinations of the Hollywood studios during the Communist witch hunts.

Ben Collier (formerly Kohler) returns to the U.S. at the end of the war, taking the train from New York to California, where his brother Danny, a movie director, is hospitalized—supposedly after jumping from his fifth floor apartment. On the train Ben meets a producer who knows Danny and promises Ben he will help him with a movie he has been assigned to make for the Army—a short film dramatizing the horrors of the concentration camps.

Ben reaches the hospital in time to see Danny briefly come out of his coma, then die. Their father died in the Holocaust, and Danny later helped many Jewish Germans, including his own wife, Liesl, escape. At his funeral, Ben meets some of these emigrants who owed Danny their lives; Ben senses they are demanding some kind of justice.

Kanon thus sets the stage for the melding of these two plots: Ben’s search for his brother’s killer set against the backdrop of the politics and paybacks of the competing studios in Hollywood’s early years.

At the same time, the war’s aftermath is leading to the hunt for Communists all over the country—but nowhere is the hunt fueled by such fervor as in Hollywood. As Ben gradually unravels the intricate ties between Congress, the FBI and its informants, he simultaneously garners information about who might have wished Danny dead—information that puts him in danger, as well.

Once again Kanon has woven real-life figures—from Paulette Goddard and Jack Warner to Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann—into a taut thriller, all set against the background of one of the least laudable moments in our country’s history.

Deborah Donovan writes from La Veta, Colorado.

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Paris just after the Napoleonic Wars was a thrilling place to be. The intellectual life of the city was in full flower, with Madame de Stäel presiding over salons and scientists like Georges Cuvier investigating the origins of life. But it was also a dangerous place: Napoleon’s defeat and exile were traumatic and the Terror, despite having occurred two decades before, had left some of its survivors feral. It’s into this ferment that medical student and narrator Daniel Connor arrives, from staid Edinburgh, in 1815.

Daniel gets into trouble immediately when he’s robbed en route to Paris by a mysterious and alluring woman who goes by the name of Lucienne Bernard. She pilfers not his money, but the items he’ll need as an entree into the world of M. Cuvier: letters of introduction, notebooks, a mammoth bone and, most precious of all, coral specimens. Distraught, Daniel turns first to M. Jagot, a crook turned private eye who has a long history with Madame Bernard, then to the thief herself. Not surprisingly, Daniel falls in love with this intriguing woman who’s nearly twice his age, and the reader can hardly wait to find out whether the young man will ever get his belongings back—and, more importantly, if Lucienne really loves him, or is just leading him on in a labyrinthine game. Stott’s skill as a writer is such that one thinks she might be doing both.

Aside from her graceful writing style and believable characters, Stott also delights with her grasp of history. Romantic, full of twists and turns and glimpses of the past, The Coral Thief is an unlikely page-turner.

Arlene McKanic writes from South Carolina.

Part historical novel, part love letter to New Orleans, A Separate Country is the remarkable new novel by Robert Hicks, author of the bestseller The Widow of the South. Based on the real life of Confederate General John Bell Hood, the novel imagines Hood in the years after the war, crippled and trying to find peace despite his infamy. He ends up in New Orleans, a city both beautiful and corrupt, peaceful and filled with the cacophony of drinking, gambling and any other vice one can dream up.

Hood sets up shop as a cotton trader, but without any real business skills, he fails quickly. He spends years trying to write a book in defense of his war experiences, but his only real success is in marrying Anna Marie Hennan, a young Creole woman he meets at a ball: “I saw that if I had gone through my life intent on the ugly and difficult (as I had!), shedding every delicate and perfect part of my soul like so many raindrops, Anna Marie must have followed behind me gathering what I sloughed off so that one day I might sit in a ballroom in New Orleans and see for myself what I had lost.”

After several happy but increasingly impoverished years during which they have 11 children, Anna Marie and the Hoods’ oldest daughter, Lydia, die during a Yellow Fever epidemic. Hood, himself stricken with fever, calls his friend Eli to his deathbed and gives him the manuscript of a book he’s written—one not about war but about his life after the war. Eli also discovers Anna Marie’s secret journals, and he pieces together the story of their extraordinary, tough life together.

Hicks once again delivers a lovely, richly detailed tale pulled partly from history, partly from his own imagination. He captures the enchanting, dark, humid soul of post-war New Orleans, a time when anything was possible but nothing—at least for one Confederate—was easy.

Amy Scribner writes from Olympia, Washington.

Anita Diamant, the best-selling author of The Red Tent, turns her attention from biblical narrative to the story of a decidedly more modern group of Jewish women in her latest novel, Day After Night. The tale takes place in the latter half of 1945 at Atlit, a camp in Israel where those fleeing Europe and hoping for a homeland are held if they do not have papers—or if there is any other problem with their status.

Diamant focuses on four women housed at Atlit: Zorah, Leonie, Tedi and Shayndel. Although the story covers just a few months, past years are explored through the women’s varied memories of the harsh, cruel and sometimes tragic experiences they have endured. Each woman’s sorrow is her own, but the shared horror of the Holocaust and the burdens each one bears as a survivor serve to unite them in a friendship that will nourish them as they take on the challenges of starting anew. All of the women await their freedom from Atlit, although the notions of what this means, how to find it and where to go once it has been achieved are different to each. Talented, beautiful and strong, each of these women brings a different layer to the multi-faceted story of Diamant’s poignantly rendered Jewish experience.

The story is dispensed in small measures, with the lives of the four women peeled away like the layers of an onion. At times the narrative is not as compelling as one might hope; there is always the sense that the women are held at arm’s length, and the true horror of what they have experienced is somewhat muted by everyday concerns. Despite these issues, it is clear that this is a story close to the author’s heart—she lost her uncle and grandfather in the Holocaust—and she tells it lovingly. Day After Night stands out as a unique depiction of a piece of the Holocaust that is little known, and in the end, the human element of this story will captivate readers, regardless of their knowledge of the history of Judaism.

Linda White is a writer and publicist in St. Paul, Minnesota. 

Louis de Bernières is the go-to guy if you like richly told “big” books such as Corelli’s Mandolin and Birds Without Wings—sweeping stories, filled with colorful characters and told from multiple points of view. His new book is not big—in fact, it is little more than a novella—and the multiplicity of voices with which the narrative unwinds has been reduced to just two. Still, A Partisan’s Daughter is vintage de Bernières: a story of impossible love, ethnic conflict and the whims of history, played out through the inevitable fates of ordinary, if compelling characters.

These characters are Chris and Roza. He’s a 40-year-old English pharmaceuticals salesman, locked in a loveless suburban marriage; she’s an undocumented Yugoslav girl, scraping out an existence amid the economic hardship of pre-Thatcher 1970s London. They meet when, on an impulse—and for the first time in his life—Chris approaches a girl he believes to be a streetwalker. Roza protests she is not a “working girl,” but she accepts a ride from him because she judges him, rightly, to be safe and kind. Before they part, she admits that she was once a prostitute, and charged 500 pounds for her services. Obsessed with the idea of sleeping with her, Chris begins to squirrel away money, but in the meantime he regularly visits Roza as friend rather than client, enjoying her company and listening to her stories.

They are vibrant, sometimes disturbing stories of her childhood near Belgrade, as well as her misadventures after she escaped to England. Roza shocks Chris with the revelation that she once seduced her father, who was a comrade of Tito, and details her rape at the hands of a British thug. But Chris, like readers of the novel, is never quite sure when Roza is telling the truth or when she is weaving a tale to make herself more fascinating—to this humdrum man who so obviously adores her, and to herself.

De Bernières, like Roza, knows how to construct a captivating narrative, and A Partisan’s Daughter is a graceful, persuasive exploration of boundless storytelling and the limits of love.

This review refers to the hardcover edition.

The author’s motive for writing a novel—if I am even aware of it—usually matters less than being educated and entertained. But that can’t be said about The Puzzle King. In her third novel, Betsy Carter fictionalizes the lives of her great uncle and aunt, now gone, in order to understand how they came to America and eventually rescue hundreds of people—including her parents—from Hitler’s Germany, making the book interesting for those facts alone.

Simon and Flora Phelps are both immigrants: Simon’s mother sent him alone at age nine to New York from Lithuania in order to save him from a life in the army; Flora came as a teenager to join one of her sisters. Flora keeps in touch with her mother and remaining sister and her family who are still in Germany, but Simon, despite his strenuous efforts, has lost track of his. He’s a talented artist who has a successful career, crowned “the Puzzle King” by Time magazine for the jigsaw puzzles he creates as promotional items for various products. But he is increasingly aware of his outsider status as a Jew. He and Flora have a solid marriage, and, while they are never able to have children, they are close to Flora’s niece, Edith, who comes from Germany to visit for a glorious summer in 1923.

Seema, Flora’s older sister, is not interested in marriage or children, or any religion. She is an intriguing character, drawn to crosses, which she begins to collect in secret. “[I]t was the way her fingers wrapped around the cross and the perfect symmetry of its design that reassured Seema that some things in life were permanent.”

As the situation in Germany worsens for Jews, only Simon and Flora see the growing dangers for their loved ones—including Seema, who has moved back to Germany. What they do to help their loved ones forms the heart of the story.

The novel’s episodic structure doesn’t always do full justice to its wide range of characters, and the ending seems too sudden and lacks the emotional weight hinted at by the prologue. Still, The Puzzle King is a vibrant portrait of a time and some unexpectedly courageous people.

Admittedly, 12-year-old Tom Page is no Gulliver, but he’s way ahead of his time (late 18th-century England) in his belief that animals and humans can interact with respect—and even love—on both sides. So it is fortuitous that Tom’s sugar-merchant master puts him in charge of two Indian elephants, delivered on British soil as exotic curiosities and almost dead after a long journey by ship with little food or care.

In Christopher Nicholson’s remarkable debut, The Elephant Keeper, Tom nurses the elephants back to life. He names them Jenny and Timothy, and together, the three of them bond on the palatial estate of a wealthy local man. Later, the kindly Lord Bidborough buys Jenny, but Timothy, whose hormones often render him fairly uncontrollable, is sold away. Tom, now 17, accompanies Jenny, and the two of them live the best years of their lives together at Lord Bidborough’s Sussex manor. Lord Bidborough suggests that Tom write a “history of the elephant” and doubtfully Tom starts “a simple account of particulars.” Gaining confidence, he launches into a joint biography/autobiography so engaging that at least one reviewer kept forgetting to make notes and simply charged ahead to find out what happens next.

First-time novelist Nicholson has produced many programs for BBC World Service about animals and humans. Here he does justice to both, establishing an unexpected venue of British aristocratic whimsy, along with an unforgettable picture of an elephant/human relationship so close that, as the elephant learns to think like a human, she teaches her human to think like an elephant, too.

After a Bidborough heir returns home, things deteriorate fast. In the end, a clever abandonment of literal storytelling succeeds in persuading the reader that, against all odds, Jenny and Tom survive into health and happiness together. This is one of the best books of the year, and “the crinkled line of writing on the distant horizon” promises a bittersweet ending that eases the heart, though it may boggle the mind.

Maude McDaniel writes from Maryland.

Author Amy Tan created her own subgenre of popular literature back in the late 1980s (sweeping, semi-autobiographical stories of family, loyalty and love set in various Asian times and cultures), beginning with The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife. More recently, Lisa See has carried the torch with Snowflower and the Secret Fan and Peony in Love.

Now, first-time novelist Eugenia Kim confidently enters the field with The Calligrapher’s Daughter, a bold, richly detailed story about the young daughter of a well-known calligrapher in turn-of-the-20th-century Korea.

Najin Han was born in a Korea already under Japanese occupation. Her father, Nin, clings to the traditions of a dynastic country he feels slipping away (even serving time in prison for his loyalty). He looks to marry his only daughter off to the young son of a respectable family, but Najin and her mother resist, wanting more for her life. They secretly arrange for her to serve on the royal court as a companion to the princess, a betrayal Nin only discovers later through a letter sent to his wife.

But when the king is assassinated, young Najin leaves the court seeking to further her education and find freedom amid oppression. After a thwarted attempt to join her husband in America, she remains in Korea as a teacher, but like so many of her countrymen, never stops seeking a better life.

The daughter of Korean immigrants, Kim grew up hearing stories of her family’s life before the Korean War. A dearth of literature about the lives of Korean women during the occupation led Kim to interview her mother. That, with other meticulous research, helped the Washington, D.C., resident paint this vivid, heartfelt portrait of faith, love and life for one family during a pivotal time in history.

Amy Scribner writes from Olympia, Washington.

In Sarah Dunant’s latest novel, the Bard’s “get thee to a nunnery” is an apt description of the destiny of 120 young women, for whom Ophelia-esque despair lurks behind the walls of the convent Santa Caterina. Set in mid-16th century Italy, Sacred Hearts takes the reader into the dank and dreary confines of a convent that serves as a virtual prison for those unlucky ladies bereft of a wedding dowry.

For Serafina, a passionate teenager whose romance is torn asunder when she is shipped off to Santa Caterina, living in the convent is torture; a spirited girl, she is not ready to go down without a fight. But when Serafina’s rebellion begins to influence even those who have reconciled themselves to the staid existence of convent life, tenuous relationships begin to fray and the peace at Santa Caterina is replaced with dissent and mistrust.

Dunant has populated Sacred Hearts with only women, yet interestingly it is the males of 1570 Ferrara who are clearly guiding the destinies of Santa Caterina’s inhabitants, as well as battling the incendiary Counter Reformation beyond the convent’s walls. The novel’s greatest strength lies in its ability to convey the intricate complexities of female friendship against the patriarchal rule of the times, with the sage Suora Zuana stepping in as a 16th century “frenemy,” the wise nun acting as both jailer and shaman, manipulator and surrogate mother to the woe-begotten Serafina.

Dunant is adept at writing the cliffhanging chapter, and also spares no details in explaining the painful, torturous rituals of penance followed by those who believe spirituality lies in leaving behind the temporal, and allowing the soul to seek wonderment in a higher power. Readers who have cherished The Birth of Venus and The Company of the Courtesan will embrace this latest addition to the triumvirate of Dunant’s Italian Renaissance novels.

Karen Ann Cullotta writes from Chicago.