In his latest novel, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Oscar Hijuelos (The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love) has delivered a story so achingly beautiful, so full of passion, regret and the power of memory, it is deserving of the term masterpiece.

As A Simple Habana Melody begins in 1947, world-renowned composer Israel Levis has returned from Spain to his beloved Habana, his birthplace, home to his dreams and the soul of his music. But he is literally a shadow of his formerly corpulent and vibrant self. Only 57, he feels and appears much older than he really is, and his notorious appetites for food, sex, music and drinking are only memories now.

And memories are the blood and bones of this exquisite telling of his life. In lush and evocative prose, the story of this musical prodigy unfolds through a series of vignettes depicting his family, childhood and youth in early 20th century Cuba.

Enamored of a beautiful young singer named Rita Valladares, Levis in 1928 writes her a song, Rosas Puras, or Pretty Roses, which becomes the most popular rumba in the world and makes the couple famous. Rita marries another man, is widowed and goes to Paris in the ’30s to sing. Levis eventually follows, ostensibly to work on a stage production of Rosas Puras, but stays to be near her. When the Nazis enter Paris, Israel Levis a devout Cuban Catholic is mistaken for a Jew because of his name and sent to Buchenwald. He survives, his body and spirit broken, and makes his way back to Habana and his dreams of Rita. Offers to play and compose pour in, but his desire to write music, like his once great appetite, has faded. Levis reflects on his gifted life and on the existence of God and an afterlife with a mixture of sadness and resignation. He receives a number of visits from a doting Rita, and marvels at the reticence that kept him from expressing his love all these years. With Levis home in his beloved study, the novel settles to an extraordinarily beautiful conclusion of intelligent grace. An exceptional life, elegantly told by an artist of exceptional gifts. Sam Harrison is a writer in Ormond Beach, Florida.

Sarah Dunant, whose The Birth of Venus was my favorite book of 2004, returns to Italy with In the Company of the Courtesan. This time, the action begins in Rome in 1527. We’re in the company of Bucino, a most resourceful man dwarf, actor-juggler and business manager for Fiammetta Bianchini, a beautiful young courtesan. But the Second Sack of Rome sends the courtesan and her dwarf to her native Venice. It’s a city as strange and exotic to Bucino who abhors water as a shrewd, intelligent dwarf is to most Venetians. The pair arrive to find Fiammetta’s mother dead and her house in the care of a slovenly woman who soon disappears, along with the ruby they had counted on to finance Fiammetta’s entry into Venetian society. Fiammetta soon becomes dependent on the assistance of a blind healer called La Draga, a woman Bucino instinctively distrusts. But not long after the loss of their fortune, Bucino finds a way for himself and his lady to re-establish themselves, with a touch of bribery, a secret hidden in a book and a great deal of panache.

In the Company of the Courtesan portrays a vibrant city at a dangerous time, when religion and politics clashed, often with violence. The city squares, bridges and canals teem with trade and colorful characters. Fiammetta’s circle includes real-life historic figures, such as Aretino, who wrote both religious works and scandalous sonnets, and the painter Tiziano Vecellio, better known as Titian. In a delicious scene set in Tiziano’s studio, Dunant imagines Fiammetta as the subject of one of his most famous nudes. But while Fiammetta’s beauty and talents support their lifestyle, this is Bucino’s journey, the story of a man who can only maintain hard-won success by confronting everything he fears. Ultimately, this is a novel not about religious or social politics, but the secrets of the heart: how love can drive the smart and cunning to the brink of foolishness, and what happens when desire battles with contentment. Leslie Budewitz treasures a small collection of Venetian Murano glass earrings.

Liberty Fish, the protagonist of Stephen Wright’s new novel, The Amalgamation Polka, is the only child of an abolitionist couple living in New York who constantly leave him in the care of his aunt as they go on their crusades. He’s also the grandson of ardent slaveholders and South Carolina plantation owners, whose letters to their runaway daughter often cause her to take to her room for days. Liberty is nearly 17 when the Civil War starts, and he knows he has to go fight despite his parents’ objections. Like so many other young men of his age, he finds that war is not at all what he thought it would be, and almost his entire regiment is killed in their first skirmish. Ultimately, he deserts the army after witnessing the cruelty of his compatriots and strikes out to find the storied Redemption Hall, where Liberty’s slave-owning grandfather’s enthusiastic and frightening experiments in amalgamation have left his once-glorious plantation in ruins. This dark story is nevertheless a joy to read. The language dances off the page with such fluidity that readers will feel compelled to read it aloud, even the ugly parts. The poetic descriptions given to acts of brutality, racism and hatred make them all the more horrible in the reader’s mind. There are lovely parts to this story, too. Liberty’s childhood is told in a series of heartwarming stories about strange visitors to his parents’ house and his adventures prospecting in the wilds around his childhood home. The syntactic turns and wordplay will make any lover of language smile, even laugh out loud at the beauty of Wright’s skill. The author of Meditations in Green, M31: A Family Romance and Going Native, Wright surely will take his place among the greats of American literature with this stirring novel. One hopes that this book will garner all the attention it deserves as a stunning American story of love, racism, a country in commotion and, yes, maybe even a little redemption. Sarah E. White is a freelance writer and reviewer in Arkansas.

If you’ve read the Bible, you know the story of the book of Ruth. Bret Lott takes that timeless tale as the basis of his lyrical new novel, A Song I Knew By Heart.

In Lott’s modern version, Naomi leaves the land of her birth (South Carolina) to set up a new life with her husband Eli in a foreign land (New Hampshire). Their only son, Mahlon, marries Ruth, a local girl, and the family is happy. When both men die before their time, Naomi’s joy turns to bitterness, and she decides to return to her beloved South, where light fell on the pine straw in “bright broken pieces” like “so many perfect gifts of warmth.” Ruth insists on going with her, and the result is a warm-hearted story suggesting that in many ways, though times have changed, people have not.

Lott’s eight previous books, including the Oprah’s Book Club selection Jewel, have often included dysfunctional situations. However, aside from a specific issue of guilt that Naomi struggles with, this is one functional family. The story is simple, almost na•ve in the present literary atmosphere, and a great relief for readers eternally braced for the emergence of unpleasant characters and dismaying plot turns.

Much of the action here is psychological, wrapped up in Naomi’s stifling sense of loss, not only of her loved ones, but also of her religious faith. Life is full of spiteful “God trick[s]” in this world in which forgiveness can become an unintended act of revenge. The most ordinary existence touches on suffering, and Naomi’s own homely Southern voice pins pain to the page with stark, colloquial prose.

And the “song I knew by heart?” “Cold and sad” at the start, it has changed pitch by the end. It hits a note of healing, and the novel’s hopeful conclusion asserts that you can go home again. There you may learn, if you’re lucky, that joy and sorrow are “a gift from the same God who’d made them both.” Maude McDaniel writes from Maryland.

William R. Trotter has crafted a magnificent Civil War novel, epic in proportion and sweeping in its treatment of the last three years of that bloody conflict. The setting is North Carolina, a theater of the war rarely touched on in most historical accounts. Yet North Carolina was pivotal to the Confederate cause.

Wilmington is the center of the action, largely because of Fort Fisher, the biggest earthen fortification in the South. It embraced a mile of sea defenses, a third of a mile of land defenses. From under its protection poured the commerce so vital to the Confederate states. Because it was built of sand and dirt, naval shelling tended to throw up geysers of the mix without major damage to the fortification or its gun crews. Trotter is a masterful storyteller, and he makes the characters real and imaginary come alive for the reader. There is William Lamb, the fortress-building engineer; Belle O’Neil, the seductive siren and Confederate spy; Jacob Landau, the Bavarian Jew and prominent Wilmington merchant; Gen. Benjamin Butler, a vicious political infighter and corrupt official of the Union; and there is Zebulon Vance, governor of North Carolina and one of the Confederacy’s great political figures. Quite a few more lives are closely intertwined in the spinning tornado of a terrible war.

In a couple of instances, Trotter has fudged a bit with history, which he freely admits in an author’s note. There is no Shelborne’s Point or Uhwarrie River. Nor was there a CSS Hatteras. But these are minor matters, used only to move the story along faster.

Fans of Civil War narratives should be thrilled with Trotter’s latest effort, but casual readers with little interest in history should also find it enchanting and hard to put down. The author tells a gripping story of history very well indeed. Lloyd Armour is a retired newspaper editor.

Set in 1886 at the beginning of the end of the Ottoman Empire, Jenny White’s beautifully written first novel revolves around the murder of an English governess and touches on so much more. White is a professor of anthropology whose specialty is Turkish culture, so she understands the society’s Byzantine (pun intended) workings, from the machinations of the ladies of the harem where the governess worked to the fears that drive corruption at the highest levels of government. All of these threads come into play when the body of Mary Dixon washes up on a shore of the Bosphorus. She’s naked save some jewelry, including a pendant which bears the tughra, or seal, of the sultan. The seal can’t be reproduced without the approval of the palace. What is it doing on a pendant found on the body of this foreign woman? And how does Mary’s death relate to the earlier death of another English governess who once wore the same pendant? For all its exoticness, The Sultan’s Seal is a detective story, and the detective here is the logical but not quite hardboiled magistrate Kamil Pasha. The murder sets him on a course to find Mary’s killer and seek justice, though justice in his society proves a malleable thing. His journeys take him into the orbits of all manner of folk, including Sybil, daughter of the British ambassador, who falls in love with Kamil. Other characters are Sybil’s vulgar and affable American cousin Bernie; Jaanan, the restless niece of a respected jurist and poet; and her beloved cousin Hamza, whose revolutionary leanings lead to tragedy. There’s also Michel, the medical examiner who knows more than he lets on, and the British ambassador, who, like Kamil’s own father, seems undone by grief over his wife’s death. White’s writing is shimmering and sensuous. She writes of rich fabrics, the sparkle of jewels, the velvety black petals of Kamil’s favorite orchid and the best way to peel the skin of an almond (with your thumbnail). Her world, despite its restrictions, is one in which you will want to immerse yourself. The Sultan’s Seal is a book to savor. Arlene McKanic writes from Jamaica, New York.

<B>A slave’s quest for freedom</B> Overwhelming acclaim greeted David Anthony Durham’s debut novel, <I>Gabriel’s Story</I>, which inspired comparisons to William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy. How does his sophomore effort measure up? <B>Walk Through Darkness</B>, Durham’s second novel, matches, even surpasses, his first on every level. A lover of history, Durham takes the prickly topic of American slavery and carefully dissects it through the eyes of two leading characters: William, a fugitive slave, and Morrison, his relentless, mysterious pursuer. Durham’s book uses the plight of William, who flees bondage in Maryland, to show the human toll of slavery as he follows the trail of his pregnant wife, Dover. In this uncertain time before the onset of the Civil War, William pushes himself to the limits of his endurance to get to freedom and to his wife, swimming the hazardous waters of the Chesapeake, braving the wilds, keeping one step ahead of his trackers and their dogs. Durham, an expert at describing his scenes in cinematic detail, is careful not to employ a broad brush in depicting either his black or white characters during this grueling journey through violent territory. The realism of the intricately evoked scenes and the humanity of his characters lift the novel above other historical fiction.

When William’s first try for freedom fails after he is betrayed by Oli, a former slave working as a decoy with the trackers, the fugitive is beaten, humiliated and led away in chains. But the harsh scenes of violence and cruelty are tempered with brief glimpses into the interior world of the slaves, who survive the barbarity of their existence by holding on to the few precious moments of joy they experience with family members and friends who have not been sold. It is that love that compels William on his perilous quest, with Morrison right on his heels.

Upon reaching the North and freedom, nothing is as he expected, neither freedom, the black life there nor his beloved Dover who has matured emotionally and spiritually. Complex, brilliantly written and deeply engaging, <B>Walk Through Darkness</B> shows a young novelist building on his formidable narrative gifts to produce a powerful work of historical fiction. <I>Robert Fleming is a writer in New York</I>.

Bigelow has two obsessions: the weather and a woman. Sent by the Weather Bureau to establish an observatory in early-boomtown, pre-WWI Anchorage, he is determined to prove his original meteorological theory: that a giant current of air sweeps in a circular fashion from the poles to the equator and back again. Pushing this goal to a secondary position in his consciousness is Bigelow’s infatuation with an Aleut woman who lives a solitary and silent life. He follows her home from the general store one fall day, and a relationship begins.

Because the woman never speaks, Bigelow does not know her name or her history. Her body language is also mysterious, composed of straightforward stares that reveal no emotion, coupled with equally straightforward sex. Intercourse becomes central to their relationship, which quickly cements into an unvarying pattern. Bigelow arrives with an animal for dinner. The Aleut woman prepares the food. They eat. They have sex. She takes a bath while Bigelow watches, after which he goes home to sleep.

This pattern continues through the winter and into the spring, until one day the woman vanishes without a trace. In the months that follow, Bigelow struggles to remain afloat, weighted down by her absence, a loss exacerbated by the harshness of his surroundings: rough men, extreme weather, an unbeautiful city. Harrison cunningly weaves his despair into the bleak landscape so that each echoes the other. As she did in two previous works of fiction (The Binding Chair, Poison), Kathryn Harrison thoroughly immerses the reader in a world forever out of reach. She has a firm grasp of the intricacies of early 20th century weather prediction as well as the story of Anchorage’s past. The result is both an historical education and a literary entanglement, fulfilling readers on numerous levels by the time they reach the last page. Susanna Baird is a writer living in Brookline, Massachusetts.