The much-maligned wife of president Abraham Lincoln tells her story in California writer Janis Cooke Newman's masterful Mary. Newman read only Mary Todd Lincoln's diaries and letters and other 19th-century documents while writing her book, resulting in a truly authentic tone and style. It is presented as a memoir written during Mary's time in Bellevue Place Sanatarium, a period sensationalized by the press, who delighted in speculating about the circumstance that led Mary's own son Robert to have her committed.

Newman covers Mary's entire life, from her comfortable but lonely childhood in Kentucky, through her courtship and marriage to Abraham Lincoln, to his assassination and beyond. Some of the most intriguing sections detail the relationship between Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln. Mary is depicted as playing an integral part in her husband's political success, teaching him to project his voice and giving him confidence. Though the two had a strong respect and love for one another, Lincoln's fear of insanity and his frequent fits of melancholy (which he felt could be triggered by strong emotion) forced him to keep his wife at arm's length.

Mary Todd Lincoln's emotional ups and downs and enormous spending sprees are well documented, but Newman presents them in a sympathetic light, portraying Mary as a deeply passionate, intelligent woman in a time when these qualities in women were discouraged and feared. Mary spends her life trying to find someone who will reciprocate her passion—or at least accept and appreciate it—and that she continues to fall short is perhaps the greatest tragedy in a life littered with tragic moments.

Memory is fragile and flexible. Even its failures serve us at times. The Madonnas of Leningrad, the first novel by Seattle professor Debra Dean, is the story of Marina, a young museum docent who takes refuge in the Hermitage during the 1941 siege of Leningrad. The paintings and artifacts are gone, carefully packed and shipped out of reach of German bombs. On the advice of a babushka, an older woman on the museum staff, Marina builds a memory palace: a museum in her mind where each painting still hangs on the wall. The memory palace serves as Marina's anchor and salvation, an exercise of imagination where she pictures a future for herself and the baby she is carrying. Of all the works in the famed collection, the paintings of Madonnas most inspire her. After the siege, Marina finds her beloved Dmitri in a German POW camp. They make their way to Seattle, where they raise two children who know little about their mother's wartime experience.

Dean merges past and present in prose that shines like the gilt frames in the Hermitage. The story shifts seamlessly from 1941 to the present, just as Alzheimer's shifts time within Marina's mind. The heart of the story is its flashbacks, when we walk the Spanish Hall with Marina, aching with loss and hunger. As she commits scenes, colors, even brushstrokes to memory, the paintings come alive. Chapters narrated by her daughter Helen show us the present, when Marina slips away at a family gathering. During the search, Helen, herself a mother and an artist, wonders about the memories parents choose to tell their children and the memories they keep secret.

Drawn in part from Dean's observations of her grandmother's life with Alzheimer's, The Madonnas of Leningrad is an artful story, lovingly told, that illustrates how humans deal with trauma the physical privations and fears of war, and the slow deterioration of the mind itself. Like the empty frames on the museum walls, this novel of memory and forgetting glows with love and hope.

Leslie Budewitz writes, reads and paints in northwest Montana.

Following her well-received fictional biography of Cleopatra, Karen Essex's latest novel brilliantly captures the turbulent years of late 15th-century Italy as seen through the eyes of the bold and beguiling Este sisters, whose lives and fates were inextricably woven into the political tapestry of those times.

In 1490, the beautiful and brainy Isabella d'Este of Ferrara, 15, is engaged to Francesco Gonzaga, destined to become the Marquis of Mantua; her younger, homlier sister Beatrice is promised to Ludovico Sforza, the future Duke of Milan. Both marriages are forged solely to cement stronger ties between Ferrara and those more powerful cities. Though Isabella is initially happier in her marriage than Beatrice, she secretly lusts for Ludovico and his political power. The sisters vie constantly with one another, as each triumph in Isabella's life is immediately overshadowed by Beatrice's victory. Above all, Isabella is jealous of the fact that Ludovico is the patron of the famous Leonardo da Vinci; she longs for her beauty to be immortalized by the master of masters. But Ludovico knows he can only commission Leonardo to paint his sister-in-law after he has painted his wife, and Beatrice has no interest in sitting for the artist who has already painted her husband's mistress.

Essex breathes vibrant life into the privileged lives of these two royal families with lavish descriptions of their bejeweled clothing, myriad servants and rooms with lush tapestries and paintings on every wall. The narrative crackles with political intrigue, as Essex carefully outlines the battles between city-states, and the growing animosity between Francesco and Ludovico over France's burgeoning presence in Italy. Of the two sisters, only Beatrice was painted by Leonardo—inserted by him into a mural by a lesser artist on the wall opposite The Last Supper. Though she died in childbirth at age 21, that portrait assured her immortality, leading Essex to bring her short history to life.

Deborah Donovan writes from Cincinnati and La Veta, Colorado.

A mysterious stranger wanders out of the woods of Siberia in 1919, finding himself in a small town inhabited by a bizarre Christian sect and occupied by a company of Czech soldiers whose leader wants to become a feudal lord in the frozen tundra. So begins James Meek's The People's Act of Love, a dark, stirring and beautiful novel that can proudly take its place beside the classic Russian novels. This is a complex story full of twists, turns and surprises. The author's spare but lyrical language illuminates the characters and allows the story to come alive and grow in the reader's imagination.

The stranger, Samarin, who is immediately arrested, tells a story of escape from a northern prison, the White Garden, with a fellow inmate who had taken him along to eat him when the food ran out. His harrowing tale disturbs the villagers and makes them wonder if the murder of a shaman in the town might have been committed by the bloodthirsty cannibal. Anna Petrovna, a widow raising a young son in the village, is captivated by Samarin and asks that he be released into her custody while the officials of the town try to sort out what's going on. Meanwhile, conflicts rage among the Czech soldiers, who are divided over whether to support their leader's ambitions or to side with a lieutenant who just wants to get the men home to their newly independent country.

A longtime journalist, Meek meticulously researched the time period, locations and situations that are chronicled in this book. Perhaps because of this, it feels as much like history as fiction, but the novel is always engaging and entertaining as well as educational. At the end of this mesmerizing tale, the reader will still have questions about almost all of the characters and circumstances of the story, but will be left feeling satisfied that they have entered an intricately wrought, realistic world full of characters they will feel privileged to have encountered.

Sarah E. White is a freelance writer living in Arkansas.

The legend of Dracula is one of the world's most enduring, spanning over 500 years since the death of the fearsome Romanian prince who inspired it, Vlad the Impaler. Thus it seems only fitting that any literary endeavor attempting to take on a historical and mythical figure of this magnitude should require time, patience and fortitude. Fortunately, debut novelist Elizabeth Kostova didn't shy away from the challenge, investing 10 long years of writing and research into what has become one of the most anticipated novels of the year, The Historian.

Kostova's keen interest in the subject stems from a childhood of being entertained by her father's stories of Bram Stoker's Dracula. From these early fictional seeds, her fertile imagination took flight, eventually percolating into an epic and unforgettable story of such breathtaking scope that it seems to belie classification as a debut novel.

Arcing back and forth between the 1970s and the 1950s, The Historian follows a motherless young girl's quest to learn the truth about her father's secret past and his search through Cold War-era Eastern Europe for the murderous fiend that has cost him so much—Dracula. The two journeys eventually become one as the story traces the monster's footsteps from the hallowed halls of Oxford to the mist-shrouded mountains of Transylvania and finally to a medieval monastery that yields a shocking truth. Going back in time to the Middle Ages, the novel peels back centuries of history and myth, threading together a chilling hypothetical portrayal of Dracula's lingering bloodthirsty presence into modern times.

It is this stunning fictional premise, made all the more plausible by the novel's rich historical context and use of epistolary narrative devices and archival documents, that makes The Historian so viscerally alluring. Ambitiously transcending genres, it succeeds equally as a terrifying gothic thriller, enlightening historical novel and haunting love story. Though the shifts between the two main storylines are occasionally awkward, Kostova's masterful and atmospheric storytelling yields a bewitching and paradoxical tale that would satiate even the prince of darkness himself.

RELATED CONTENT

Behind a blockbuster
Among the many debut novels published each year, only a small percentage are granted generous advances, film rights sales and the full force of a publishing house's publicity machine. In 1997, the debut novel that drew the world's attention was Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha. This year, the smash hit in the first-novel category is unarguably Elizabeth Kostova's vampire novel The Historian, which has more than 800,000 copies in print. Ten years in the making, the novel follows a young girl who takes up her father's quest to find the real Dracula. Kostova was inspired both by her own father's vampire stories, and by her experiences living and traveling in Eastern Europe as the Iron Curtain fell. On one such trip to Bulgaria in 1989, she met her future husband, Georgi Kostov, who later emigrated to the U.S. Told partially through letters and punctuated by digressions on European history and vampire lore, Kostova's novel might not have looked like a sure bet. However, when the book was published in mid-June, first-day sales topped those of another surprise blockbuster, The Da Vinci Code, and it hasn't left the bestseller lists since. The leisurely pace and literary style of The Historian are quite different from the hectic speed of Dan Brown's novel, but both books blend fact and fiction in interesting ways and both keep readers eagerly turning the pages. Kostova has said that her next novel will be vampire-free, though it still deals with her first love, history. Whatever the subject, her phenomenal success guarantees that the book will resemble its predecessor in at least one respect: sales figures.

—BookPage

It's been almost four years since the last volume of Diana Gabaldon's genre-bending Outlander saga was published. With the appearance of A Breath of Snow and Ashes, fans will slip back into the story with ease.

As we rejoin time-traveling surgeon Claire Fraser and her hunky red-haired husband Jamie, it is 1773 in remote western North Carolina. They are living on the edge of civilization, on the edge of war and on the edge of a political predicament. Claire, her daughter Brianna and son-in-law Roger MacKenzie are all time-travelers from the 20th century. They know how the American Revolution will turn out, but to declare themselves on the winning side too soon could provoke a brutal response. As if that weren't enough, the Frasers and MacKenzies must also cope with armed Cherokee Indians, renegade militias, the King's soldiers, suspicious Presbyterians, mysterious pregnancies, not-quite-trustworthy relations and a homicidal pig.

This installment in the series is not about witches, pirates, magic or deadly battles. Larger-than-life elements are all here, but these are homier tales, full of Gabaldon's distinctive humor, astounding historical detail, and of course just a little bit of deviant sexuality. The most fulfilling development may be the demise of the Wuthering Heights problem, where you never care quite as much about the second generation as you did about the first. Brianna and Roger's marriage, while never as breathtakingly passionate as Claire and Jamie's, achieves a solidity that will allow them to make several crucial decisions. No spoilers, but a new calling, a shocking turn during an execution and a terrible choice are all in store.

I, for one, will be holding my breath for the next book. I hope that Lord John and his mysteries can wait for the answer to the ultimate question: what about that ghost outside Claire and Frank's guest house in Inverness in 1945?

Mary Neal Meador is an editorial designer who lives in Chicago.

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Interview with Gabaldon for An Echo in the Bone

Read more historical fiction reviews from BookPage.com

The cacophony of sights, sounds and smells emanating from the seamier side of Victorian London seethe like the city itself in the pages of this highly atmospheric debut novel that chooses an unusual backdrop for murder: the city's sewers. During this era, crumbling subterranean tunnels festered beneath the cobbled streets, absorbing the city's detritus and spewing it out into the Thames, which had become a giant, odiferous cesspool. By the summer of 1858, things had reached a fever pitch as a cholera epidemic ravaged the city and a sewage backup gave rise to a stench so repulsive it became known as "The Great Stink." It is within this pungent milieu that Clare Clark sets her richly imagined story of murder, madness and corruption centering on a humble surveyor with the Metropolitan Board of Works, William May. After witnessing the atrocities of war on the Crimean frontlines, William returns home in a precarious mental state, finding comfort in his wife and child as well as in his work assessing the decrepit sewers. But after a murder occurs in his subterranean sanctuary, he plunges into a madness so profound that it nearly destroys his family, his tenuous connection to reality and even his very life, as he finds himself standing trial for the crime. The only one who can save him is a Dickensian sewer scavenger, Long Arm Tom, who knows more than he cares to share and has a score of his own to settle. Interspersing the narratives of the two men, The Great Stink takes us on a fascinating aboveground tour of London's corrupt bureaucracies, raucous taverns and overcrowded tenements, by way of the labyrinthine underworld that connects them all. Combining riveting fact with imaginative fiction, the author brings to heady olfactory life the fascinating political machinations surrounding the birth of the city's modern sewer system. As deeply engrossing and evocative as the novels of Caleb Carr and Charles Palliser, The Great Stink shines a lantern into the dark and uncelebrated recesses where few have dared venture before.

Joni Rendon writes from London, where she is very grateful indeed for the Victorian modernization of the sewage system.