Two Chinese girls meet in elementary school during China’s Cultural Revolution. Their initial joining of hands is less a matter of childhood friendship than a drawing together of two young people who face similar persecution. Both are outcasts during the reign of an abusive regime, one that tolerates little diversity. Mao Zedong sits on the throne of this world, and from his perch terror and intolerance spill down into the lowest ranks of his troops.

Author Anchee Min, like the two women portrayed in this, her fourth book, grew up during China’s Cultural Revolution and was once a cog in Mao’s massive Communist machine. Not until the 1980s, when she came to America, was she able to address her past, at first in the form of her best-selling memoir Red Azalea. Now in her mid-40s, living in sunny California, Min figuratively returns home in Wild Ginger for an unsettling examination of the China that defined her youth.

Wild Ginger and Maple, the narrator of the novel, yearn to be upstanding citizens, proper young Maoists, but each is disabled by her family. Maple’s parents are as poor as the proletariat throngs so celebrated during this period, but they are teachers and are therefore contaminated. Wild Ginger comes from even more reactionary stock. While her mother is Chinese, her long-deceased father was part-French, a fact that shows through Wild Ginger’s “foreign-colored eyes.” While the two girls delight in having found one other, they respond differently to the strictures of the system as they grow older: ideals harden in one woman and shatter in the other. The tension between the two is a subtle means by which Min underlines the tensions inherent in Mao’s China. Each girl becomes symbolic of a mode of reacting to an oppressive government. Min’s skill lies in the fact that each remains a convincing and compelling character. Employing the personal to profess the political, Min has created another engaging fiction that simultaneously serves as powerful commentary on her complex relationship with her native country. Susanna Baird is a writer living in Brookline, Massachusetts.

In this sequel to A Conspiracy of Paper, David Liss provides another varied and vivid portrait of early 18th-century British life. His protagonist, Benjamin Weaver, is a well-known “thief-taker.” In a society in which there is no professional police force, Weaver and others like him perform many of the functions of today’s police, private investigators, bounty hunters and criminal “enforcers.” Already straddling the lines that divide respectability and criminality, Weaver is additionally vulnerable because he is a Jew in a Protestant country in which any evidence of foreignness is viewed with immediate suspicion.

The action hinges on the parliamentary elections of 1722, a referendum not only on the standing Whig government but also on the first Hanoverian monarch, King George I. Although he is not eligible to vote and has very little interest in politics, the amateur detective gets caught up in the intrigue surrounding this pivotal election: while investigating threatening letters sent to a cleric, Weaver is convicted and sentenced to hang for a dockworker’s murder.

The working out of this mystery involves a fantastic prison escape, an audacious impersonation and all sorts of side-alley plot elements, including romantic tensions. Liss describes a wide range of characters and settings with such vivid and selective detail that they are pointedly individualized. All sorts of information on the life of the period from the source of the clichŽ “a chip on one’s shoulder” to the popularity of boxing matches between male and female fighters are integrated into the narrative in a manner that enriches its immediacy, rather than compromising its focus. The descriptive details appeal to or, more often, assault all five senses, convincing the reader that England in this period was a fairly miserable place in which to live. This masterful evocation of time and place, along with the story’s charm and adventure, make A Spectacle of Corruption a fascinating and worthwhile read. Martin Kich is a professor of English at Wright State University.

Ever since the last of her four children left home during the war, Agnes Schofield had looked forward to their return. After it happens, in 1947, Agnes, widowed many years before, finds that things are not the same. They all come back with new lives of their own, yet the encumbrances of the past have not disappeared. Agnes still harbors a sense of guilt at her husband’s death and the children have not outgrown their sense of superiority to the scenes and people of their youth. They felt sorry that they could never explain real life to their parents, or their aunts or their uncles, who no doubt believed that the important things that happened to them were whatever had happened in Washburn, Ohio. And so the Schofield family hangs in there in this multigenerational trilogy of which <b>The Truth of the Matter</b> is the second book, after <i>The Evidence Against Her</i>.

Once again, as so often before, Robb Forman Dew gets it right. And not just right, but close to perfect. This is one of the best books of the year, and if it won its author another prize, it wouldn’t be too soon. (She received the National Book Award in 1982 for her first novel, <i>Dale Loves Sophie to Death</i>.) The plot is not unique; it’s what the author does with it that impresses. The nuanced story unfolds in revealing increments, like family history. Furthermore, Dew doesn’t always get the credit she deserves for the covert humor she unearths in the dynamics of functional families. For example, there’s a delicious scene when a pregnant mother, fresh from reading Freud and Spock, endeavors to forestall sibling rivalry in her four-year-old daughter. Somehow she gets carried away with her metaphor of life being like a park bench. At the end, the four-year-old fell fast asleep in self-defense. The truth of the matter is that, if there’s anything you learn as you get older, it’s that there are some things you only learn when you get older.

<i>Maude McDaniel writes from Maryland.</i>

It seems somehow inappropriate to call a book so mired in war and misery magical, but in the case of When the Elephants Dance, there’s no other word for it. Tess Uriza Holthe’s first novel is a collection of supernatural Filipino legends recounted in her family for generations. Even with a backdrop of a brutal World War II battle during which women are raped, malaria is rampant and the lush land of the Philippines is destroyed, Holthe’s writing is luminous and her characters so engaging that whole chapters go by without the reader remembering that war is central to the book.

After the Japanese occupation, Filipinos are forced into hiding to escape the atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers and the bombs dropped by American planes. Trapped in a dark, crowded basement, the Karangalan family and their neighbors are desperate to forget their rumbling stomachs and the destruction of their island, so they begin telling stories to distract themselves. The book swings between the present gloom of their situation and the narration of these ethereal tales. Among those we meet are a beautiful peasant who sells mysterious potions and seeks the unattainable love of an aristocrat, and a boy who renounces his neglectful family in exchange for the affection of a powerful fisherman.

Interspersed with these beautifully told legends are perilous attempts to find food and survive the war, related from the alternating viewpoints of the Karangalan’s young son and daughter and a neighbor guerilla warrior. Holthe’s well-researched scenes of raging war and harrowing brutality are unrelenting and lead to a devastating and surprising climax.

Although Holthe grew up in the United States, her writing is obviously that of a woman born into the valued Filipino tradition of storytelling. The author based her book on the recollections of her Filipino parents, who often told her of their teenage years under Japanese occupation. At the age of 13, her father was captured and tortured by soldiers who hung him by his thumbs until they broke and bled. Holthe is haunted by the ordeals her family encountered, but doesn’t allow this to cloud her writing with sentiment. Rather, she retells the stories with an unflinching passion and spirit that announce a bold new storyteller in the family.

Amy Scribner writes from Washington, D.C.

James Carlos Blake, renowned for his violent novels about notorious historical figures (James “Jimmy the Kid” Youngblood in Under the Skin, William T. “Bloody Bill” Anderson in Wildwood Boys, John Ashley in Red Grass River, etc.), has penned his most commercial work to date: a fictional portrait of the Dillinger Gang through the eyes of John Dillinger’s right hand man, Handsome Harry Pierpont. Although comparable in setting to Blake’s previous novels most take place between the mid-19th century and the era of Prohibition Handsome Harry is something of a departure for Blake. Underpinning scenes of bank robberies, jailbreaks and bloody shootouts is a surprisingly intimate story of friendship, honor and desperate love. After Dillinger helps to break Pierpont and others out of Michigan City prison by smuggling in guns, Pierpont repays the favor by busting Dillinger out of an Ohio jail and killing the sheriff in the process. With the gang together and their women by their sides, their legendary four-month crime spree across the Midwest begins. Throughout the daring stick-ups and dangerous getaways, there are two constants in Harry’s life the unconditional love of his girlfriend Mary and the deep camaraderie of friends like Dillinger and Fat Charley Makley. But with the FBI, the National Guard and police officers all over the country looking for them, their luck is destined to run out.

It’s difficult to identify the bad guys in this extraordinarily realistic and brutally graphic novel. Is it the members of the Dillinger Gang, who towards the end of their crime spree were folk heroes whose exploits were cheered by Depression-weary families? Or were the real villains the banking institutions that mercilessly foreclosed on people’s homes and businesses as the economy deteriorated? A masterful social commentary on Depression-era America, Blake’s latest is as bloody as it is bittersweet. Paul Goat Allen is a freelance editor and writer in Syracuse, New York.

From the best-selling author of Chocolat and Five Quarters of the Orange comes this rapturous and page-turning story of devotion, deceit and religious persecution set in 17th-century France. In Holy Fools, Joanne Harris departs from the culinary themes she is known for, but the result is no less delicious. Her trademark sensory descriptions infuse the novel with rich historical and atmospheric detail, and she vividly captures the religious upheaval of the era.

Fluidly interwoven story lines unfold the present and past life of Juliette, a traveling circus performer who becomes enamored with the Machiavellian leader of the troupe, LeMerle, who shamelessly abandons her to a group of murderous religious zealots. Juliette, who is secretly carrying LeMerle’s child, manages to escape and seeks refuge in a remote abbey, reinventing herself as a widow and religious devotee. But her serene existence is shattered five years later with the appointment of a new Abbess who arrives with LeMerle in tow, audaciously masquerading as a priest. What ensues is a spellbinding battle of wits between Juliette and LeMerle, who is bent on orchestrating a dangerous game of revenge against a long-time enemy by using Juliette, her daughter and the nuns as expendable pawns. Without exposing her own checkered past or succumbing to LeMerle’s seductive charms, Juliette must save the abbey from his villainous machinations. The tension builds to a breathtaking crescendo, with a theatrical showdown that brings twists, turns and surprising revelations. This is a dark, seductive exploration of passion and repression that plumbs the depths of the human psyche with its superb and penetrating characterizations; the contrast between Juliette’s wise and generous spirit and LeMerle’s base immorality makes for a bewitching interplay of good and evil, sinner and saint. The cleverly ambiguous conclusion leaves us with many provocative questions to ponder, such as the possibility of LeMerle’s redemption and the mystery of Juliette’s destructive devotion to her betrayer. With its inspired themes and sharp observations, Holy Fools is Joanne Harris’ most ambitious and unforgettable novel to date. Joni Rendon writes from Hoboken, New Jersey.