These times of uncertainty make the story of a legendary disaster simultaneously important and irrelevant. Irrelevant because the immediacy and pain of the current situation render any comparison to previous tragedies superfluous; important because the impact such events have on individual lives can touch us today. The Phoenix, a novel about the 1937 crash of the Hindenburg, is such a story.

German writer Henning Boetius actually tells two stories in The Phoenix. The first is that of Edmund Boysen, a sailor turned dirigible pilot, a man whose quest for the clouds mirrors his quest to better himself in society. He is a golden boy, and his golden life is shattered one fateful evening in Lakehurst, New Jersey. The second story, wrapped around the first, is that of Birger Lund, a reporter and passenger on the ill-fated flight. Horribly disfigured and presumed dead, Lund gets a new face and a new identity, and he is determined to discover what actually happened on the Hindenburg. Boetius has impeccable credentials when it comes to this subject. His father was the last surviving member of the crew and was at the controls the night of the crash. Boetius grew up hearing the stories and theories of those events.

It’s been widely said that the Titanic’s demise marked the beginning of the modern age, but in portraying the Hindenburg tragedy, Boetius has captured another important turning point. Boysen is a man who wears his past like a scar, while Lund, who is scarred, sheds his skin both physically and metaphorically to face the new age. The Phoenix is a moody, enthralling voyage into a past that isn’t so far away and a future that is continually being remade.

At the height of the Allied liberation of Elba during World War II, 10-year-old Adriana Nardi finds herself tucked into a cabinet beneath the kitchen sink. Hidden there overnight by her mother to protect her from the bands of roving soldiers, Adriana longs to be released and set free into a world she no longer understands. Cataloging the sounds around her to pass the long night “three quick coughs, suck of a cigarette, murmur of prayer” she bristles at the confinement, her stubborn childhood courage deeply insulted at being forced to hide from danger. Sixty years later, Adriana again finds herself captive to circumstances beyond her control and flashes back to that night and the story that unfolded after she stepped from the kitchen cabinet.

Pulitzer Prize finalist Joanna Scott beautifully captures war as seen through the innocence of a child. Mostly isolated from the occupying German soldiers, young Adriana views the war alternately as a grand adventure and a grand nuisance. It is not until her accidental discovery of the fleeing Amdu Diop, a Senegalese solider barely more than a child himself, that the war becomes tangible for both. Amdu’s displeasure at being a soldier matches Adriana’s despair at being sheltered from adventure and they soon learn that each is able to offer what the other is seeking. Together, they help to free each other from the aftermath of the liberation.

As Adriana remembers her past, Liberation winds its way through the New Jersey landscape seen from her Manhattan-bound train and the terrain of her childhood memories of war-torn Elba. The result is a deeply moving story of the surrender of innocence and love and the struggle to remember the cost of both. Meredith McGuire writes from New Jersey.

In her vividly evocative fourth novel, The Lady and the Unicorn, Tracy Chevalier returns to the appealing blend of fiction and art history that she wove together so successfully in her luminous bestseller Girl with a Pearl Earring, recently adapted into a feature film. Just as that book so plausibly re-imagined the story behind the eponymous Vermeer painting, Chevalier’s latest does the same for the famed Lady and the Unicorn tapestries, which hang in the Museum of the Middle Ages in Paris. She transports us back to 15th-century France and into the richly textured, starkly contrasting worlds of the noble Le Viste family who commissioned the tapestries and the modest family of weavers whose looms brought them to life. Through shifting first-person narration, we witness both the extraordinary subjectivity of art and its power to transform and seduce.

While the cold and dismissive patriarch Jean Le Viste originally intends the tapestries to portray bloody and self-aggrandizing battle scenes, his long-suffering wife conspires to have them changed to show a peaceful tableau of unicorns and maidens. The womanizing and egotistical artist commissioned to design them, Nicholas des Innocents, depicts a story of the unicorn’s seduction as a surreptitious flirtation with the Le Viste’s daughter, with whom he shares a mutual attraction. But their passion is destined to be thwarted by their differing classes and the girl is sequestered in a convent while Nicholas is dispatched to Belgium to oversee the tapestries’ completion.

Nicholas’ time with the simple, industrious family of weavers and their wise blind daughter has a profoundly humanizing effect on him. Indeed by the novel’s end, each of the characters has changed markedly and their lives, loves and desires have become irrevocably intertwined in the tapestries’ threads, infusing the works with multiple layers of meaning that have kept art historians guessing for five centuries. The Lady and the Unicorn bears literary testament to the adage that art imitates life, and Chevalier has once again succeeded at creating a beguiling, incandescent portrait of a distant time and place. Joni Rendon is a writer in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Although it’s long been known that Marie Antoinette was hardly the extravagant, hateful woman often depicted in history, she just hasn’t been able to shake her let them eat cake image, even after more than 200 years. By the time she was publicly beheaded in 1793, Marie Antoinette had earned the wrath of virtually an entire nation. Rumors flew about her sexual exploits and her lavish spending sprees, and mobs in Paris waited to kill her with their own hands. It must have been a terrifying time for the queen of France, who by then was a mother and a key adviser to her husband, Louis XVI, a meek man who was ill-suited for the duties of a king. Carolly Erickson offers a stark, fascinating view of the queen in The Hidden Diary of Marie Antoinette, a fictionalized journal that is a strikingly believable account of what she might have felt as she watched the French monarchy crumble.

In truth, the queen did not do much to help her own cause. As someone whose chief purpose in life was producing an heir to the throne, Marie Antoinette lived aimlessly, filling her days by remodeling her many estates and starting new fashion trends among the royal court. Her idea of economy was wearing a pair of slippers at least twice. She rarely ventured beyond the gates of her palace and had little concept of the poverty in which her subjects lived.

Yet Erickson allows the queen frequent flashes of humanity. In one entry, Marie Antoinette is horrified to stumble across two homeless women who froze to death in the palace gardens. And to think that last night while these poor women were out here freezing, we were dancing at Madam Solange’s ball, she wrote, noting that she arranged a funeral mass for the two unknown paupers.

Erickson has written extensively about royalty, including the Marie Antoinette biography To the Scaffolding. Erickson’s fondness for her subject is clear, but she wisely refrains from romanticizing the queen, and as a result, The Hidden Diary of Marie Antoinette is an astonishingly fresh portrait of one of the most talked-about women in history. Amy Scribner writes from Olympia, Washington.

Once upon a time in 1903, 12-year-old Diamante Mazzucco and his nine-year-old cousin Vita left their small village in Italy and traveled in the company of more than 2,000 other hopeful immigrants on the SS Republic to begin new lives in America. Vita, an impressively poignant and thoroughly entertaining novel by Italian author Melania Mazzucco, is their fascinating story. As they learn how to survive in an often strange and sometimes inhospitable culture, the two young immigrants whose story is based upon that of Mazzucco’s own ancestors encounter powerful passions, unimaginable poverty and heartbreaking challenges. Throughout the erratic courses of their lives, Diamante and Vita join the millions of resourceful and resilient immigrants who have given America something of their souls, ideas, feelings and dreams. Diamante’s experiences are both harrowing and humbling; even though he had ever since leaving the reassuring familiarity of Italy dared to dream of a different life, he ultimately believes himself to have been betrayed both by the dream and by America. While Vita’s life in her new country is often no less traumatic and devastating than Diamante’s, she learns to trust in what she thinks is the great lesson of the American experience: have an unshakeable faith in a better tomorrow.

This uniquely crafted work is a modern woman’s attempt to rediscover the nearly invisible historical tracks left by two children whose legendary experiences, failures and successes have left an indelible impression on subsequent generations of the Mazzucco family. Vita was awarded the Strega Prize in 2003, Italy’s leading literary award. Now American readers (so many of whom have families who also shared in the great American immigrant experience) have an opportunity to enjoy this powerful portrait of Diamante, Vita and America a sweeping saga of hope and disappointment, love and loss, and endurance and success in the face of staggering odds. Tim Davis teaches literature at the University of West Florida.

Robert Morgan paints a searing portrait of a North Carolina family during the 1920s in his latest novel, This Rock. Ginny Powell, widowed for years, tries to keep her sons together while they struggle to survive in a grim Appalachian valley. Moody, true to his name, looms sullen and mean-spirited, running moonshine and developing a reputation as a knife-fighter. The younger brother, Muir, dreams of building things and escaping the valley. The conflict between the two runs rampant throughout the book, spilling over into internecine violence.

As he demonstrated in Gap Creek, a widely admired novel that became an Oprah Book Club selection, Morgan has a gift for capturing the cadences and diction of North Carolina mountain people. An honesty bordering on intense self-reflection graces the voices of both Ginny and Muir, who alternate in narrating the novel. Ginny remains preoccupied with making peace between her sons, and her anguish at Moody’s self-destructive behavior parallels the anxiety she feels with Muir’s restlessness. She is a tough but tender woman, tempered by tragedy and hardship, fixated on her family. She is also a curious hybrid of Pentecostal and Baptist, and she limns her story with a heavy spiritual tone. The chapters narrated by Muir also reveal a spirituality (at the age of 16, he feels called to be a preacher, and later, in a moment of drunken epiphany, he charges himself with building a church) as well as his wanderlust. At one point, Muir lights out for Canada, only to encounter bewildering cities and people on his journey. This collision of urban and rural proves too intense, and he eventually returns to North Carolina chastened and humbled.

Morgan’s prose is sharp and saturated with details, and he has a particular talent for describing the intricacies of manual labor. He can spend pages chronicling the minutiae of clearing land on a mountain in order to build a road, though never in a fashion to bore or stunt the story’s flow. Indeed, he imbues his writing with a sort of lyrical sheen, taking particular delight in illustrating with words the mountains, forests and rivers of Appalachia. The sum of these parts is a novel that explores the relationship between people and land in a way both moving and spiritual.

Michael Paulson teaches English in Baltimore.

One of the odder things about art vs. life is that synchronicities, coincidences and generation-spanning family patterns occur in real life that one would never believe in fiction unless the writer is exceptionally skilled. In her latest novel, October Suite, writer Maxine Clair displays the required talent as she deals with the fortunes and misfortunes of the Brown family, particularly October, the book’s conflicted heroine.

The novel takes place in the 1950s Midwest, where October not the name she was born with, but one she adopted as a tribute to her mother works as a school teacher. Having striven all her life to be a proper Negro lady in order to distance herself from an exceptionally fraught legacy, she is nevertheless seduced and abandoned by the married handyman at her boarding house. Times being what they were, the disgraced October takes refuge with her sister Vergie, her husband Gene and the two maiden aunts who raised the girls after tragic circumstances took their parents from them. When her son David is born, October, resentful over the failure of her affair and possibly suffering from postpartum depression, hands him over to Vergie, who possessive and loving can’t tolerate the thought of anyone ever telling him the truth. From then on, Clair quietly uncovers the real story behind the sisters’ upbringing and the recurring patterns that have both blessed and cursed their family.

October is a fascinating character, tidy but hankering after pleasure, a bit selfish and a bit rigid but essentially kind-hearted. She is jealous of Vergie’s relationship with her son but grateful to her, obviously intelligent but just as obviously dumb when it comes to her love life. Vergie, unable to have children of her own, is all unleashed maternal passion, ready to take on her sister if it means sparing David pain. The minor characters are also well drawn, particularly the maiden aunts Frances and Maude, both strong, funny and insistent about their own version of the family myth; Leon the jazz musician October finally realizes she’s in love with; and Foots, Leon’s grizzled mentor who has a past of his own.

The award-winning author of the novel Rattlebone, Clair evokes a time and place beautifully; a snowfall that begins in the morning and buries a tall fence by lunchtime; 78s played on Victrolas; Negro teachers’ clubs; chenille bedspreads in a boarding house room; the cut of a shirtwaist dress. The sad and lovely story of October Suite lingers in the mind like the first hint of fall in the Midwest.

Arlene McKanic writes from Jamaica, New York.