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.

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.