The punishing winds of a New Zealand winter greet Joseph Blackstone, his bride Harriet, and his mother Lilian as they settle in at Cob House, their new home fashioned out of mud and straw. The year is 1864, and the three have left England to make their fortune in this bold, wild land.

Rose Tremain’s enthralling ninth novel, The Colour, is set against the background of the New Zealand gold rush, for “the colour” is what these prospectors called gold. Fans of Tremain’s earlier historical novels know well her skill at luring the reader into a faraway world. With sensual images and telling details about the region, she practices a high form of literary escapism. Before you know it, you are ensnared by different strands of story and the fates of diverse characters. Like many immigrants before and after him, Joseph sought to escape his past. Tremain states simply that “in England, he had done a disgraceful thing.” The shadow of it haunts him all through the book only to be revealed near the end.

She creates a worthy heroine in Harriet, the tall, former governess who “carries herself well.” Harriet proves an excellent settler for this new land, as eager to adapt as her mother-in-law Lilian is reluctant. An early scene at Cob House shows Joseph’s mother meticulously mending her English china, broken on the voyage. Joseph saw then that “he had failed her, just as he had always and always failed her . . . he couldn’t remember any single day when he had pleased her enough.”

Joseph’s story turns into a fevered search for gold in a setting filled with desperate men. Harriet’s is something else again. No true villains exist in The Colour—just flawed human beings following their dreams in a natural world that seems bent on squashing them.

The great bird artist John James Audubon was obsessed with the idea of drawing the living essence of his elusive subjects. The same thing could be said for author Katherine Govier. In her second novel, Creation, Audubon himself is Govier's quarry. He turns out to be as difficult to pin down as an arctic tern or a red-throated loon. Govier takes the reader directly into the most uncertain passage of Audubon's biography the foggiest period of his long years of tracking down birds. In the summer of 1833, midway through his work on the monumental Birds of America, Audubon hired a ship to explore bird life on the Labrador coast. The artist's journal for those months is unaccountably sketchy, with events seemingly withheld for a deliberate reason. Govier seizes the challenge of filling in this biographical gap, which stands out oddly in a life that is otherwise so richly documented.

In researching the maritime archives, Govier discovered that Audubon's excursion to the Gulf of St. Lawrence coincided exactly with the hydrographical voyage of the Royal Navy ship Gulnare, whose Captain Bayfield was second in renown only to Captain Cook as a surveyor of treacherous coastlines.

Audubon matter-of-factly recorded in his journal, without further comment, that his ship encountered Bayfield's. Might the two men have become friends? How would they have understood each other's missions to that fogbound, dangerous place? Questions like these are a novelist's (and thus a reader's) dream come true. For bird lovers, it is vexing to know that Audubon killed huge quantities of birds during his long career many more than he actually needed to create his art. Indeed, Audubon thoroughly enjoyed shooting birds. There was something innately cruel in his nature, a trait that unfortunately extended to his relations with human beings, particularly the women he purported to love. Govier dives deep into these dark waters of Audubon's character. On every page of Creation, the bird man, long dead, comes to life again, in all the colorful plumage of an immortal artist.

Monique Truong's debut novel, The Book of Salt, is narrated by a Vietnamese man named Binh who serves as the personal cook for those sapphic luminaries Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. The primary setting is Paris; the time, the 1930s, when things began to go seriously awry.

In an elegant if rambling style somewhat reminiscent of Stein herself, Truong relates Binh's rise from obscurity to semi-obscurity. The son of a hateful, alcoholic, but devoutly Catholic father and a long-suffering, devoted mother, Binh begins his culinary career in the Governor-General's mansion in Saigon. Later, as a lost soul in the Paris of the Lost Generation, he answers an ad placed by "Two American ladies," whom Binh addresses as GertrudeStein (a one-word appellation) and Miss Toklas. What follows is a truly mouth-watering cascade of food preparations and displays.

In its celebration of gustatory delights and their use as metaphors for human life, Truong's novel belongs in the company of such books as Joanne Harris' Chocolat. Compared to a soufflé, says Binh, "A tart is better, uncomplicated, in the wrong hands even a bit rough. Like an American boy, I would imagine."

Despite Leo Stein's tenable appraisal of his sister's prose as "nothing more than babble," the two women inhabit a world of extreme aestheticism and popularity. In contrast, Binh lives on the fringes as an asiatique, and gay to boot. Indeed, and perhaps implausibly, Binh has a brief encounter with no less than the future Ho Chi Minh. He drinks excessively and wanders around Paris so much that he memorizes its arrondissements. And when the Steins eventually return to America, they leave Binh as well as their two dogs, Pépé and Basket behind.

Born in Saigon and now a New Yorker, Truong capably evokes Binh's disparate worlds, and her depiction of the eccentric, punctilious and almost intolerably narcissistic American ladies rings true. Somewhat less convincing is her ambitious persona as a gay man: one often hears Truong, not Binh, when the writing soars into sentimentality or sensuality. And for a man of such reticence, Binh's inner life is almost incredibly elaborate.

But there is perhaps no place so romantic as colonial Indochina or antebellum Paris, and by the end of The Book of Salt one hungers desperately for both. And perhaps even more, one hungers for one of Binh's extraordinary repasts.

Kenneth Champeon, a writer living in Thailand, is a regular contributor to ThingsAsian.com.

In Property, Valerie Martin, author of Mary Reilly, has set herself a difficult task. How does one elicit sympathy for an unlikable narrator? Her approach is a gutsy one: Don't try.

Manon Gaudet is a sugarcane planter's wife in the antebellum South. She has come to despise her husband because, in addition to being a humorless dullard, he has produced two children with Manon's own slave girl, Sarah. All while Manon herself remains childless.

Manon tells her story in an intimate monologue, forcing readers to see the world through her eyes and the view is not a pretty one. She's a solipsistic young girl, self-pitying and arrogant, who would prefer nightly dinner parties among New Orleans society to the country life her husband has given her. She is also an unrepentant slave owner and an oblivious hypocrite, raging constantly about her husband's mistreatment of her, his controlling ways, his undisputed ownership of her body and her fortune, while utterly failing to note the similarity between her situation and Sarah's. She never sees that she's doing to Sarah exactly what her husband has done to her, because she can't imagine why Sarah would ever aspire to being anything more than Manon's prized possession. She doesn't understand why Sarah seems ungrateful to belong to her, a kind and sophisticated mistress who values her servant's housekeeping and hairdressing skills.

Telling the story from Manon's viewpoint rather than Sarah's is an interesting tactic, and a brave one. Few readers would be unmoved by a young black woman's story of slavery, rape and emotional blackmail. But choosing a protagonist who's impossible to like is a greater challenge, and it makes for a novel that works on an entirely different level. It forces the reader to understand that the world of slavery existed for years as the unquestioned norm, that it was so commonly accepted for so long that its wrongness never occurred to many who lived within it. This is a novel that, while well written in high gothic style and deliciously evocative of the atmospheric New Orleans area, is not always as pleasant to read as it is important.

Becky Ohlsen is a freelance writer and editor in Portland, Oregon.

In the turbulent early days of revolutionary Russia, Bolshevik agents herded the deposed Tsar Nicholai II, his family and aides into the basement of a Siberian house and executed them all in a blaze of gunfire. Details of what happened that fateful night have taken decades to emerge, reaching a terrible climax with the 1991 excavation of a mass grave believed to be the one in which some of the members of the Romanov family were buried.

Writer Robert Alexander, a fluent Russian speaker who studied in Leningrad, became fascinated with an obscure reference in the Empress Alexandra's personal journal shortly before her death, noting that their kitchen boy had been sent away. This brief reference from a forgotten 1918 diary took root in Alexander's imagination and, after much research, blossomed as his new novel The Kitchen Boy. This intriguing work of speculative historical fiction recreates the last days of the tsar through the eyes of the young Leonka, who recalls how he secretly returned to the Siberian house that served as the Romanovs' prison and witnessed their execution.

The novel successfully maintains an intense atmo-sphere of peril and suspense despite the reader's foreknowledge of the Romanovs' fate. The calamity is heightened by the fierce, almost primal protectiveness the parents showed toward their children who nevertheless would die with them—invoking compassion for the royal family as people rather than dusty national symbols. Despite the sympathetic portrayal of the tsar and his family, Alexander doesn't ignore the judgment of history. As Leonka notes, however well-intentioned Nicholai and his empress may have been, their rule over Russia was a legacy of war, revolution, corruption and oppression. But the thuggish Bolshevik revolutionaries fare no better under the novel's scrutiny.

The Kitchen Boy is a fascinating and suspenseful glimpse of a tempestuous but shadowy period in Russian history. It's also a moving portrait of a family that, despite their legendary role in world events, proved in the end to be as mortal as the rest of us.

Gregory Harris is a writer, editor and technology consultant in Indianapolis.

The study of England’s 15th-century Wars of the Roses has been known to give British schoolchildren howling fits, trying to differentiate between the Lancasters and the Yorks, false heirs to the throne, the murdered princes in the tower, treacherous brothers, plotting earls and “my kingdom for a horse.” Needless to say, many Americans have found it even more confusing. How lucky then for present day readers that Philippa Gregory, whose The Other Boleyn Girl became a successful film and a #1 New York Times bestseller, uses historical facts to create a fascinating fiction about this period of time, The White Queen.

The title comes from the symbols each faction used in their battles against each other: the Yorks wore a white rose, the Lancasters a red rose. It wasn’t until Henry VII married Elizabeth of York in 1486 that the symbol of the monarchy became the two intertwined blossoms, signaling the end of the Wars of the Roses.

Elizabeth Woodville (the White Queen) married Sir John Grey in 1452; he was killed at St. Albans in 1461, fighting for the Lancastrian side. As legend has it (a legend Gregory heartily endorses), Elizabeth took her two fatherless boys to wait by the side of the road for arrival of the victorious Edward IV, hoping to petition him for the return of her lands. Regardless of how they met, there is no doubt theirs was a love match—the two married secretly in 1464, and over the course of the next 18 years, Elizabeth bore him nine children, seven of which survived infancy.

Edward crowned Elizabeth queen the year after their marriage, and she lost no time promoting her extensive Woodville family to positions of power. This won her no fans among the York nobility, who had helped Edward take the throne from Henry VI. Nor did the marriage sit well with his mother, the Duchess of York, or the Earl of Warwick, who was known as “The King Maker.” They were arranging a marriage for Edward with the daughter of the French king and both were furious to have their plans thwarted by this less-than-royal match. Warwick had long fancied himself the power behind the throne, and seeing Edward take control of his own life propelled Warwick to seek another possible royal puppet; in this case, Edward’s younger brother, George, who was eventually convicted of and killed for treason.

One of the joys of Gregory’s books, of course, is their ‘history made easy’ quality. It’s one thing to read in a ‘just-the-facts’ history book that Warwick captured Edward IV. It’s another to read of Elizabeth’s fear for Edward’s life, of her seeking sanctuary in Westminster Abbey to save herself and her children, of her constant worry for all their futures, of her fervent hopes for word of Edward’s well-being and her inexpressible joy at his release.

No examination of Elizabeth’s life, fictional or otherwise, could ignore her brother-in-law, Richard III, nor the death of her two sons in the Tower of London. History, written primarily after Henry VII seized the monarchy, paints Richard as the villain, and there’s no denying he stole the crown from 12-year-old Edward V. But Gregory raises the possibility (as did Josephine Tey before her, among others) that Richard was innocent of this crime. Why, Richard posits in The White Queen, would he commit such a heinous crime when it gains him nothing politically and damns him in the eyes of the people? As Gregory tells it, both Richard and Elizabeth lay the crime at the feet of Henry Tudor. Indeed, one wonders if Shakespeare had not painted such a black picture of Richard III in his plays (plays written under Tudor rule), whether or not history might have treated Richard more leniently.

Regardless, all the people in this important and fascinating time in British history come marvelously alive in The White Queen. Indeed, compared to the intrigue, drama, murder and political machinations of 15th-century England, life in the 21st-century seems a delightfully quiet place in which to live.

Edgar Drake, the hero of Daniel Mason's remarkable debut novel, is commissioned by the British War Office in late 1886 to leave London for a crucial assignment in the distant Burmese province of Mae Lwin. Drake's subsequent journey across Europe, the Red Sea and India is fraught with danger, mystery and beauty. After a surreptitious night crossing of Burma's Salween River, he finally arrives at his destination, only to offer these fateful words to his local greeters on shore: "I am Edgar Drake. I am here to repair a piano."

For Drake is not your usual imperial adventurer, but a piano tuner, and therein lies one of the clever twists of Mason's tale. On its surface, The Piano Tuner is loaded with the traditional elements of an exotic 19th century adventure saga: colorful history and folklore, political intrigue, native romance and ethereal landscapes poetically rendered. Mason, who spent a year in the area studying tropical medicine, has supplemented his real-life experience with considerable research, and the book combines historical faithfulness with plot drama that will have readers racing through the last 30 pages.

But The Piano Tuner is more than an adventure novel, delving as it does into questions of identity, moral responsibility and perhaps most centrally, the effect of desire on perceptions. In the novel, Drake's services have been requested by British Surgeon-Major Anthony Carroll, a military maverick stationed in Mae Lwin desperate to have his rare Erard grand piano repaired. The request is not as frivolous as it may seem; Carroll uses music and poetry to keep the peace among local warring leaders in Burma's Shan States. As Drake's journey to Burma progresses, Carroll's legend grows, as high military officials, rank-and-file soldiers and locals all offer conflicting stories of the surgeon-major.

The Piano Tuner's offerings of engaging history, drama and large-scale thematic rumination seem even more impressive when one considers that Mason is only 26, and that he wrote the novel while a full-time medical student. With this promising debut, Mason now joins the ranks of Jonathan Safran Foer and Nick McDonnell in the under-30 set of American novelists whose careers deserve close watch.

Mark Tarallo, a journalist based in Washington, D.C., is at work on his first novel.

With his new novel, Lost Nation, Jeffrey Lent has proven that there are second acts in American literature. Following on the success of his first novel, In the Fall, Lent has produced a second book with the same sort of tragic power and dignity.

The comparisons that have been made between Lent and Cormac McCarthy are understandable: both writers have mastered the art of the unspoken. Perhaps both learned from Hemingway that poetry and truth can be found in what is never said. But Lent is an original, no imitator of McCarthy or Hemingway or anyone else, for that matter. He is a writer of such breathtaking talent and honesty that one feels compelled to group him with the greats of American literature. But, finally, he stands alone, as all true writers do.

In this follow-up to In The Fall, a young woman finds a way to survive in a brutal landscape.

A novel of brutal originality, Lost Nation is reminiscent of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! or McCarthy's The Crossing—both tragic tales of secrets circling in their own slow way toward truth. Blood, the main character of Lost Nation, could be a scion of Faulkner's Thomas Sutpen, a man with a soul like a closed wound and the morality of a panther. His two sons, young men of taciturnity and deep feeling, are reminiscent of Boyd and Billy Parham in The Crossing. But Sally, the teenage prostitute that Blood wins in a card game in Portland, Maine, transcends any female found in the work of the great novelists. The kind of young woman a man like Blood had ceased hoping for, Sally is everything he did not deserve, a woman who finds a way to face the world without flinching, who finds a way to survive with her soul mainly intact.

And the world Lent creates is not an easy place in which to survive. Set in mid-19th century New England in a lost place known as Indian Stream, the book opens in familiar epic territory, in medias res, with Blood in hobnailed boots and rotting leather breeches, leading an oxcart with the barefoot Sally tied behind it and a mastiff hound named Luther trailing alongside. Heading into the bleak wilderness carrying rum and stores of supplies to set up shop on the edge of civilization, Blood is running from something in his past, in himself something that makes it easy for him to use other people hard. He opens up a tavern and sells Sally's services to the locals, but she is not some waif, helpless and adrift in a world of men. Sally is a match for Blood and for the trappers and outlaws who compose her toughened clientele in Indian Stream, and through the hardness that life has created within her, she is able to maintain her strength of spirit.

Lent creates a strange, violent landscape dotted with corpses, decapitations, rapes, suicides, masturbating monkeys, hangings and slit throats, but it's not the strangeness one is left with, rather the odd familiarity of a dream come clear. The whole book has a sort of power and heartbreaking truth to it, a quality of something long forgotten and now remembered with brilliant clarity. Each time the story takes a turn, you think you know where the road is heading, until Lent opens up a new path in the plot. Which brings me to my penultimate point: this book is a mystery tale, of sorts. It unravels its truths in its own fashion, slowly peeling away one reality after another, and therefore it would be unfair for this reviewer to reveal any more of the story. So, finally, read it.

Dr. Michael Pearson directs the Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University.