Tan Twan Eng’s third novel, which was longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize, is set in the early 1920s, when the British writer William Somerset Maugham and his secretary (and lover) Gerald Haxton visit the coastal province of Penang, Malaysia, as the guests of Lesley and Robert Hamlyn.

Part of Penang’s European elite, Lesley and Robert live a comfortable, privileged life although their marriage is no longer as intimate as it once was and Lesley suspects Robert of having an affair. Over the course of his visit, Lesley shares her concerns with “Willie” and mentions that she was once close to the revolutionary leader Sun Yat Sen, who spent time fundraising in Penang. Lesley was also a friend of Ethel Proudlock, whose murder trial in Kuala Lumpur sent shock waves through the British expat population. These details provided the seeds for several of Maugham’s future works, most notably “The Letter,” the final story in his 1926 collection The Casuarina Tree.

The House of Doors alternates between Lesley’s and Willie’s perspectives as Lesley unburdens herself to Willie, disclosing her fears of her husband’s infidelity and her involvement in Sun’s movement. Willie draws inspiration for his stories from Lesley and other locals, while hoping to dig himself out of a financial hole and worrying that Gerald will leave him now that money is flowing less freely.

Tan’s choice to tell the story from the view of the colonizing class highlights his characters’ limitations and blind spots. Many of the characters are living double lives; Willie hides his homosexuality, and Lesley too keeps an intimate relationship secret. Perhaps this is why, for a novel about desire and revolutionary politics, the tone of The House of Doors is surprisingly cool: The moral complexities of a colonial society are hidden behind a veneer of restraint and manners. Tan’s eye for detail and understated storytelling bring a subtle edge to this thoughtfully written, atypical historical novel that searches for the emotional truth behind the facts.

For the last decade, Dan Jones has been one of the brightest voices in popular nonfiction and a go-to expert on all things medieval. If you want a thorough yet entertaining look at the making of the Magna Carta, for example, or the rise and fall of the Knights Templar, Jones is one of the first authors you should reach for. But making the leap from nonfiction to fiction isn’t easy, which means Jones’ debut novel carries an air of suspense, even among his longtime fans, to see if he can pull off the transition.

Happily, Essex Dogs is a thoroughly enjoyable achievement that brings medieval warriors to bright, crackling life. The titular Essex Dogs are a group of English mercenaries who land on the beaches of Normandy in 1346, just a few years into the conflict that will eventually be known as the Hundred Years’ War. Like every other English fighter on the beaches, the Dogs seek fortune and glory as hired swords for King Edward III, who’s determined to reclaim France for his domain by any means necessary. But while the nobles leading the army are bent toward that purpose, the everyday work of keeping the war machine going falls to men like the Dogs, whose triumphs and struggles make up the meat of Jones’ intimate story. 

The Essex Dogs are anchored by their leader, Loveday, who leads readers through the humdrum days of marching and the often terrifying up-close brutality of real war when the French stop retreating and start defending. There is, of course, an instant credibility to it all that stems from Jones’ other work, but what makes Essex Dogs especially impressive is his focus on character. Loveday and his comrades Pismire, Scotsman, Father and the rest are the true centerpieces of this story, not the war unfolding in the background. Jones keenly understands this, and it allows him to craft a remarkable story about the price of war and the way violence weighs on men’s souls while never losing sight of the sweeping, epic scale of his narrative. 

Rich in historical detail and told in tight, endearing prose, Essex Dogs is a historical fiction triumph for both longtime Jones fans and newcomers. It belongs on the reading list of every medieval history buff.

Set in Trinidad in the 1940s, Kevin Jared Hosein’s debut novel, Hungry Ghosts, has the mesmerizing power of a tale told on a bone-chilling night. A science teacher living in Trinidad and Tobago, Hosein explains in his author’s note that he drew on Caribbean oral traditions of “ghost stories and dark domestic parables and calcified wisdoms rooted in the bedrock of an island nation.” Inspired by his grandfather’s stories in particular, Hosein captures Trinidad’s lush flora and fauna, as well as its explosive mix of cultures, races and religions, within a novel that slowly but steadily builds toward a climax of Shakespearean proportions. 

In the opening chapter, titled “A Gate to Hell,” readers meet four teenage boys performing a blood oath by a river. They name their union “Corbeau, for the vulture, a carrion feeder,” because the bird “must eat corpses for breakfast, knowing to savour bowels and maggoty flesh, realizing those too are meals fit for kings.” At the heart of the novel is the family of one of these boys, Krishna Saroop. They live in a sugar cane estate barrack, one of many “scattered like half-buried bones across the plain, strewn from their colonial corpse.” The barrack is a “place of lesser lives,” with a yard for communal cooking and five tiny adjacent rooms that house five families who can hear everyone’s sounds and feel the rain dripping through their shared, dilapidated roof. Krishna’s parents are mourning the death of their infant daughter, and his mother, Shweta, prays they can soon buy their own home in the nearby village. 

Krishna’s father, Hans, works just up on the hill on the grand estate of Dalton Changoor and his younger wife, Marlee. Their opulent manor is filled with goose-feather cushions and velveteen rugs, and from their box radio drift the sounds of Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman. One stormy night, Dalton vanishes. Marlee, understandably fearful for her safety, asks kindhearted, fit Hans—with whom she is infatuated—to be her night watchman. It’s an epic setup for a collision of poverty and wealth.

Hosein excels at setting this volatile stage and letting events simmer. Along the way, he delicately explores the often tortured backgrounds of numerous characters in his large cast, revealing their motives and desires. But the heart of Hungry Ghosts is haunted. It’s bleak and visceral, with brutal details of violence and animal cruelty. Readers will long remember this one.

While a child’s disappearance can shock a community into coming together, it’s also the kind of event that can reveal fissures among residents, heighten conflicts within families and prompt reevaluations of relationships. Fiona McFarlane explores these possibilities and more in her leisurely novel The Sun Walks Down.

In 1883, the potential tragedy of a 6-year-old boy’s disappearance strikes the town of Fairly in “the arid middle of South Australia.” This Outback region is known for dust storms, hilly ranges that were “laid down, long ago and slowly, in layers of rock,” and a sun so red and fierce that the boy in question fears “the gods must be angry.” The boy is Denny Wallace. His mother, Mary, deaf since age 22, sends him out with a sack to gather bark and twigs while his five sisters attend a wedding and his father, Mathew, plants parsnips. But Denny gets lost in a dust storm and doesn’t return home.

The bulk of McFarlane’s novel focuses on the efforts of the townspeople to help the Wallaces look for their son and the stories of the family members left behind as the search continues. This includes Minna Baumann and Mounted Constable Robert Manning, whose wedding was attended by Denny’s sisters; 15-year-old Cissy Wallace, Denny’s oldest sister, who doesn’t understand why the other women won’t join the search party and who secretly falls in love with Robert; Bess and Karl Rapp, Swedish artists fascinated by the reds in “this disastrous South Australian sky”; and Mr. Daniels, a courtly vicar prone to fainting spells.

The Sun Walks Down should be read not for narrative action but rather for the minutely observed relationships among its characters, as Denny’s disappearance is less of a mystery than it is a plot device that allows McFarlane to explore her themes. She does this beautifully, such as when she depicts the relations between white people and Australia’s native Aboriginal people, the wayward behavior that can come from an excess of ambition, and the question of who does and does not constitute a British subject.

“Don’t you like people to be happy?” Denny’s sister Joy asks Cissy. “Happiness won’t find Denny,” Cissy replies. As McFarlane makes clear in this fine work, the quest for contentment can be as elusive as a 6-year-old lost in a dust storm. 

Aleksandar Hemon’s literary career has been nothing if not diverse, with works that range from the comic novel The Making of Zombie Wars to his acclaimed The Lazarus Project, from collections of essays and stories to his collaboration with Lana Wachowski and David Mitchell on the script for The Matrix Resurrections. The World and All That It Holds launches him yet again into new territory, as his ambitious, elegantly wrought novel melds two love stories that play out amid the devastating global conflicts of the first half of the 20th century.

Rafael Pinto, a poetry-writing Bosnian Jew with a weakness for opiates, witnesses the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife just outside his Sarajevo apothecary shop in August 1914. Shortly afterward, Rafael finds himself conscripted into the army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and fighting in the bloody trenches of World War I, where “nothing happened all the time, and also very slowly.” Rafael falls in love with Osman, another Sarajevan member of his unit, a Muslim man and gifted storyteller with “a knack for fixing problems.”

Rafael’s entanglement in the brutal, pointless conflict is only the beginning of an odyssey that takes him from Europe’s battlefields to the Asian wilderness and on foot across the Chinese desert, then to Shanghai where he experiences life as a refugee in the period that extends from a few years preceding the Japanese invasion of 1937 to the Communist takeover in 1949. For most of that journey, he’s accompanied by Osman’s daughter, Rahela, after Osman disappears. But even after Osman’s physical presence is gone, his bond with Rafael is the source of a sustaining power within this harsh new life, one that slowly deepens Rafael’s affection for Rahela. 

The World and All That It Holds mostly follows the perspectives of Rafael and Rahela, with occasional detours into the memoirs of colorful British spy Edgar Moser-Ethering, who becomes a ubiquitous presence in Rafael’s life.

Hemon’s ability to pack such an epic narrative into 352 pages is impressive. Across all its settings, the tale is enriched by the accumulation of closely observed details. Vivid action sequences are neatly balanced with scenes exploring the characters’ interior lives. Although the story is not overtly religious, Hemon alludes frequently to the biblical account of the Tower of Babel and God’s decision to “confound their speech, so that nobody shall understand,” as well as the Samsara wheel, the symbol of reincarnation in Buddhism and Hinduism. “Just love each other whatever the world you think you might be in,” a character tells Rafael and Osman. The power of love to give meaning to life, even in the worst of circumstances, suffuses this quietly passionate story.