For the past century or so, Bulgaria has served as a sort of unwitting laboratory for political change in the western world; communism, socialism and capitalism have all swept through and had their way with the place. So it makes sense that Rana Dasgupta would set his new novel here: Solo is the story of a 100-year-old Bulgarian man, who happens to be an amateur chemist with an ad hoc lab in his apartment, reflecting on his life as it was shaped by the huge, transformative, uncontrollable forces of history.

But Solo isn’t really a political novel, though politics infuse every page. It’s a love story, in a way, but more than that it’s a story about squelched love, truncated passions. The old man, Ulrich, is confined to his apartment in Sofia. He has been blind for years; his neighbors stop by to give him food and medicine. The first half of the novel follows Ulrich’s efforts to piece together and make sense of his childhood and early life. As a boy, Ulrich fell madly in love with music, but his father banished it from the household. So he turned to his second love, chemistry. He dreamed of becoming a great inventor and boosting his country’s industrial sophistication. He went to Berlin to study chemistry with the scientists who were at the forefront of innovation at the time, but then his mother, penniless and on the wrong side of the latest political shift, called him home.

With both his obsessions lost to him, Ulrich gets a job managing a factory. He marries his best friend’s sister and has a son, but loses them as well. He descends into poverty and chaos, like his homeland. As charming and eloquent as Ulrich is, his melancholy trudge through his own bleak history threatens to become a serious downer.

But just as things start to seem impossibly hopeless, the novel explodes into its delightful second half. Ulrich has survived his grim existence, it turns out, by daydreaming constantly: “His private fictions have sustained him from one day to the next, even as the world itself has become nonsense.” The daydreams were, Dasgupta tells us, “a life’s endeavor of sorts.” In this part of the novel, we follow Ulrich’s dreamed-up children, who are free to roam where he cannot and pursue the passions that were denied him. It’s an illustration of the theory that an urge suppressed in one place will spring forth in another, and that every great achievement is built on multiple great failures. (Albert Einstein pops up here and there to embody this theme.)

Ulrich’s daydreams are more vivid than any of the actual life experiences he details, and in the book‘s second half Dasgupta‘s already gorgeous writing becomes doubly concentrated. (Here, for instance, is one character describing the sounds of New York City: “the stricken alarm of reversing trucks, the industrial growl of electronic shutters, the hydraulic sigh of brakes.”) We’re lulled by Ulrich’s spare existence, then suddenly freed into his kaleidoscopic imagination; it’s a thrilling lesson on the power of an inner life to transcend the circumstances of history.

Becky Ohlsen is a freelance writer in Portland, Oregon.

Elie Wiesel’s new work, The Sonderberg Case, is a terse philosophical novel that explores issues of identity, memory and personal responsibility in the shadow of the Holocaust, subjects to which the Nobel Prize-winning author has returned time and again in his distinguished literary career.

Yedidyah Wasserman, Wiesel’s protagonist, is a failed actor and theater critic for one of New York’s newspapers. He is the husband of an aspiring actress, the father of two sons living in Israel and the descendant of Holocaust survivors intrigued by apocryphal Biblical literature. Assigned by his editor to cover a sensational criminal trial, he finds himself increasingly immersed in troubling questions about his own identity.

The focal point of the novel’s episodic plot is the trial of Werner Sonderberg, a 24-year-old German immigrant and student of comparative literature who’s accused of shoving his uncle from a cliff while the two hiked in the Adirondack Mountains. Asked to enter his plea to the murder charge, Sonderberg responds, to his lawyer’s dismay and observers’ confusion, “Guilty and not guilty.” Yedidyah watches and writes with fascination as the drama enacted in the theater that is the courtroom unfolds, reaching a result that is undeniably just but morally ambiguous.

It takes more than 20 years for Yedidyah, in an intense and intellectually challenging dialogue with Sonderberg, to discover disturbing information about the wartime role of the latter’s uncle and thus unravel the mystery behind the accused’s enigmatic plea. In the process, in dreams and in hypnotically prompted memory, Yedidyah struggles to make sense of a family history that once seemed certain but that, he learns, contains its own mysteries of sorrow and redemption. “We don’t live in the past,” he concludes, “but the past lives in us.”

Sixty-five years after the end of World War II, even the youngest of those who survived the Holocaust, the “kingdom of oblivion,” as Yedidyah Wasserman thinks of it, are now in their eighth decade of life or beyond. In the time left to his generation, it remains for Elie Wiesel to probe, honestly and relentlessly, for answers to questions that, even for the wisest of us, likely have none.

As a storyteller, Isabel Allende is concerned with the most universal of themes: spirituality, motherhood, love. And in Island Beneath the Sea, her first work of fiction since 2006, she asks us to confront a fundamental need that, for most, is taken entirely for granted: freedom—its cost, worth and meaning.

The novel follows the life of Tété, a slave in the colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) at the turn of the 19th century. Her master is Toulouse Valmorain, a sugarcane plantation owner. Throughout their inexorably intertwined lives, he depends on Tété to care for his ailing, insufferable wife; act as a mother to his son; and satisfy his sexual desires, a horrific chore that leads to their bastard child—the beautiful Rosette, whom Tété loves unconditionally, in spite of her painful genesis.

After the death of Valmorain’s wife, during the slave rebellion led by Toussaint Louverture, Tété saves her master’s life: She warns him that the plantation will be burned by rebels, and they flee to Cuba, then New Orleans. As a condition for her favor, Tété asks Valmorain to sign a paper granting freedom to her and Rosette. He agrees, although it takes years for the promise to be realized.

Despite the tragic nature of the story, there are uplifting moments in Island Beneath the Sea, especially when Allende writes about female self-reliance and the power of Tété’s faith in the loa of Voodoo. Also deeply affecting are her portrayal of the madness of racism and the warped societal codes it engenders.

Island Beneath the Sea is classic Allende—sensual, gripping and infused with a touch of magic. And though she lives through many heartbreaking moments, Tété is nothing if not a survivor and an inspiration. She will take her place alongside her many literary sisters: Blanca Trueba, Eliza Sommers and the long line of resilient female characters from Allende’s boundless imagination. 

When Montse and Santiago meet in Barcelona in 1975, they have little idea their relationship will take them to another continent altogether. Two teenagers from different social classes, their summer romance is almost over before it started when Montse spots her young lover with a former girlfriend. Montse decides she never wants to see Santiago again, despite the fact that she is pregnant. In his despair, he decides to spend his military service as far away as he can possibly go—in the Western Sahara, which was, at the time, a Spanish colony. Not long after, word comes back to Montse that he has died there in one of the many armed conflicts after the death of Franco. It is here that the story of See How Much I Love You by Luis Leante really begins.

The Western Sahara had been the site of a little-known conflict between Morocco and a Sahawari independence movement ever since Spain pulled out of North Africa in the mid 1970s. When Santiago first arrived for duty, he became one of the few Spaniards to befriend the Sahawari troops. He was drawn to their culture and their families and was soon trusted enough to escort a colleague’s extended family over hundreds of desert miles. Thirty years later, Montse, a divorced doctor still living in Barcelona, sees a photograph of Santiago carried by one of her Sahawari patients. Realizing he is not dead, she sets out to find him, combing through the refugee camps of the Western Sahara that prove to be as dangerous to her as they were to Santiago so many years before.

See How Much I Love You was inspired by a humanitarian trip Leante took to the Western Sahara. He clearly knows a lot about the situation and there is no doubt that his heart is in the right place. But the novel suffers from the constant shifts in time and the curious plot twist that are not helped by an awkward translation.  Flawed or not, though, the novel does important work, shedding light on a little known political situation of much suffering and little hope.

J.M. Coetzee’s magnificent Summertime is a work of fiction. Never, though, has a genre seemed more ambiguous, more masterfully and provocatively tampered with than in this incredible novel.

A biographer is writing about a novelist named John Coetzee in Summertime, interviewing five people who touched Coetzee’s life as a young man living in Cape Town. With the biographer’s—and of course Coetzee’s—coaxing, characters that might otherwise feel peripheral come alive. A cousin speaks about a night she spent stranded with him, a Brazilian ballet dancer muses on his unreturned love letters and a married lover recalls with mild indifference the nights that they spent together. Remarkably, and seemingly intentionally, the interviewees all become more interesting as characters than Coetzee himself.

The portrait of Coetzee is often unflattering—he appears distant, emotionally incapable and painfully socially awkward. In this sense, the book feels tremendously honest, an almost cathartic exercise in which the author has striven toward extreme self-evaluation. The problem with this reading, though, is the presupposition of truth, which Coetzee has robbed from his reader. As one of his interview subjects tells his biographer, “It would be very, very naive to conclude that because the theme was present in his writing it had to be present in his life.”

It is ruthlessly tempting, of course, to try to separate fact from fiction, and Coetzee seems almost to be taunting his readers with clues, particularly in relation to the indisputable facts of his publishing history—indicating, for example, that the dancer was the inspiration behind his much lauded novel Foe. But the frustration that comes with the reading experience is what, in turn, makes it so genius. Truth, Coetzee seems to argue, is irrelevant, and the reader’s reliance on it is dangerous. 

Rebecca Shapiro is an assistant editor at the Random House Publishing Group.

Walter de la Mare’s fiction from between the World Wars has long been lost in a lonely, twilight world of half-obscurity. Such a literary fate is somewhat ironic, for his stories and novels consistently depict a lonely, twilight world of half-obscurity—the most haunting of all being the unsettling universe of diminutive Miss M., the midget-heroine-narrator of what surely must be de la Mare’s finest novel.

For the handful of de la Mare’s aficionados in England and the U.S., the reappearance of Memoirs of a Midget 88 years after its first publication will come as both a vindication of his enduring genius and a cause for some alarm. After all, what will a 21st-century readership make of dear old Walter’s art? Will his prose, like a living mosquito caught in the gorgeous amber of Henry James and Marcel Proust, still be able to buzz off the page and bite deep into a reader’s conscience?

As with James and Proust, a central thrill of reading Memoirs belongs to the moment of surrender. In the first chapter or two, the question looms in the reader’s mind: how far am I willing to submit to the discomfiting dream-language of little Miss M., who tells her peculiar life story through prose infused with wonder and wisdom, as well as magnificent emotional detail? But as the pages turn, the revelation comes, and the fearful odyssey of a midget in a full-sized world rings increasingly true as the perfect expression of what every human being—regardless of size—feels throughout life, as both child and adult: that the world does not fit, that we were not meant for it, that every act of love we tender towards the world is met with misunderstanding and rebuff. It is a terrible epiphany, but one whose redemption is the heroic presence of an angel such as Miss M. who can record all these evils of spiritual misalignment.

Michael Alec Rose is a composer who teaches at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music.

Tell Me Something True is an apt title for this stunning novel. Thought and action frequently find themselves at odds in this fiction debut from journalist and television host Leila Cobo—we start out dipping our toes in what appears to be a clear stream with a firm sandy bottom, but we soon find ourselves in much deeper waters. As the impeccably drawn characters in this narrative begin to reveal themselves, what they choose to share with us isn’t always the truth.

On a yearly visit to her grandmother Nini in Colombia, Gabriella finds her deceased mother’s diary on a dusty shelf. The personal narrative Gabriella has created in her own mind about her mother’s life begins to unravel as she discovers another, hidden life, one that doesn’t match Gabriella’s creation. The diary abruptly ends just before her mother, Helena, took a final, fatal flight to Colombia, leaving Gabriella with a question: was Helena flying to Colombia to join her lover, abandoning her husband and four-year-old Gabriella, or was she traveling there to end that affair?

The contents of the diary form a sometimes eerie parallel to Gabriella’s story, as she finds herself stepping beyond the bounds of her well-ordered life to embrace a forbidden love affair of her own. The intertwining stories, though occasionally confusing in their similarities, are so well drawn that we’re in up to our necks before we know it.

Helena knows she’s justifying her secret life, but she fights to survive. It’s Gabriella’s life that grabs us, though, because we’re rooting for her, and at the same time we want to warn her she may not be thinking straight. At 22, for all her poise and accomplishments, she’s still acting like a teenager, convinced she has a handle on life’s pitfalls and can avoid them, even as she teeters on the brink. Gabriella wants to flaunt convention, but it’s hard for her to follow through, even as she struggles to find her place in the world and put her own demons to rest.

Does knowing the truth of a matter help us at a moment of emotional decision, even if we see where the chips are going to fall? Or are we every bit as vulnerable as if we’d not seen clear? The book’s strength is that it doesn’t give us the answers to our questions, and the author wisely hints that trying to unravel the knot of truth may prove a difficult task.

Barbara Clark writes from Cape Cod.

In her debut novel, Janet Skeslien Charles pulls off a couple of feats. First, the Montana native manages to write convincingly like a Ukrainian who’s tackling the English language. Perhaps more impressively, she crams fascinating cultural and historical information into what might otherwise be merely a diverting beach romance. It’s like sneaking vitamins into a chocolate shake.

Moonlight in Odessa is the story of Daria, a smart and feisty young Ukrainian woman who has just landed a job at an Israeli-run shipping firm that pays 10 times better than any comparable job in Odessa. She loves the work; the catch is that her boss can’t stop chasing her around the office trying to get his hands on her. Opting for a none-too-subtle bait-and-switch strategy, Daria introduces her boss to her friend Olga, who has made it plain she’d be happy to have such an admirer. Problem solved, sort of—now Daria has to worry that Olga might take her job.

So Daria takes a second job, just in case: in the evenings, she helps arrange “socials,” dances at which groups of American men come to meet available Odessan girls. These duties lead her into an Internet correspondence with Tristan, a California schoolteacher much older than she is. Both jobs require her to navigate the complicated forest of corruption that is Odessa shortly after perestroika. The local mob king, Vladimir, comes around to collect “protection” money, and to ask Daria out, repeatedly. He’s suave, handsome, rich, persistent and sensitive: before the mafia, he worked as a marine biologist, possibly the most wholesome profession ever invented.

Daria is torn—will her heart lead her to America and Tristan, or is she tied to her beloved Odessa and the passionate Vlad? True, this could be a gooey and overwrought story, but Daria’s sharp humor and keen insights into human nature make her a winning narrator. In fact, all of the characters are well-drawn, complex and interesting, even the initially sleazy boss. It all goes to show that the romantic beach-read formula needn’t be silly, or even formulaic; in the right hands, it can be instructive.

Becky Ohlsen is a freelance writer in Portland, Oregon.