ON CANAAN’S SIDE
Sebastian Barry, Faber & Faber, 2011, £16.99, $25.95, hb, 272pp, 9780571226535 / Viking, 2011, $25.95, hb, 272pp, 9780670022922
    The narrator of On Canaan's Side, 89-year-old Lilly Bere, feels herself at the end of her life. She is the midst of an intense grief, mourning the recent loss of her grandson, Bill, and everybody she has loved is now dead. She is left only with her memories, the entry point to the narrative of this novel, one filtered purely through her sensibilities. Lilly's story is both intimate and grand. As she tries to truly grasp what her life has been, the reader is transported through some 70 years of history, beginning in Ireland at the end of the First World War and continuing right through her subsequent and dangerous flight to America, where Lilly’s life of hope and pain unfolds against the cultural changes of her adopted country, the immigrant’s promised land of the title.
    Sebastian Barry continues in this, his fifth novel, to explore the almost forgotten stories of the marginalised victims of Ireland’s quest for independence. There are narrative connections too with earlier novels; Lilly is the younger sister of Willie Dunne, the central character of his hugely successful novel A Long Long Way.
    This is not an easy book to read in one sense, as Lilly’s life is not one of untrammelled joy, but it is a simple pleasure to read for the wonderful lyricism of Barry’s prose. His writing is truly poetic, constantly creating images full of an emotional power that drives this novel. He concentrates on tiny fragments of Lilly’s experience to create an intense narrative sustained by Lilly’s memories of love and loss. This is simply a wonderful novel. --Gordon O’Sullivan

THE BLACK HAWK
Joanna Bourne, Berkley Sensation, 2011, $7.99/C$8.99, pb, 336pp, 9780425244531
    Joanna Bourne always manages to pack her historical romances with plenty of plot twists, multi-layered characters, and deftly placed historical detail, yet she never compromises the central relationship driving the story. Her latest offering, the story of Justine and Hawker, the young spies from her previous The Forbidden Rose, is no exception.
    The war between France and England may be over, but the spying continues. When French agent Justine DeCabrillac is attacked in a London alley, she drags herself to the door of the only person she trusts – Adrian Hawk, head of the British Secret Service and her one-time lover. From their alliance during the French Revolution to their forced enmity on opposite sides of the Napoleonic Wars, their relationship was fraught with mistrust but also yearning passion. To find the assailant, Justine and Hawker must look to their past, at 23 years of secrets, lies, and forbidden love.
    I really love Bourne’s romances and thought this was the best so far. Intricately plotted, carefully structured, gorgeously written. Despite the violence of the inciting incident, this is a quiet story, a story about a relationship, where it went wrong, and how it can again go right. She dips in and out of the present day, as they search for Justine’s attacker, and the previous two decades, as they fall inescapably in love. A lesser writer may have lost control of her story, but Bourne keeps hold of it, using the time shifts to build the story up by layers. She has a knack for describing characters and scenes in a way that’s both fresh and familiar. I’m not a Napoleonic spy, yet I felt right along with Justine and Hawker. --Jessica Brockmole

THE YEAR AFTER
Martin Davies, Hodder & Stoughton, 2011, £17.99, hb, 401pp, 9780340980422
THE LAST SUMMER
Judith Kinghorn, Headline Review, 2012, £7.99, pb, 437pp, 9780755385997
    Occasionally the accidents of publishing bring out two books in the same season which neatly complement each other. The Last Summer and The Year After do just that, so much so that it seems inexcusable not to include them in the same review.
    Even the titles are complementary. The Last Summer is the sultry, idyllic summer of 1914, before the young men went away to war, and The Year After is 1919, the year the survivors came back to a grieving, shell-shocked nation. Both novels are set in country houses in southern England, the homes of the super-rich, and both are told in the first person.
    The narrator of The Last Summer is the teenage daughter of the owner of the house. That summer she loses her innocence to a young man on the outer edge of her social milieu, her uncle’s illegitimate son. Before the year is out her whole world loses its innocence on the battlefields of France, and the story follows her romantic obsession through the nightmare of the war into the early years of peace.
    The narrator of The Year After is a young officer returning from France. Before the war he has been a frequent guest at a country house in Devon, even though he is not really part of the family’s glittering milieu, where he fell in love with the daughter of the house. At Christmas 1919, he is invited back, as the family struggles to restore the old routine. He consummates his prewar love affair, although he fails to reignite his old passion, and takes the first steps to finding a new love.
    It is almost as if the same story is being told by different authors from different viewpoints, although the romantic outcomes are not the same. In both stories the prewar world was not as innocent as it seems, and secrets emerge after the war. The Year After has a more explicit detective story element, but it is not really a murder/mystery (the suspected murder wasn’t a murder). Both books excel in evoking rural England of the early 20th century – the lush, lovely summer countryside of Sussex in 1914 and the harsh winter moorland of Devon in 1919 – and the closed hierarchical world of the village and the ‘big house’, and both books chronicle the shock, grief and bewilderment as this world blows apart.
    There are obvious echoes of Gone with the Wind. Unlike the antebellum South, aristocratic England was on the winning side in its war but its way of life, if not quite blown away, was badly shaken and lost its sense of permanence and legitimacy. Both The Last Summer and The Year After mix nostalgia and cynicism, a gracious world with a dark underside that maybe deserved to die, if not with so much suffering. --Edward James

THE TIME IN BETWEEN (US) / THE SEAMSTRESS (UK)
María Dueñas, Atria, 2011,$26.00, hb, 624pp. 9781451616880 / Viking, Apr. 2012, £12.99, hb, 624pp, 9780670920020
    From Gone with the Wind to The Thorn Birds, the romantic epic is a tried-and-true favorite, invariably set during a tumultuous period in history, with a heroine, and hero, overcoming spectacular odds to consummate their passion. In María Dueñas’s The Time in Between, some of these motifs come into play: a naïve seamstress named Sira falls in love and finds herself a victim of vicissitudes beyond her control, cast adrift in the Spanish protectorate of Morocco on the eve of the Spanish Civil War. Here, she’s forced to reinvent herself as a mysterious couturiere, abetted by a cast of eccentric friends, including a redoubtable black-marketeering landlady and stylish Englishwoman who happens to be the mistress of a high-ranking official.
    But this is where the familiar ends. In her heroine, Dueñas has crafted a refreshingly ordinary woman who rises to the challenge of a world plunging into darkness. She’s clever but not infallible, and her driving ambition isn’t to get her man but to seize control of her fate. With her native Spain devastated and Europe overshadowed by the threat of Nazi supremacy, Sira discovers that her past isn’t so easy to escape when she’s drawn into an espionage ring that sends her back to shell-shocked Madrid, where the Nazis exploit the new regime’s Fascist sensibilities. Here, she undertakes a mission that could prove her undoing, returning to the world she left behind, to face old ghosts and new foes.
    Narrated in elegant prose, set in a time rarely explored – that of the aftermath of Spain’s civil war and Franco’s underhanded dealings with Germany – The Time in Between is a romantic epic for a new age, in which love, when it arrives, cannot be fulfilled without freedom. --C.W. Gortner

HALF-BLOOD BLUES
Esi Edugyan, Picador, 2011, $15/£10.99, pb, 336pp, 9781250012708 / Serpent’s Tail, 2011, £10.99, pb, 352pp, 9781846687754
    Sid Griffiths is a “dependable” bass player who, with his old neighborhood friend Chip Jones from Baltimore, was part of a jazz band in the cabaret scene in pre-Nazi Berlin. Now that “the Boots” have taken over, Sid, Chip, and their brilliant half-German, half-African trumpet player, Hieronymous Falk, flee to Paris. They meet up with Louis Armstrong there, and Armstrong and Hiero work together to cut a recording, creating a sound that “was the old Armstrong and the new, that mature distilled essence of a master and the boy he used to be, the boy who could make his glissandi snap like marbles, the high Cs piercing.” The Germans arrive in 1940, and arrest the paperless Falk.
    The book travels back and forth between 1992, when Sid and Chip are invited to Berlin as special guests of a Falk Festival. The two take a side trip to Poland, to check out whether a letter from the long disappeared Falk might be real, with the implication that he survived the concentration camps.
    Even seeming diversions are meaningful – like the cat they find living in their hiding place’s walls in Berlin. When the men leave, they put the cat back into the walls, “it was either that or the streets.” Edugyan’s characters are tragic and absolutely believable, and she compellingly unpeels the layers that Sid hides behind. He is revealed first as a self-centered loser (not just an innocent victim) and finally as a tragically blind man, always hiding his woundedness.
    Half-Blood Blues was the winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize (the literary prize for Canadians, with a $50,000 purse), and shortlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. The honors are deserved; it is a beautifully executed, dark and jazzy masterpiece, beautifully executed. Recommended. --Kristen Hannum

A PLAY OF HERESY
Margaret Frazer, Berkley, 2011, $15.00/C$17.50, pb, 290pp, 9780425243473
During the reign of Henry VI, Joliffe the Player returns to his travelling troupe as they prepare to assist the citizens of Coventry to stage their annual mystery plays. Within common memory, Coventry had been rocked by Lollard heresy, and the disappearance of a merchant between Coventry and Bristol might be linked. Joliffe investigates while he tries to whip the least inspiring of the plays into shape.
In wonderful detailed Author’s Notes, Frazer describes the opportunity she had to attend a recreation of the Coventry guild plays at the University of Toronto. How I wish I’d been there! This novel, so much more than a history mystery, may be as close as I'll ever get. The detail and recreation of the players’ craft are brilliant. She has clearly acted, but readers are so lucky she didn't decide to restrict her skills to that calling. Every detail, physical and emotional, is spot on. And where other later installments in other mystery series can leave the novice reader floundering, I know these characters from the beginning pages. --Ann Chamberlin

A GOOD AMERICAN
Alex George, Amy Einhorn Books, 2012, $25.95/C$30, hb, 400pp, 9780399157592
    George, an Englishman now living in Columbia, Missouri, has written an absolutely beautiful book about one immigrant family’s experience in America. Spanning almost one hundred years, from the turn of the 20^th century to the turn of the 21^st century, this book is both a saga and a series of discrete, always fascinating, stories.
    Frederick and Jette Meisenheimer emigrate from Germany to the United States in 1904. Jette is pregnant and disowned by her parents. They have their sights set on a job for Frederick in Rocheport, Missouri, but babies come when they want to come, and Jette gives birth in Beatrice, Missouri, and that settles the destiny for the Meisenheimer family. Beatrice residents they shall be, and their story, their children’s story, and their grandchildren’s story are all lovingly recounted by their grandson, James.
    Through each generation, various truths are illustrated, but never in a ham-fisted way. Frederick, a gregarious man with a love of music, finds himself fighting anti-German sentiment during World War I. The Great Depression takes its toll through foreclosures and suicides. African American family friend Lomax encounters small-town racism with devastating results. And yet, the overall tone of the book remains buoyant. James is self-deprecating about his quiet life as his brothers, Freddy, the eldest, and Teddy and Franklin, the twins, seem to live more interesting lives. But, James underestimates himself. His clear-eyed view of his family, his relationship with his Aunt Rosa, and how he handles himself when he learns a long-hidden family secret are testaments to his character. This is a tale to savor and then re-read and re-read again. It’s just that good. --Ellen Keith

THE PRINTMAKER’S DAUGHTER (US) / THE GHOST BRUSH (CAN.)
Katherine Govier, HarperPerennial, 2011, $14.99, pb, 501pp, 9780062000361 / HarperCollins, 2010, C$22.99, pb, 396pp, 9871554686438
    Readers will cherish this story and not soon forget the daughter of Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1839). The famous painter of The Great Wave had a daughter. Not much is known about Katsushika Oei other than that she worked with her father. Speculation has emerged that paintings originally attributed to Hokusai may have been hers. It was common for his protégés to sign their master’s name to their work, along with his stamp.
    Katherine Govier imagines the life of Oei from her own in-depth research. In her historical novel, Oei is portrayed as an independent woman who was raised around courtesans in the streets of Edo. The political climate during the 19th century was a time when artists, musicians and novelists feared the regime. Oei was a devoted daughter to Hokusai, and he adored her. She was chained to him, without question. As she says in the novel, “A husband can be left, but a father cannot. He is always attached...”
    Her father Hokusai, considered the “Dickens of Japan,” was highly successful yet never wealthy, as he faced the challenges of war and earthquakes during his life. Oei became a masterful painter in her own right, but uncovering her history reveals a trick that prevented her fame.
    Katherine Govier creates an image of Oei that will beguile the hardest of hearts. She emerges as a strong, sensitive and talented personality and artist. This captivating novel of a remarkable woman would pair well with a screenplay adaptation.
    Govier’s writing style is imaginative and irresistible. The unique father-daughter bond is captured with honest sensitivity, and the picturesque beauty and vivid color shape her setting and characters. Not to be missed, this is sure to be an historical novel bestseller. --Wisteria Leigh

GILLESPIE AND I
Jane Harris, Faber & Faber, 2011, £14.99, hb, $14.99, pb, 504pp, 9780571275168 / Harper Perennial, 2012, $14.99, pb, 504pp, 9780062103208
    Harriet Baxter is sitting in her flat in Bloomsbury in 1933 writing her memoir of events that took place in Glasgow in 1888 at the time of the International Exhibition. She recalls events surrounding her meeting of a talented artist, Ned Gillespie, and what follows is a dark tale of deception and tragedy which leads to an exciting criminal trial in the second half.
    I thoroughly enjoyed this book. You are kept guessing until the end of the novel, and you are left never knowing quite the whole story but still satisfied that it was all worth reading. Harriet remains an unreliable narrator, and you have to consider if she is an interfering busybody or a firm family friend. The ambiguity surrounding her adds to the mystery and enjoyment. The two narratives, one set in 1888 and the other in 1933, entwine together to provide an absorbing and well-written tale. In places the novel is quite creepy and menacing, with memorable characters and authentic setting, and at the same time shot through with Gillespie’s wicked sense of humour.
    This story put me in mind of the sensation novels of the Victorian Gothic tradition, but even if you are not familiar with these, it is still full of atmosphere and well worth a second read. --Karen Wintle

THE DOVEKEEPERS
Alice Hoffman, Scribner, 2011, $27.99/C$29.99, hb, 503pp, 9781451617474 / Simon & Schuster, 2011, £16.99, hb, 512pp, 9780857205421
    A new book by Alice Hoffman is always cause to sit up and take note, and The Dovekeepers does not disappoint. Five women dominate the story, four of them taking a turn as narrator of their personal journeys to Masada, the hilltop citadel that was home to the last Jewish holdouts against Roman annihilation in 70 CE.
    Shirah, raised in Alexandria by a courtesan mother and known as the Witch of Moab, has two daughters – Aziza, who disguises herself as a man and fights in her brother’s place, and Nahara, who falls in love with an Essene and goes off to live a life of such austerity it pains others to watch. Together, they tend the dovecote at Masada, along with Yael, the daughter of a ruthless political assassin taking refuge there, and Revka, a baker’s wife, whose husband and daughter were murdered by the Romans. Their stories are unpeeled more than simply presented, revealing layers of personal griefs, forbidden loves, mind-numbing horrors, and private triumphs of the spirit.
    The tension builds as drought and famine take their toll on the hilltop fortress. Hoffman’s atmospheric prose has the reader staggering under the brutal sun and incessant dusty wind, and when the first Roman scouts are followed by a legion intent on destroying this rebel community, the tension catches the reader by the throat and does not let go. The outcome is never in doubt – Josephus tells us that only two women and five children survived the mass suicide before the successful Roman assault on the citadel. This is the story of those who survived and those who did not, bringing the reader closer to the daily life of women in those desperate times than has been achieved by any other novel to date. --Laurel Corona

CONQUEROR: A Novel of Kublai Khan

Conn Iggulden, Delacorte, 2012, $27.00, hb, 496pp, 978038534305 / HarperCollins, £18.99, hb, 464pp, 9780007271146
    Conqueror is the story of the renowned scholar and warrior Kublai Khan, but it is also the tale of those men who shaped and opposed Kublai as he was maturing into a brilliant 13^th-century Mongolian leader. It begins with Kublai’s brother Guyuk, a suspicious leader whose fears border on paranoia while he rules. Ironically, Guyuk is brought down by an unexpected, formidable enemy capable of breaching the strongest security measures.
    Kublai’s cousin, Mongke, then proclaims himself as Khan, one who deplores the weaknesses of the past government and one who will die by the hand of that same elusive enemy that killed Guyuk. Years before that happens, however, Mongke sends Kublai out to conquer more of China, a task Mongke at which believes Kublai will fail, as he has previously concentrated only on the skills of reading and studying. Instead, Kublai manages to combine fierceness with reason; he realizes, because of his scholarly nature, that he can leave behind those who obey out of fear or those who comply out of respect.
    These two aspects of the Khans’ rule are where the author most excels. Iggulden makes the reader quake with fear while reading some of the most horrific scenes of murder and torture, but in the next breath one is respecting and admiring the Khan’s wise decisions about where to be merciful and forgiving. We feel the unspoken depths of all of the Khans’ fears, doubts, and confusion that are potent, albeit temporary, moments in their trek to conquer the entire world. Kublai will declare himself Khan after conquering Xanadu, and he wants to continue his elusive quest to overcome the ancient, powerful empire of Sung China. Conqueror is a superb, fifth historical volume in this notable series depicting the lives of Genghis to Kublai Khan. Wonderful novel!
--Viviane Crystal

THE SILENCE (Viennese Mysteries)
J. Sydney Jones, Severn House, 2011, $28.95/£18.99, hb, 240pp, 9780727880840
In this excellent mystery set in Vienna in 1900, Werthen, a lawyer, is hired by a wealthy family to find a son who has disappeared. Werthen is told by a friend of the young man that he is safe and has gone abroad. But then the informant dies and the circumstances are such that Werthen may be accused of the murder. Or was it murder? By threatening to expose his homosexuality in order to induce him to talk, Werthen may have precipitated the dead man’s suicide. Not devoid of conscience, Werthen wishes to prove to himself as well as to others that he had no role in the death. So he begins investigating and enters a complex and dangerous labyrinth.
Vienna provides an atmospheric backdrop for this story. It is a city in which sophistication and high culture coexist with virulent anti-Semitism, a city of great wealth in which the poor make their homes underground in the sewers. With artful writing, the author has brought this time and place to life. He has also created a vivid cast of characters and devised a plot that never lags. I was engrossed by this novel and highly recommend it. --Phyllis T. Smith

SPARTACUS: The Gladiator
Ben Kane, Preface, 2012, £12.99, hb, 448pp, 9781848093403
    Thanks to Hollywood, Spartacus is one of the most familiar figures of Roman history, notorious and glorified for his slave rebellion in the 1st century BC. When reading Kane’s Spartacus, it is advised that you put everything you think you know behind you and immerse yourself in this enthralling recreation of the years that turned Spartacus from a noble Thracian warrior into a gladiator in Capua, finally becoming a figure feared and ridiculed by the Roman senate who sent against him army after army, ever increasing in size, only for them to suffer humiliating defeat.
    The figure of Spartacus inspires his men, moving the pages on fast, but there is much more to the novel. The history comes alive through Spartacus’s relationships with other people – Ariadne, priestess of Dionysus, who becomes his wife; Carbo, the bitter young Roman who finds his own identity through Spartacus; the mishmash of argumentative followers; and Crassus in Rome, who makes the destruction of Spartacus and his rabble his personal mission.
    This is the first in a series and so focuses not on the war with Rome as much as Spartacus’ efforts to rally slaves and gladiators together (no mean feat), giving them military training along with hope that they can defeat the might of Rome. The parallel story of Carbo helps to build a fascinating picture of the world that Spartacus opposes, and demonstrates that there is good and bad on both sides. There is also a lot of action, every bit as thrilling as you would expect from a tale of a great fighter. Ben Kane is a master of blending action, storytelling, living characters and historical and military detail. At the end of this novel, Spartacus will live in your memory, and he will be different from any incarnation you have encountered before. Highly recommended.
--Kate Atherton

HAWK QUEST
Robert Lyndon, Sphere, 2012, £12.99, hb, 658pp, 9781847444974
England, AD 1072, and a Christian knight languishes in Anatolia, captive of Emir Suleyman. His ransom: four rare birds of prey, gyrfalcons to be taken as nestlings from icy, near-mythical Greenland; thence by sea and land, to reach the emir within one year. That is the quest, so perilous that there is bound to be loss of life – hawk and human. The men who undertake the journey have their own secrets and purposes. Vallon, the leader, an outcast tormented by guilt; Hero, possessor of dangerous knowledge; Wayland, hawk master, traumatised and mute, protected by the gigantic dog-with-no-name; Raul, craftier than he seems; Richard, a known coward – terrors ahead can’t be worse than the hell of home. Pursued by old enemies, this ill-assorted band soon includes women: Syth, a Fenland will-o-the-wisp, and Caitlin, a haughty Icelander. And apart from nestlings, Wayland triumphantly captures a priceless treasure: a haggard, a pure white gyrfalcon that has already achieved full flight in the wild.
Give time to Hawk Quest. Do not be tempted to skip anything: you may lose a small vital incident or a metaphor of startling originality that illuminates a whole scene. Does four pages devoted to raising a ship’s mast sound tedious? It is not; it is suspenseful near to screaming point. This magnificent novel has all the breathtaking cruelties and valour a lover of historical adventure and romance can wish for – the treatment of wounds will have readers gnawing their own fingers – but there is more: growing respect, affection and understanding between the little group of such diverse men and women engages those same readers’ feelings with an intensity that will surely mean tears before the end. The haggard gyrfalcon soaring, literally above all, learns to live in the world of humankind. --Nancy Henshaw

THE SONG OF ACHILLES
Madeline Miller, Ecco, 2012, $24.99/C$28.99, hb, 384pp, 9780062060617 / Bloomsbury, 2011, £18.99, hb, 368pp, 9781408816035
    Whether you are fascinated by the history and the people of The Iliad, or you’re looking for an achingly good love story, or you want to escape from an over-connected world to one where gods, not gadgets, rule, this book is for you. Miller’s debut novel, a retelling of the life of Achilles through the eyes and voice of his lover Patroclus, is a tour de force of history, mythology, politics, and devotion.
    Most readers will know the basic storyline, and Miller stays true to the events portrayed in The Iliad while contributing her own insights. Here, she begins with the young Patroclus being banished from his father’s kingdom and sent as an orphan to Phthia, where King Peleus trained other such outcasts for battle. Peleus’s son, Achilles, befriends Patroclus, and the two young men are sent into the wilderness to be taught by Chiron, before heading to Troy for a ten-year war to rescue Helen from her captors.
    What Miller adds is depth, and life, to every character and facet of the story: Thetis, mother of Achilles, is a powerful, at times terrifying force; Odysseus is revealed as a thoughtful man not above using trickery to gain the advantage; Agamemnon, leader of the Greek army, is at times more evil than honorable. And of course there is the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, which starts as friendship and grows into a deep, undying love, even though both men know there can be no happy ending.
    Immersion into Miller’s world, with descriptions reminiscent of Mary Renault at her best, and not a single false note in the dialogue, is a true pleasure. Readers may suffer from withdrawal as they reluctantly finish this book, and this reviewer hopes to see more soon from this talented author. --Helene Williams

THE SHERLOCKIAN
Graham Moore, Twelve/Grand Central, 2010, $24.99, hb, 350pp, 9780446572590
Anyone who has read even a few of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories featuring Sherlock Holmes knows that the author killed off his famous detective at the height of his popularity… but after eight years of public outcry reversed his decision and brought him back to life. Graham Moore, in The Sherlockian, gives the reader an entertaining glimpse into Conan Doyle’s motivation but goes a dozen steps further by juxtaposing Conan Doyle’s investigation of the murder of three young women at the turn of the 19th century with a modern mystery more than 100 years later. Chapters alternate between two perspectives. One focuses on Conan Doyle as he works out his hate-love relationship with the famous character he created and puzzles over the serial killings with the help of his good friend and fellow author Bram Stoker. (Who, in turn, contributes his theatrical talents to the hunt.) Leaping forward into the 21st century, we follow a young Harold White, a new inductee into the Baker Street Irregulars, the foremost Sherlock Holmes fan club. Connecting the action between the two time periods is Conan Doyle’s diary, the holy grail of Holmes worshippers, which is missing in 2010. Some say it no longer exists. But it appears to have been the motive behind the murder of a scholar in his New York hotel room during the Irregulars’ meeting. It becomes Harold’s mission to locate both the diary and the scholar’s killer, by using all he has learned from years of reading detective stories.
This debut novel is a stunner. From its deftly handled intrigue plot to its clever portrayal of the man who breathed life into Sherlock Holmes, the novel is a must-read for Doyle followers and anyone else who enjoys a convincing mix of mystery and historical detail. --Kathryn Johnson

THREE WEEKS IN DECEMBER
Audrey Schulman, Europa, 2012, $16/C$17.50/£11.99, pb, 352pp, 9781609450649
    Schulman has written two stories here in alternating chapters; each stands on its own, so good you hate to leave its fully imagined world at the chapter’s conclusion. Together they make a rich and suspenseful novel, bringing in big issues of what makes us human, environmental destruction, love, parenting, and even insights into gorilla and human leadership.
    In the first story, Jeremy, a young engineer and misfit, finds himself in love with life in 1899 British East Africa as he never felt in Bangor, Maine. He’s in charge of building a stretch of railroad; 700 laborers, mostly from India, are in his charge. They’re dying of malaria by the dozens and, even more terrifyingly, being picked off by a pair of lions.
    In 2000, Max, a mixed-race, female ethnobotanist with Asperger’s (sometimes described as a milder form of autism), travels to a Rwandan mountain gorilla research station just across the border from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She too, finds comfort amidst Africa’s dangers, and she seems to understand the gorillas in ways the “normals” cannot. As Jeremy must reluctantly hunt the two man-eating lions, Max must face her role in finding a vine that could help save thousands of lives from stroke or helping to save the few surviving mountain gorillas. Adding immediate danger to both Max and the gorillas (versus slow death by climate change, overpopulation, and resource extraction), child soldiers from the Congo are killing and eating both bush meat and foreigners.
    The final third of this book is a page-turner, with both Jeremy and Max in deadly danger and facing impossible choices. Schulman pulls off this bravura writing with ease, as though fitting these two stories together were as simple as walking while chewing gum. Recommended and unforgettable.
--Kristen Hannum

THE HOUSE AT TYNEFORD (US) / THE NOVEL IN THE VIOLA (UK)
Natasha Solomons, Plume, 2011, $15.00, pb, 368pp, 9780452297647
“On the page we live again, young and unknowing, everything yet to happen.” So begins the captivating story of Elise Landau, a young Jewish woman living in 1938 Vienna. As the situation in Austria grows dangerous, her family sends 19-year-old Elise to England as one of the many Jewish refugees working in domestic service. The reluctant Elise arrives at Tyneford House, a coastal estate owned by the kind but reserved Mr. Rivers; unaccustomed to looking, acting, or being treated like a servant, her indignation adds to her homesickness as she struggles with the starched rigidity of the English class system. Her Jewish faith and German accent stack the deck against her, but she refuses to be cowed; and when the master’s son, Kit, arrives home from university, Elise finds in him a friend who will change her life in ways she could never imagine. Through years of conflict, love, loss, and healing, Elise grows from a headstrong girl to a courageous woman determined to protect Tyneford House, and all those in it, from the ravages of war and time.
Some readers may assume that The House at Tyneford is another reheated Jane Eyre mixed with Upstairs Downstairs – but it’s not the uniqueness of a premise that makes a book great, it’s what the author does with it, and Solomons has done something magical here. Her story is rich with history and filled with characters that soak into your heart and come knocking on its door at night, asking to come back in; time and place come to life in the kind of smooth, nimble prose that disappears and lets the pages turn themselves. This is a book that will make your heart ache, but some aches are more sweet than bitter. The House at Tyneford is very highly recommended. --Heather Domin

A GOOD MAN
Guy Vanderhaeghe, Atlantic Monthly, 2012, $24.95, hb, 480pp, 9780802120045
    In the 1870s, the resistance of the Plains Indians to the inexorable advance of the United States was coming to its tragic and terrible end on the high plains of Montana. Guy Vanderhaeghe’s excellent novel does justice to the heroic genius of Sitting Bull and the suffering of his people; fortunately, he leavens the dread and guilt and sorrow of this history with a beautiful, grown-up love story between two lively, warmly drawn and interesting people.
    Both Wesley Case and Ada Tarr are suffering from some bad decisions earlier in their lives. The frontier for each represents a chance at renewal, as it did for so many people in real time. Vanderhaeghe’s description of life on the edge of civilization is detailed, unsentimental and demythologized; this is about the West, but it isn’t a Western, although there’s plenty of action.
    The necessary threat to Wesley and Ada’s happiness comes from one of the best villains I’ve read in a long time. Vanderhaeghe shrewdly invades this man’s psychopathic mind and makes him both horrible and utterly believable, and he nearly steals the novel.
    The author’s gift for characterization and his fluent, literate style overcome some curious tics in the book, which is told sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, sometimes in present tense and sometimes in past. Wonderful passages abound. The Milky Way “hangs its trembling canopy” over travelers. “Birds fling out of the trees, turn into mad whirring specks.” All in all, A Good Man is a nifty piece of work, true both to the time it portrays and to our own, the best kind of historical fiction. --Cecelia Holland

THE GOLDEN HOUR
Margaret Wurtele, NAL, 2011, $15.00/C$17.50, pb, 320pp, 9780451237088
    Summer 1944, Tuscany. Giovanna Bellini is a girl of seventeen, longing for life to begin for her. When the Germans invade her village and ensconce themselves in her family’s villa, she is simultaneously intrigued and repulsed by them. Her brother, Giorgio, takes a stand by refusing to fight for the invaders. When he joins the local partisans hiding in the forest around the villa, Giovanna, without her parents’ knowledge, helps by gathering clothing, food and medical supplies for him and his compatriots.
    When Giorgio brings a wounded partisan, who is Jewish, and begs Giovanna to help him, she is drawn into a world of terror and intrigue where interception could mean death. Giovanna’s growth as a person and into adulthood is emphasized in her realization that people have more similarities than differences, and that love and fate often play counter to what we expect from life.
    This wonderful debut novel grabs the reader from the first word. The history of World War II in Italy is gently woven through this story where character, courage and love win the day. I did not want the story to end.
    An excellent story, beautifully written. Highly recommended.
--Monica E. Spence

CHILDREN AND YOUNG ADULT

THE WATCH THAT ENDS THE NIGHT
Allan Wolf, Candlewick, 2011, $21.99/C$25.00/£12.99, hb, 467pp, 9780763637033
Simply put, The Watch That Ends the Night is one of the best books I’ve read all year. Written in verse, it is the story of the Titanic from its launch to its sinking, told in 24 different voices, including those of third-class passengers, first-class passengers, crew, and even the iceberg. We learn of the hopes of young third-class teens, the desperation of a second-class father, the con artist in first class, the valiant musicians, and the new Marconi wireman, plus many more; with the exception of only one, all were real passengers aboard the ship, and all were changed forever when destiny met a silent, waiting iceberg in the dark of the ocean.
Creative and captivating, Wolf keeps the action steady as the stories of the passengers race toward a struggle with life and death. I was equally as enthralled with young Frankie Goldsmith’s ice dragon adventures as I was with Captain Smith’s realization that this final voyage would not be to his anticipated retirement. Wolf’s research is detectable in all his details, and this Titanic buff was pleased to read the illuminating author’s note in the final pages. I could easily have inhaled this novel in one long breath, but I made myself savor each word, right down to the lines falling off the pages as Thomas Andrews takes his final plunge with the ship. As 2012 is the centenary of the sinking of the great ship, there will doubtless be lots of information and many books available, but this title should definitely be the one literature and history lovers seek out first. Highly, highly recommended. --Tamela McCann

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