Today I talked to Marian O’Shea Wernicke about her new novel Out of Ireland (She Writes Press, 2023). Most people have heard of the Irish famine in 1848 and of the resistance movement against British sovereignty that consumed much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this fictional attempt to understand her great-grandmother’s life, Marian O’Shea Wernicke examines the years between the famine and the Easter Rebellion of 1916. In the process, she creates a compelling tale of a young Irish girl, Mary Eileen O’Donovan, whose impoverished family forces her to marry a ..read more

Today I talked to Aleksandar Hemon about his new novel The World and All That It Holds (MCD, 2023). As the Archduke Franz Ferdinand arrives in Sarajevo one June day in 1914, Rafael Pinto is busy crushing herbs and grinding tablets behind the counter at the pharmacy he inherited from his estimable father. It's not quite the life he had expected during his poetry-filled student days in libertine Vienna, but it's nothing a dash of laudanum from the high shelf, a summer stroll, and idle fantasies about passersby can't put in perspective. And then the world explodes. In the trenches ..read more

In the 1940s, Singapore was controlled by the British occupied by the Japanese and comprised of rubber plantations and decrepit fishing villages. A timid little boy is the only one who can help his father, a fisherman, find a string of mysterious islands surrounded by teeming ocean life that will change the fortune of his family and neighbors. While his older brother fishes with their father, Ah Boon gets to go to school, where he meets his first friend, the beautiful Siok Mei. As they grow up, Siok Mei becomes entranced with improving the country through communism while Ah Boon focuses on his ..read more

Fans of Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, know that the individual tales that form his saga combine complex, fast-paced, often political mysteries with a series of revelations about his family’s history that it would be churlish to reveal. All this takes place against the background of the Napoleonic Wars, mostly in Regency-era London with its vast social gap between the aristocratic rich and the starving, crime-ridden poor. The eighteenth of Sebastian’s adventures, Who Cries for the Lost (Berkley Books, 2023) begins a few days before the Battle of Waterloo, a cataclysmic even ..read more

The Memory Seeker is a novel that, drawing upon Professor Ronald Niezen's background in researching human rights, takes on the experiences of war violence and its aftermath, the vagaries of memory, and the incompleteness of courtroom justice. When Dutch-Canadian Peter Dekker is hired as an investigator by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, he has no inkling of the war crimes that lie in his own family's history. His work takes him to Timbuktu, where he collaborates with Malian colleagues to document war crimes from a recent and only partly-ended civil war. While he i ..read more

It’s just after World War II, and Elinor White (born Elinor de Witt, which also means “white”), a single woman in her mid-forties, lives as a recluse in a village near Tunbridge Wells. One day in 1947, while on a walk, she encounters a recent arrival named Rose Mackie and is drawn to Rose’s three-year-old daughter, Susie. When thugs from London threaten Rose and Susie, Elinor brushes off the skills she polished during the two world wars and, with the help of a former colleague who has risen through the ranks at Scotland Yard, sets out to discover exactly what the thugs have planned for Rose’s ..read more

An early American adage proclaimed, "The frontier was heaven for men and dogs―hell for women and mules." Since the 1700s, when his name first appeared in print, Daniel Boone has been synonymous with America's westward expansion and life on the frontier. Traces (Fireside Industries, 2022) is a retelling of Boone's saga through the eyes of his wife, Rebecca, and her two oldest daughters, Susannah and Jemima. Daniel became a mythic figure during his lifetime, but his fame fueled backwoods gossip that bedeviled the Boone women throughout their lives―most notably the widespread suspi ..read more

Spring 1944. A Jewish family is murdered in a remote Ukrainian village. Who were they? Who were the killers? Three generations later, an Israeli woman and a British man of Ukrainian origins set out to find out how their families were implicated in this crime. They also discover how this untold murder has warped their own lives. Narrated by an unnamed historian, and based on fragments of memories, testimonies, diaries, letters and confessions, The Butterfly and the Axe (Amsterdam Publishers, 2023) seeks to fill a gap in the historical record of the Holocaust by reimagining those ..read more

Once in a while, a novel comes along that is both different and special. Marvelous (William Morrow, 2023) is such a book. Retellings of fairy tales are not unusual, and some of them are quite good. But here Molly Greeley explores the real-life story that gave rise to one of the best-loved tales, “Beauty and the Beast.” In doing so, she raises issues of inclusion, trust, acceptance, the effects of trauma, and basic humanity—all in a gentle, non-preachy way. Pedro Gonzales, later known as Petrus Gonsalvus or Pierre Sauvage (Pierre the Savage, which itself says a great deal about other ..read more

Today I talked to Joanna Higgins about her new book In the Fall They Leave: a Novel of the First World War (Regal House Publishing, 2023). Nineteen-year-old pianist Marie-Thérèse has dropped out of her prestigious conservatory in favor of becoming a nurse, much to her mother’s disappointment. As she begins her final year of study, Germany invades Belgium on its way to France. It’s 1914, and Marie-Thérèse’s world is upended by harsh rules and demands that students and staff spy on each other. The matron of the school, who is based on the historical Edith Cavell, is a nurse whose coura ..read more