There are times and places when reality becomes utterly surreal. Consider, for example, the trenches of World War I, which Katherine Arden invests with a brilliantly spooky aura in THE WARM HANDS OF GHOSTS (Del Rey, 324 pp., $28.99). Her heroine is a Canadian nurse, furloughed after being wounded, who has returned to the Belgian battlefields in search of her brother, missing in action and presumed dead. But there are others haunting this “forbidden zone,” and at least one of them is intent on some very devilish manipulation.
The spectral voice in Katya Apekina’s tragicomic MOTHER DOLL (Overlook, 320 pp., $28) is Irina, the great-grandmother of Zhenia, a feckless would-be actress stuck in Los Angeles during the early stages of a pregnancy her husband would rather ignore. When a psychic contacts her out of the blue, Zhenia embarks on a long-distance visit to the Russian Revolution via her domineering ancestor’s tales. Irina, it turns out, is seeking forgiveness for past actions and abandonments that have warped mother-daughter relations for three generations. Will these revelations arrive in time to spare a fourth?
Apekina’s novel illuminates a crucial historical event from the perspective of a few minor players. This is also the tactic Cristina Henríquez employs in THE GREAT DIVIDE (Ecco, 336 pp., $30), set in early-20th-century Panama during the vast canal-building project. Her focus is not on the outsiders intent on reshaping the isthmus but on the local people whose lives — and livelihoods — will be reshaped in the process. Chief among these are Omar, a young workman on an excavation crew whose fisherman father dreads the changes he sees coming, and Ada, a teenager from Barbados who has smuggled herself into the country, desperate to earn money to pay for her sister’s medical care.
In Flora Carr’s THE TOWER (Doubleday, 272 pp., $28), the action is focused on smuggling out. The tower in question is part of a windswept castle on an island in 16th-century Scotland and the person in need of clandestine removal is Mary, Queen of Scots, held prisoner by her enemies, who have forced her to abdicate, leaving them to rule on behalf of her infant son. By restricting the novel to the 11 months Mary spends confined with two lowly servants and a single noble companion, Carr manages to provide fresh insight into a historical figure whose story would appear to have already been thoroughly mined.
Is there a character in English literature more easily pigeonholed — and vilified — than Lady Macbeth? In ALL OUR YESTERDAYS (Putnam, 368 pp., $28), Joel H. Morris revisits the medieval woman who inspired Shakespeare and gives her a sympathetic back story. Married in her teens to an abusive older man, this daughter of the aristocracy finds herself caught in a never-ending cycle of violence and vengeance. She and Macbeth have no children, but the son she bore to her murdered first husband figures into a curse she will try, without success, to escape.
The effort it took for the poet Elizabeth Barrett to escape her overprotective family is at the heart of Laura McNeal’s THE SWAN’S NEST (Algonquin, 320 pp., $29). An invalid confined for years to her bedroom, Barrett falls in love with the writing of Robert Browning, whose letters to her trigger an impassioned epistolary romance. Their eventual meeting and elopement are depicted from the perspectives of both the Barretts and the Brownings, yielding a delicately shaded portrait of a marriage only Elizabeth and Robert could perhaps have envisioned.
The young women in Helen Simonson’s latest novel might be affronted by such a protracted, interference-filled courtship. Set in the immediate aftermath of World War I, THE HAZELBOURNE LADIES MOTORCYCLE AND FLYING CLUB (Dial Press, 420 pp., $29) has a whole pack of them reveling in the freedoms they attained while the men were off fighting — and bristling when those freedoms evaporate in peacetime. With the same sort of affectionate wit she deployed in “Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand,” Simonson directs an unconventional cast through an intrigue-filled summer at an English seaside resort, yielding the closest the historical novel may come to what mystery readers call a “cozy.”
World War II was the formative experience for the Williamson sisters, nonagenarian British veterans being shepherded through various present-day commemorative ceremonies by their indulgent great-nephew in CJ Wray’s THE EXCITEMENTS (Morrow, 304 pp., paperback, $19.99). In a wild adventure that belongs on the shelf with “Travels With My Aunt,” discreet and dapper Archie discovers that their joint visit to Paris will reveal more of the secret — occasionally larcenous — past experiences of these doddering but hardly dotty ladies.
