Melissa Brown

Loosely based on true events—and the real people and animals that played a part—The Elephant of Belfast captures the turmoil of both a city and a young woman’s life during World War II.

S. Kirk Walsh’s first novel opens in 1940, just as German bombardment begins to threaten Northern Ireland. The Bellevue Zoo has welcomed a new elephant named Violet to its menagerie, parading the pachyderm through the streets of Belfast with all the pomp of a visiting dignitary. Onlookers are bewildered, but young zookeeper Hettie Quin finds a sense of purpose in the elephant’s presence.

Hettie’s older sister is dead and her father absent, and she tiptoes around the house she shares with her mother, Rose. Hettie wants to be taken seriously as the only female zookeeper at Bellevue, though navigating her terse boss and the physical demands of working with large exotic animals proves challenging. But Hettie steadily proves to herself that she is capable, even resilient, despite the nearly constant state of upheaval caused by her tense relationship with Rose, confusion about the opposite sex, the ever-present Catholic and Protestant divide and the threat of bombing raids.

When the Luftwaffe bombs start to fall in April 1941, caring for Violet becomes Hettie’s sole focus. In a time where everyone is looking for something solid to hold on to, Hettie has Violet, and their relationship keeps the young woman from falling into total despair.

With such a unique premise, the novel remains engaging despite occasionally clichéd prose and a plot that gets bogged down in detail. Hettie’s grief and longing are palpable, her mounting losses real and tangible. Through heart-stirring scenes of violence and destruction in a city unprepared for the chaos of war, Walsh showcases a flair for description and emotion, and for rendering ordinary lives amid extraordinary circumstances.

The passing of time encourages reflection, looking back over one’s life and the seminal moments that defined it. In author and poet Benjamin Myers’ The Offing, an old man remembers a youthful summer of significance.

As a shattered England recuperates from World War II, 16-year-old Robert Appleyard heads out to wander, in search of life beyond his village and the coal mines where his father worked. He meanders south, picking up odd jobs and witnessing remnants of a war he was too young to fight. For Robert, “the newness of the unfamiliar was intoxicating.”

A dead-end lane brings Robert into Dulcie Piper’s orbit, and thus begins an education. Well read and well traveled, unabashed and blunt, Dulcie has lived a life of adventure and pushed boundaries that Robert never imagined. For the last six years, though, her life has been overshadowed by a sudden and horrible loss. When Robert unearths a neglected manuscript in the tumbledown artist studio next to Dulcie’s cottage, his eccentric host opens up about her love and life with Romy Landau, a tormented and brilliant German poet living at a time when most British people considered Germans to be the enemy.

Myers writes beautifully and insightfully in The Offing. Highly sensory and inviting, the novel reads like a paean to the mettle of Britain’s men and women during a time of great upheaval. It’s also a pastoral ode to the lovely, verdant countryside that Robert encounters away from his coal-dusted home. Dulcie’s hospitality sparks an appetite in Robert not unlike her own youthful zest for life. His first tastes of lemon, wine and lobster, his first blush with pure poetry, his first attempt at driving a car—each has their own heady effect. Dulcie may be schooling Robert in the ways of her world, but his youthful and open perspective helps her see possibility beyond her grief.

There is plenty of wit and depth to be found in Myers’ lyrical writing and in the captivating way he envisions an unlikely friendship that charts a new course for both parties.

In the verdant Massachusetts countryside, the latest of Samuel Hood’s grand philosophical experiments at Birch Hill is underway. It’s 1871, and a school for the true instruction of girls—“the training of intellects and souls, hearts and minds”—is a novel undertaking. Intending to give young ladies more to do than embroider and play the piano, Samuel sets out to redeem his first failed intellectual endeavor that took place at the farm.

From the outset of Clare Beams’ first novel, The Illness Lesson, hubris clouds Samuel’s judgment. He believes he’s been chosen by God for this transformative work and that his efforts are validated by the surprising return of arresting, brilliantly red birds called trilling hearts. He desires to teach girls—but really to form them in his image, as he’s done with his daughter, Caroline, who reluctantly becomes the only female teacher in the school.

Eight girls arrive and begin their studies, and Beams poetically chronicles their experiences. The reader’s gaze is Caroline’s; we experience with her a growing unease at what begins unfolding at the school. Her father’s grand, even laudable, dream slowly proves disastrous in execution. Before long, the teenage girls are beset by maladies—fainting, red welts and rashes, strange lack of bodily control—and the doctor who is brought in, Hawkins, diagnoses hysteria. It’s a catch-all label, as the insidious Hawkins himself admits, whose “treatment” is as transgressive as they come. Questions of parental consent are swiftly discarded as the doctor goes about his intrusive plans. Resistant but ultimately compliant, Caroline finds even herself swept up in Hawkins’ machinations. Neither her father nor the other male teacher intervenes.

Beams powerfully explores the nature of susceptibility, manipulation and authority, as well as the strength of the female mind and body. The author’s prose is flowing if occasionally florid, but the style suits the historic setting.

Caroline’s father wants to shape girls’ minds and souls, but eventually the girls—and Caroline—are set free to fly. At a crucial turning point, Beams poignantly writes that “with a survivable body, a person could do anything she wanted,” which becomes a fitting anthem.