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When Emma Donoghue realized that she and her partner were moving to the Paris neighborhood of Montparnasse for a year, a quick internet search about the area revealed something unexpected: a stunning 1895 photo of a train crash at the Montparnasse station—a locomotive dangling from a jagged hole in the second-floor facade. “That train sort of burst out of my screen at me,” she recalls, the excitement of the moment still fueling her voice. And just like that, she had the makings of her 16th novel, The Paris Express.

“The photo has this mysterious quality, because it’s so surreal,” she says. Culturally, it captures a familiar experience when “we’ve invented all these amazing things and something’s gone horribly wrong—just as nowadays.” Plus, trains, Donoghue notes, “have been not just a plot point, but a setting in novels from, really, before the middle of the 19th century, so it was an irresistible combination.”

During a video call from her home in London, Ontario, the Dublin-born writer speaks rapidly, revealing unbridled enthusiasm and humor. Near the start of our chat, she comments, “When you write a book like this, you’re offering reviewers an easy way to be cruel to you. You know—a train wreck of a novel.”

The book is anything but, of course. Over the years, Donoghue has juggled a variety of subjects, including a middle grade series about a family of 11 and a fictionalization of the youth of British diarist Anne Lister. However, as she remarks on her website, since publishing Room, her novel about a 5-year-old boy being held captive with his mother, “I’m mostly known as the locked-up-children writer.” The Paris Express is also set in a confined space, which she says she’s often written about: “I thought a train would be both claustrophobic—because especially in those days, you couldn’t leave your carriage while it was moving—but also broader in terms of the variety of people on board.” The train carriages become “a series of little rooms,” each with their own small group of characters, a very different setup from the classic 1930s train novel “where people are racing through or hiding from each other.”

Her fast-paced thriller is filled with intriguing characters based on actual passengers and crew who were on the train on the day of the crash, as well as real people who were living nearby and “could have been there . . . plausible guests I have invited onto my train,” as she explains in an author’s note. The book takes place during the course of a morning and afternoon, from the train’s 8:30 a.m. arrival at the Granville station until its crash in Paris at 4:01 p.m., with chapters marking various arrivals, delays and departures along the way.

“Sometimes I felt like the stationmaster, actually. I was like, ‘Come on, everybody back on the train. It’s been five minutes.’ ”

Donoghue calls Paris “just a gift to write about,” especially because in the 1890s it “was such a destination city for people from all over the world.” Writing about a place while living there, she says, “not only makes the writing easier, but it makes being in the place more interesting because it means I get to live there in a sort of double sense. So yes, I was enjoying contemporary Montparnasse, but always with a sort of slight kind of haunting feeling of, what would this have been like in 1895?” Readers, meanwhile, may experience the opposite effect—while immersing themselves in the 1895 world that Donoghue has conjured, they will notice numerous parallels to today.

Donoghue deftly uses her real and imagined cast to ponder numerous topics, including the motivations behind terrorism, racism and class, and sexual attraction and secrets: the very same subjects that propel today’s news headlines and the narrative threads of contemporary fiction. For example, one young French passenger, activist Mado Pelletier, seems ready to transform her revolutionary thoughts into action—through sabotage. Meanwhile, American painter Henry Tanner, who is Black, isn’t comfortable riding in a first-class carriage out of fear of reactions to his race, even though French law doesn’t prohibit it, unlike in the United States. And since this is France, this excursion includes romance and more—the relatively short train ride reveals quite a bit about the erotic activities of several passengers. As Donoghue develops relationships among characters, she delicately weaves in a brief but broad tapestry of historical events, innovations and concerns, all while ramping up dramatic tension that will keep readers on the edge of their seats, especially since they know catastrophe lies ahead.

Donoghue knew she wanted her story to be expansive, yet “squeezed very tight.” That said, reader: Do not read the author’s note before finishing the novel. Instead, allow Donoghue’s marvelous action to play out first, preserving her surprises. In fact, she says, “If I could, I would design books so the back pages didn’t open until you have read the entire novel.”

The author emphasizes that “pace is what the novel is all about,” given that the driver and stoker’s pay was tied to the timeliness of the train. For all the characters, “there are no toilets to hide in,” she explains. “There are no dining cars. It meant there was a kind of urgent pressure on me to find somewhere for my passengers to pee, or to find a way for them to buy food. So it was like a ticking clock, basically. Each chapter was either you’re on the train, you’re stuck with these people in this carriage, you’re effectively trapped with them, or else it’s a chapter set in a station where everybody leaps out and tries to meet their needs. And that gave me a chance to have people occasionally change carriages or have brief conversations or sexual encounters while the minutes were ticking away.” Donoghue laughs, adding, “Sometimes I felt like the stationmaster, actually. I was like, ‘Come on, everybody back on the train. It’s been five minutes.’ ”

“Maybe because I’ve never had colleagues, I’m kind of fascinated by working relationships. Shows like The Office or shows about spies—you know, how people work together.”

Donoghue researched many aspects of the novel both before and as she wrote, devouring “some wonderfully geeky specialist works,” including a “goldmine” of a book by a rather fastidious English stationmaster in the mid-19th century who wrote at length about parcel sorting—which Donoghue translated into a pivotal plot point. She also “haunted” the YouTube feeds of people who restore vintage trains, and she says, “I’m so grateful to the train geeks. I found videos of, in particular, elderly English men who will spend three years lovingly restoring a carriage or even an engine. And then they take it out and do videos of themselves pulling all the knobs. All these people you would not want to get trapped with at a party, but they’re so useful to the novelist.”

“Of course,” she adds, laughing, “When I’m writing a novel about something, I become that person you don’t want to get trapped with at a party. Because I’m like, ‘Oh, since you asked what I’m working on, let me tell you.’ ”

Donoghue parsed all of these minute details with care. “My rule with fiction is that I only put in details if I think my point of view character would care about them. So, in my novel about Irish monks on an island [Haven], there’s a lot about theological subtleties, because they would care. Sometimes, I think, will the reader care? But I have to say to myself, ‘I must be loyal to my point of view character, and then maybe the reader will come with me.’ ”

The train crew became equally crucial. Donoghue says, “Maybe because I’ve never had colleagues, I’m kind of fascinated by working relationships. Shows like The Office or shows about spies—you know, how people work together.” She loved the idea that “the working partnership would be crucial to the success of the journey. That everything depended on the driver and stoker being able to pretty much read each other’s minds” because they couldn’t talk over the noise of the train.

Passengers, in contrast, had to earn their way in. “It did take me a while to sort of choose my cast,” she says. “I researched quite a few people thoroughly, and I even started writing scenes for them on the train. And then I was like, ‘No, you’re not quite earning your place here. You’re interesting people with great backstories, but nothing particularly interesting is happening to you on this day in October 1895.’ So, I would say to my partner, ‘I tipped that one off the train. I pushed that one out the window.’ ” Donoghue laughs, adding, “Nobody could be on the train unless they had something interesting to offer.”

More often than not, when writing historical characters, Donoghue imbues them with traits borrowed from family and friends. For instance, she modeled the murder victim in Slammerkin after her mother. “My loved ones are very tolerant,” she says. “They know that I need some raw material to work on. When I was writing my novel The Wonder about this intelligent, virtuous little girl who stops eating, I used to look at my daughter—who’s never skipped a meal in her life—and think, ‘What would it be like if somebody like her was in 19th-century Irish Catholicism?’ And all her powers and skills kind of got twisted into abstemiousness?’ ”

After completing The Paris Express, Donoghue handed her manuscript to a Polish friend, only to suddenly realize that she had fashioned the character of Russian emigre Elise Blonska after her. She also channeled some of her tender feelings about her daughter, who will start college in the fall, into concerns that another character has for her teenage daughter. Her muses “know that the result is not really them,” Donoghue adds. “I think they’re usually quite happy to have been useful.”

On her website, the award-winning historical novelist says that if she had a time machine, she would go back to late 18th-century London to be a “rich spinster of scandalous habits.” An unabashedly practical time traveler, Donoghue says, “Let’s face it, none of us really want to go back and be a street urchin without asthma medicine. Especially as then our time travel wouldn’t last long, if we’re going to die of diphtheria on day four. We all want time travel on our terms.”

Read our starred review of The Paris Express.

Photo of Emma Donoghue © Woodgate Photography.

In her thrilling historical novel, The Paris Express, Emma Donoghue takes readers on a doomed train ride at the turn of the 20th century.
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“Like a knife turning the world to butter, Engine 721 bursts through the wooden buffers.” That’s how Emma Donoghue describes a real-life railway disaster in her thrilling, thought-provoking historical novel, The Paris Express. Inspired by an iconic 1895 photo of a train engine dangling out of Paris’s Montparnasse Station, the multifaceted author (Room, The Wonder), artfully blends fact with her astute imagination to create a story representing a broad slice of social concerns, including innovation and technology, as well as art. As the train hurtles toward its fate, Donoghue examines the transportation mode as a metaphor—the train is “a moving image of the unfairness of the long con of life.”

The action of the novel begins with an 8:30 a.m. stop in Granville and continues through the Paris crash that afternoon at 4:01. Chapters are organized like a train schedule, marking various station arrivals, departures and delays, while passengers arrive and occasionally move from carriage to carriage, each carriage “as intimate as a dinner party, but one with no host and guests assembled at random.”

And oh, what a dinner party this is! People of all ages, classes, races and nationalities interact, as Donoghue introduces characters based on passengers who were actually aboard that 1895 train, as well as other real-life personalities whom she “invites” aboard, and a few characters entirely of her invention. Amid the drama, Donoghue has plenty of fun, for instance, having her characters refer to the recently erected Eiffel Tower as “that monstrosity,” or writing that “Ever since that morning in Le Havre decades back when Monet daubed his first Impression, Sunrise, Normandy’s been infested with painters.”

Tension builds from the start of the journey, when a radical young woman nicknamed Mado raises the suspicions of Russian emigree and social worker Elise Blonska. Donoghue explains the technology and handling of the locomotive in riveting scenes, bringing the crew to life amid descriptions of corporate greed. Only a writer as talented as Donoghue could have readers so immersed in fin de siecle Paris while also, perhaps, musing about the motivations and movements involved in the contemporary assassination of which Luigi Mangione has been accused.

Each and every beautifully written word counts in The Paris Express, as Donoghue wonderfully illuminates the fleeting qualities of both life and art. As Henry Tanner notes: “That’s the paradox of trains. . . . They show you what you’d never have seen otherwise, but only for a tantalising second.”

Read our interview with Emma Donoghue about The Paris Express.

Each and every beautifully written word counts in The Paris Express, Emma Donoghue’s thrilling, thought-provoking historical novel inspired by a real-life railway disaster.
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How does one review a book when discussing even the basics of the plot might spoil it? Such is the dilemma with Kirsten Menger-Anderson’s fascinating The Expert of Subtle Revisions. The novel reminded me of 1950s Russian puzzle book The Moscow Puzzles, not just because it’s about a group of mathematicians/philosophers/Wikipedia contributors, but because the solution to its main question is so devilishly clever.

The book opens in 2016, on the birthday of a strange woman named Hase (German for “Rabbit”). Her equally strange father lives on a rickety boat and is missing. Hase grows more and more anxious as the day goes on and he doesn’t show up; it’s not like this meticulous man to forget her birthday. 

Then, in its fourth chapter, the novel jumps backward to 1933 Austria, a most perilous time and place. You’ll wonder what this era has to do with Hase, an impoverished Wikipedia contributor who has neither birth certificate, Social Security number nor any of those other documents that lets the government know you exist. The answer is everything.  

Chapter 4 is narrated by a young man named Anton who has been named a Privatdozent, or an unpaid lecturer, at a university in Vienna. His part of the tale is fraught with nasty rivalries, secret loves, weird cults, blackmail, seances, political turmoil and even an assassination. Then, Anton comes into possession of a music box full of strange little gears and an especially haunting melody. Meanwhile, in 2016, Hase is on the lookout for a book her father wants her to find “in the event.” In the event of what, exactly?

The author’s cool writing style is deceptive, for her characters who so value their intellect are buffeted about by all kinds of crazy passions. These passions, and the one great problem that drives the book, have everything to do with the workings of their beautiful minds. It leads to an ending that’s surreal, impossible and a tad Lynchian. Menger-Anderson’s talent makes you believe in it.

In The Expert of Subtle Revisions, Kirsten Menger-Anderson’s oddball intellectual characters are buffeted about by all kinds of crazy passions, which have everything to do with the workings of their beautiful minds.

The past feels astonishingly present in Joanna Miller’s debut novel, The Eights, a stirring work of historical fiction set in 1920s England on the heels of World War I, during the first year women are officially admitted into Oxford University’s hallowed halls.

Among the incoming female “freshers” are Beatrice, Marianne, Dora and Otto: the titular Eights, thus named for the dormitory floor they share. Strangers at first, each with their own private hopes and heartaches, they soon forge a bond of sisterhood stronger than blood as they head into the academic trenches, where they soon realize that the minds that most need educating may not be their own. United, these remarkable, resilient women face an uncomfortable new world in which they are dismissed, derided, desired and demonized (something that readers a century later will all too easily recognize), but they refuse to be defeated.

Rigorously researched, The Eights brilliantly synthesizes fact and fiction. Miller breathes life into a bygone era; her skilled storytelling makes it impossible for readers to discern which bits are based on actual events and which stem from Miller’s imagination, and the trials and triumphs of the quartet are deeply relatable. In particular, the struggle for gender equality and the impossible standards women face feel especially timely: A plot point involving a debate about whether women have any business being at Oxford prompts the novel’s own version of the famous Barbie movie monologue, “Women are mocked for being too dowdy or too attractive, too feeble-minded or too diligent. They are criticized for breaking rules, for slavishly adhering to rules, for using the university’s resources lavishly, for operating on a shoestring. . . . The truth of the matter is that with some men they can never win.”

Miller’s plotting, world building and character development are all excellent, but it is her facility with language that truly gives The Eights its power: Her prose is precise yet lyrical, restrained yet impactful, exactly what one would expect from a writer of award-winning gift poetry. The Eights is a rewarding read for anyone who enjoys emotional, character-driven narratives and for anyone who celebrates impeccable writing. But most of all, it’s for anyone who has ever been told they couldn’t do something but did it anyway.

The Eights is a rewarding read for anyone who enjoys emotional, character-driven narratives and who celebrates impeccable writing. But most of all, it’s for anyone who has ever been told they couldn’t do something but did it anyway.
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Author of multiple absorbing stories, including the Carol award winner The Lost Melody, Joanna Davidson Politano does it again with The Curious Inheritance of Blakely House, delivering an exemplary historical romance led by an endearing character and set in a house shrouded in mystery.

In 1901 while working at her aunt’s curiosity and clock repair shop in Shropshire, England, Sydney Forrester learns she has inherited a house from her great uncle, Emmett Sinclair, who was an acclaimed inventor. Blakely House is an unusual house fraught with mystery and fascinating machinery that will draw readers in. The house is inhabited by an interesting group of people, including pirates and adventurers who were rescued by Emmett after their ships wrecked on the shores nearby.

When Sydney goes to visit the property, she is met with hostility, as her relatives devise ways to prove Sydney was involved in her uncle’s death. But while at first Sydney’s relationship with the head of staff at Blakely House (and Emmett’s former righthand man) is cool and distant, in time, a friendship develops between them. Sydney learns about her uncle’s intriguing story and is captivated by the gadgetry and inventions in his house, including one project she is determined to work on herself, while the appearance of an unexpected stranger on the shoreline adds to the suspense of the story.

The novel is layered with various mysteries and characters’ stories that connect beautifully. Chapters begin with snippets of Emmett’s letters to his beloved Sophie, a mysterious woman whose connection to the house, and to Emmett, Sydney is determined to uncover. Sydney is a delightful character with an eccentric nature and a brilliant understanding of machinery. Her faith journey is also tactfully explored.

Set in an atmospheric house packed with thrilling mysteries, The Curious Inheritance of Blakely House is a splendid story that will win readers’ hearts.

Set in an atmospheric house packed with thrilling mysteries, The Curious Inheritance of Blakely House is a splendid story that will win readers’ hearts.
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What if the innocent dead of the Holocaust had gone on to live alternate lives? And what if each survivor didn’t know that others in their family existed elsewhere in the universe? That’s the central premise of Rooms for Vanishing, Stuart Nadler’s poignant, ornate tapestry of a novel. 

At the center of this grief-soaked, nonlinear narrative are the Altermans, a Jewish family originally from Vienna. In 1979 London, Sonja Alterman is looking for her missing husband, Franz, an orchestra conductor “successful enough that he occasionally appeared on television looking appropriately bewildered.” Before he departed, Franz left behind a curious artifact, “a photograph of a woman standing in the center of a church.” 

That woman, who appears to be about 18 years old, may or may not be Anya, their daughter. But Anya died a decade earlier at age 9 from a misdiagnosed illness. Adding to the mystery is another wrinkle: Sonja herself died years earlier after her father, Arnold, put her on a Kindertransport to London and warned her, “Do not under any circumstances say anything in Yiddish.” After Sonja’s departure, the Nazis killed her father, her mother, Fania, and her 6-month-old brother, Moses. 

Nadler shifts among the family members’ perspectives throughout this intricate novel. Readers meet Fania, who works as a masseuse in a Montreal hotel in 1966, where she suspects that one of her clients may be her doppelganger; Moses, who meets a man who says he was shot dead at the Prague train station years earlier; and Arnold, who celebrates his 99th birthday and receives a letter from a woman who claims to be Sonja.

Ghosts and doubles abound in Rooms for Vanishing. Like many stories involving alternate realities, Nadler’s novel can get needlessly complex, but it compensates with exceptionally powerful moments, as when Moses notes, regarding the young boys who were Nazi soldiers, “the face of mid-century evil, I discovered, was a cleanly shaven face.” One can’t erase the travesties of the past, but one can imagine a different future, as Nadler does in this emotionally resonant work.

Ghosts and doppelgangers abound in Stuart Nadler’s poignant, ornate tapestry of a novel, which shifts among the perspectives of members of a Jewish family originally from Vienna.
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It’s not hard to imagine the powerful desire of those previously enslaved to live on their own terms, directing their own destinies. However, the existence of a self-governing group of Black Americans while Civil War fires still smoldered is harder to fathom—and yet, the deeds and oral histories exist. Happy Land, by Dolen Perkins-Valdez, intertwines fact and fiction to tell the story of freed men and women who left behind slavery’s chains for self-sufficiency, self-determination and a true community. 

For her fourth novel, Perkins-Valdez extensively researched the Kingdom of the Happy Land, a community established along the border between North Carolina and South Carolina that was home to 200 or more formerly enslaved people. These men and women worked on land owned by a white widow and eventually bought a substantial number of acres. The inhabitants named a king and queen (in homage to their African heritage, Perkins-Valdez suggests), and formed a governing council. They built homes, sold lauded herbal remedies and thrived for several decades. 

Perkins-Valdez takes the bare-bones historical narrative and puts imagined flesh to the queen, Luella Montgomery, and the women who are descended from her. Happy Land opens with Nikki visiting her grandmother Rita in North Carolina in the present day, then alternates between Nikki’s timeline and the 1870s, when Luella lived and ruled. As the novel unfolds, we learn Nikki’s family history and walk with her as she encounters family secrets. Perkins-Valdez paints stirring portraits of the strong-minded Luella and the women in her lineage: Nikki; her daughter, Shawnie; her mother, Lorelle; and her grandmother, Mother Rita, who is holding on to her portion of the Kingdom while facing eviction by a white family claiming rightful ownership. 

Happy Land sheds light on the often deceitful ways developers took property from Black landowners during the 20th century. Though the plot occasionally gets bogged down in the author’s attempts to explain legalities and history, her characters are imbued with a captivating realism and vividness. These women are tenacious and industrious, thoughtful and curious, and their desire to preserve where they came from forms the heart of the novel. Through delving into her past, Nikki finds a deeper connection to her present and begins to chart a new, more fulfilling course. Just as her ancestors did. 

Happy Land by Dolen Perkins-Valdez intertwines fact and fiction to tell the story of men and women who left behind slavery’s chains for self-sufficiency, self-determination and a true community.
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From 1935 to 1944, the Farm Security Administration commissioned photographs of life during the Great Depression, and in particular, the Dust Bowl. Roy Stryker, head of the New Deal photographic initiative, was a merciless editor, and to obtain his desired portrayal of American rural poverty, he rejected thousands of negatives from Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, Arthur Rothstein and others, not only declining to display them but also mutilating the images, “killing” them with a hole punch. In 2018, London’s Whitechapel Gallery hosted an exhibition of these altered photographs, titled Killed Negatives: Unseen Images of 1930s America.

In some of the photographs from Whitechapel Gallery’s exhibition, the effect of the hole punch is surreal, even a little funny, the black hole appearing like an eclipse over a brittle landscape, or a ball bouncing into the scene. In others, it has a harsher effect, as when the hole punctures a person’s face. These missing circles are an easy metaphor for lost memories, reminding us how simple it is to alter the way history is told.

 

Photographer: Carl Mydans. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Farm Security Administration/ Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives.
“What kinds of forgetting are we ceaselessly encouraged to do, just to go on living?”

Like Killed Negatives, Karen Russell’s second novel, The Antidote, transforms the iconic American imagery of the Dust Bowl into a stunning work of art: daring, masterful, hard to look away from. Her novel includes some of these censored Dust Bowl images, and a New Deal photographer named Cleo—whose Graflex Speed Graphic camera has an unusual power, and whose work has been rejected many times via Stryker’s punch—is one of the central characters in this Technicolor epic of land, history and memory.

Within The Antidote, the hole punch-like sense of something missing is represented by the titular character, a prairie witch known as the Antidote. She is a “Vault”—a bank of sorts, not for money but for memories. “I will take whatever they cannot stand to know,” the Antidote thinks in a memory of her training as a Vault. “The memories that make them chase impossible dreams, that make them sick with regret and grief. Whatever they hope to preserve in the future. Whatever cargo unbalances the cart. . . . Milk, honey, rainwater, venom, blood. Horror, happiness, sorrow, regret—pour it all into me.

The witch was the very first seed of the book, an idea that came to Russell when she was finishing up her Pulitzer-finalist debut novel, Swamplandia!, in 2009. Speaking by phone from Oregon, Russell says that at that time she had been writing around trauma, personal and familial, and exploring how private traumas can aggregate into a mass denial. “That’s how I write, kind of like a child,” she says. “I like to literalize these things that are very abstract. . . . The question becomes, what kinds of forgetting are we ceaselessly encouraged to do, just to go on living as we do? What can people not carry into the future?”

Along with the Antidote and Cleo, the novel follows several other citizens of Uz, Nebraska, including a humble farmer named Harp whose wheat crop is flourishing while his neighbors struggle to make ends meet. Russell cracks a joke that “it’s hard to make [soil] sexy,” but Harp’s tender sections make a good go of it. There’s also Harp’s niece, Dell, a teenage basketballer who’s mourning the murder of her mother.

“You can’t imagine a viable future, a world that’s kinder and more just than what we’ve got going today, without returning to the past.”

Inevitability is a powerful presence in the novel, which is bookended by two true events: the Black Sunday dust storm and the deadly Republican River flood. By 1935, when the book begins, nothing can avert these disasters. Even the New Deal agency soil expert sent to screen The Plow That Broke the Plains for Uz’s farmers is forced to admit that they can’t get their topsoil back.

But though some events seem inevitable, it’s apparent that hard lines can yet be redrawn. The way Russell considers the ecological elements of her novel is a distinct departure from the majority of environmental fiction, which is dominated by doomsday narratives, as if complete ecosystem collapse were already inescapable.

“I really went into this thinking, I want to tune my imagination to a future that’s not apocalyptic,” Russell says. “Elvia Wilk . . . wrote a book called Death by Landscape, and she talks about how utopias and dystopias are coterminous. I also love Joy Williams’ Harrow. What a dark book, but you can often feel the seeds of a future world, right? You can feel a resistance or a countervailing force, even if it’s like a micro-utopia, or a community of dreamers that make themselves a blueprint that’s not this fortress world.”

 

Photographer: Carl Mydans. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Farm Security Administration/ Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives.
Without deep roots to hold our story together, nothing new can grow.

 

When it comes to what Russell calls “the weathervaning of utopias and dystopias,” Cleo’s magical camera is the novel’s greatest tool, as distinct as Philip Pullman’s subtle knife. It has the power to reveal scenes from the past, when the Pawnee people farmed the land effectively and nondestructively, as well as possible futures, good and bad. (At the end of the book, a “Land Lost Acknowledgment,” co-authored with historian James Riding In, recounts the history of the Pawnees, whose presence on the Central Plains predates foreign settlers by at least a thousand years.)

“You can’t imagine a viable future, a world that’s kinder and more just than what we’ve got going today, without returning to the past,” Russell says. “I just don’t think that you can skip that step. One of the exciting things about this book for me was [that] so many of the solutions are here with us today. We don’t have to indenture ourselves to Elon Musk’s space fleet.”

As for those solutions, Russell points to Land Back efforts and the work of Rebecca Clarren, whose book The Cost of Free Land investigates the history of her Jewish family’s land as stolen from the Lakota. Another solution: We consider our whole history, no holes punched. Through novels like Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois and Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys, more stories based on our nation’s full history are reaching readers. In The Antidote, the Dust Bowl is the perfect metaphor for the United States: Without deep roots to hold our story together, nothing new can grow. Russell brings up the recent wave of legislation restricting the teaching of racial history in public schools, as we’ve seen proposed in more than 70% of U.S. state legislatures in the first half of the 2020s. To pass laws that forbid the teaching of true American history in classrooms is to risk a cultural dust bowl, with children primed to perpetuate the individualistic mistakes of their parents and grandparents out of pure ignorance.

“I was taught this history in a very partitioned way, and it’s like, the dispossession of Indigenous people happens over here, and the Dust Bowl happens over here, and they’re in separate boxes. That started to feel like lunacy to me,” says Russell. She describes how textbooks make the connection between ecological and environmental collapse, “but it was very strange to me that we omit the violence and dispossession and attempted genocide and ethnocide.”

What enables our forgetting is a hollow perception of scarcity, represented by the phrase “better you than me” (a refrain in the novel) and its cousin, “I’ll give when I have more for myself.”

“You have to partition your own heart and consciousness to live the way that we do,” Russell says, describing how it’s “so tempting” to ignore the injustice and suffering around us. “You have to exile a lot from your waking awareness, and you have to tell the story that, ‘Oh, well, that has nothing to do with me,’ which is such a fatally lonely story.”

Instead, Russell’s characters find themselves blessed with little miracles that force them out of step with the tradition of forgetting. “The emptiness of any place is an illusion,” Cleo says. “That’s what this camera has taught me. Any piece of earth is brimming over with living. I think this must be what the poets mean when they write in the fullness of time.” Books like The Antidote often leave a reader wondering, “OK, what am I supposed to do to fix all this?” But Russell’s novel won’t leave you at all. It’s a cascade of razed illusions, brimming over with living.

Read our starred review of The Antidote.

Photos by Carl Mydans. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Farm Security Administration/ Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives.

Karen Russell author photo © Annette Hornischer.

A decade and a half in the making, The Antidote brings together undertold history of 1930s America and the fantastical vision that made Swamplandia! so remarkable.
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Ace, Marvel, Spy

Jenni L. Walsh deftly fictionalizes the intriguing rise of real-life trailblazing tennis champion Alice Marble and her extraordinary life following the start of World War II in Ace, Marvel, Spy.

After her brother encourages Alice to trade baseball for tennis, which he regards as more ladylike, Alice picks up a racket for the first time and falls in love with the sport. But the chances of a career in tennis are slim for a teen whose family in Beckwourth, California, is struggling financially, especially after the death of her father. Through grit and diligence, Alice defies all odds, rising to unprecedented prominence in tennis. Her life is disrupted when war breaks out, and she suffers heartbreaking losses. Not one to give up, Alice joins the fight against the Nazis by becoming a spy.

Through a carefully crafted dual timeline, Walsh follows Alice’s story, including her early start in tennis playing in junior tournaments and her struggle to prove herself. Her journey to becoming an 18 Grand Slam tennis champion and the Associated Press Athlete of the Year in 1939 and 1940 is exhilarating. The story includes the wonderful relationship between Alice and her long-term coach and mentor, Eleanor “Teach” Tennant, who supports Alice through the tragedies she experiences.

After the war, Alice’s later accomplishments include becoming an associate editor with All-American Comics of their Wonder Women of History series, covering the stories of notable women in history. She also plays a role in the desegregation of tennis, writing an editorial piece in support of Black player Althea Gibson, who goes on to become the first African American player to play in the National Championships (and the first to win them).

With expertise and finesse, Walsh provides a complete picture of Alice’s life that celebrates her unrelenting determination to succeed and courage in the face of hardship.

 

Midnight on the Scottish Shore

Sarah Sundin is the bestselling author of Christian historical novels including Until Leaves Fall in Paris, which received a 2022 Christy Award, and the Sunrise at Normandy series. In Midnight on the Scottish Shore, she weaves a stunning story of a brave woman determined to escape Nazi control and find freedom in England.

Intent on establishing a new life and leaving the Netherlands following the German invasion, Cilla van der Zee develops a plan: She will become a Nazi spy, then desert the Germans after arriving safely in England, and begin a new life. Her plan is halted when Scottish lieutenant Lachlan Mackenzie finds and arrests her. To avoid execution, Cilla is forced to work as a double agent and partner with Lachlan in relaying false messages to the Nazis.

Blending a woman’s exciting journey across Europe and the unlikely, endearing romance between the novel’s main characters, Sundin underscores Cilla’s bravery and Lachlan’s devotion to the Allied cause. Cilla’s vivacity and humor enliven the story, and her compassion and willingness to put her life at risk for others’ sake are inspiring. Sundin also explores Lachlan’s background and chronicles his growth. Through his and Cilla’s experiences, themes of faith, forgiveness and strength in unity are examined.

Read more Christian fiction picks.

Set during World War II, Ace, Marvel, Spy and Midnight on the Scottish Shore chronicle the stories of two women whose lives are testaments to the power of courage during times of upheaval.
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Headshot, Rita Bullwinkel’s powerful debut, focuses on eight teenage boxers—all women—who are contending for a title at Bob’s Boxing Palace in Reno, Nevada. Bullwinkel skillfully shifts points of view throughout this dramatic, often funny novel, developing a unique identity and personal history for each fighter, as she recounts their boxing bouts in wonderful detail. Against the backdrop of competitive sports, Bullwinkel probes the aspirations and inspirations of an unforgettable group of young women. Their differing motivations and struggles with self-determination will stimulate lively conversation among readers.

The Family Izquierdo by Rubén Degollado chronicles the lives of members of a close-knit Mexican American clan in McAllen, Texas. The novel follows the family across three generations as they contend with a curse they believe has caused the physical decline of Papa Tavo, the head of the family, and the marriage woes of Gonzalo, the eldest son. Narrated by different members of the Izquierdo clan, the novel examines family ties and traditions as well as life on the Texas-Mexico border. Degollado creates a rich chorus of voices in this moving, compassionate novel.

Intricate and enthralling, Megha Majumdar’s A Burning takes place in Kolkata, India, following a terrorist attack. Jivan, a Muslim woman, is implicated in the attack and jailed. Lovely, a trans actress, could clear Jivan’s name, but is reluctant to speak up. Jivan’s former gym teacher, PT Sir, who has been increasingly drawn toward right-wing politics, is also involved in the case. Each character provides a different take on the events at hand, and the result is a nuanced, multilayered tale. The tough questions it raises about justice make Majumdar’s novel a rewarding choice for book clubs.

In Wandering Stars, Tommy Orange continues the mesmerizing family saga that started with his acclaimed novel There There (2018). He resumes the stories of Orvil Red Feather and Opal Viola Bear Shield in modern-day Oakland, California, while also detailing the lives of their forebears, including Jude Star, a survivor of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre. Told from the viewpoints of multiple characters, the book weaves together varied voices to create a complex narrative tapestry. Throughout the novel, Orange explores long-standing family conflicts and the enduring legacies of American Indigenous history.

Book clubs will have plenty to debate with these multiperspective and polyvocal novels.
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I’ll be honest, at first glance, the synopsis of The Lost Passenger sounds a bit like a sequel to Titanic. But happily, this proves not to be the case. The book begins two years before the doomed voyage and is told in the fresh first-person voice of a likable heroine, Elinor Hayward.

After a whirlwind courtship, 19-year-old Elinor marries Frederick Coombes, an English aristocrat, only to discover that what she thought was a union of love was instead a ruse to get her father’s new money to resurrect the Coombes’ crumbling old English estate. In Frederick’s words, his family’s guiding principle is, “When the place has been in the family for five centuries, it gives one a certain responsibility to the generations who’ve gone before and the ones to come.”

Having realized Frederick’s duplicity, Elinor resigns herself to a loveless life in cold Winterton Hall. She simply does not fit in there, as a woman who speaks her mind and has been taught by her father to have some business sense. She is looked down upon for her accent and her manners (her mother-in-law: “We spoon soup away from us, Elinor”). When she provides the family with a male heir, Teddy, she learns that motherhood, too, will not be as she imagined. A nanny will raise her son without her input.

Then Elinor’s father gives her three tickets for the Titanic’s maiden voyage, and Elinor jumps at the opportunity to escape from Winterton for 16 days. The trip becomes a more permanent escape for her when Frederick goes down with the ship, and Elinor makes an impulsive, brave choice that leads her to a new family in New York.

Readers will enjoy The Lost Passenger’s emphasis on the power of self-reliance and determination, demonstrated through the juxtaposition of Elinor’s unhappy life in England with her happiness in the life she chooses, despite its less favorable conditions. Some may wish to see more of her later life and Teddy’s, but Elinor’s believable voice and sympathetic narrative will have great appeal.

The Lost Passenger begins two years before the Titanic’s doomed voyage, telling the story of a young woman and her son whose lives will be forever changed by the disaster.
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The two story collections and novella that we’ve received from Karen Russell since her first novel, the 2012 Pulitzer finalist Swamplandia!, is part of the reason the decade-plus we have waited for her second novel hasn’t felt like such a long drought: We’ve rarely had to go without her brilliance and arch humor.

The Antidote is set in the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. The name of the town comes from the Book of Job, but it’s also a clear nod to L. Frank Baum’s Oz. Uz is a little bit over the rainbow but mostly under it, a place of both hopelessness and possibility, and the events of the novel occur between two real disasters in 1935: the Black Sunday dust storm and the deadly Republican River flood.

The narrative’s host of lead characters includes (but is not limited to) a witch, a wheat farmer, a New Deal photographer, a scarecrow and a young basketball player mourning her mother’s murder. The witch is a “Vault,” which means she has the ability to store memories for the citizens of Uz, but during the Black Sunday storm, she goes bankrupt, losing all her clients’ deposits. Meanwhile, the farmer has found his crop to be flourishing, in awkward contrast to his neighbors’ devastation, and the photographer has discovered that her camera captures more than just scenes of Uz, instead revealing glimpses through time to the land’s past and possible futures.

Similar to Honoree Fanonne Jeffers’ The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, The Antidote offers a long view of American history, through not just characters’ histories but also the legacy of the land itself. We hear the stories of Polish refugees seeking the promise of American soil alongside tales of prisonlike maternity homes, Indigenous genocide and government-funded, often church-run Indian boarding schools—American history that is very, very hard to talk about.

The pain of The Antidote is that it reminds you that you are only one person, and one voice does nothing to break a cycle of willful ignorance. But the joy of the novel is its immense sense of gratitude, as powerful a force as fear and wind, but quieter in its orchestrations. Gratitude is what transforms the lives of the witch, the farmer, the basketballer and the photographer, each of whom finds themselves out of step with the dominant practice of forgetting.

Russell’s novel is deeply researched, with a narrative that is propulsive and consuming, and characters who are tender and complicated. She does the hard work of looking directly at something that we’d rather allow our eyes to glance away from—which makes her the best kind of author, one who will lead you to the hard thing and stay there with you.

Read our interview with Karen Russell about The Antidote.

In her Dust Bowl epic, The Antidote, Karen Russell shows us that she’s the best kind of author: one who will lead you to the hard thing and stay there with you.
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Meet Jacob Fagin, pickpocket extraordinaire of 19th-century London. He lives in an abandoned property on Bell Court with a cluster of proteges: children who, with no roof over their heads, no food to eat and no family to turn to, ended up on his doorstep. He is, through one lens, a hero to be admired. Through another, he makes his living breaking the law, harboring and shaping the next generation of criminals. In Fagin the Thief, Allison Epstein’s greatly imaginative retelling of Oliver Twist, it’s left to the reader to wrestle with their verdict. 

After losing his beloved mother to illness, 16-year-old Jacob is thrust into thievery as his only method of survival. The orphan has just begun to settle into a ragged routine when he meets Bill Sikes, another young thief. Having fled an abusive home, Bill struggles to find his place in the world, and as he becomes a notorious housebreaker, he develops an increasing anger that scares Jacob and his circle. Eventually, a burglary gone wrong breaks the precarious company into irreparable pieces when, for the first time, Jacob’s exceptional instincts for self-preservation prove insufficient. 

In Charles Dickens’ original portrayal, the character of Fagin is a famously anti-Semitic caricature. In Fagin the Thief, Epstein reclaims the character’s Jewish identity, threading his upbringing and customs throughout the book, along with the discrimination he faces. This context adds nuance to her depiction—Jacob’s compassion towards his community is even more meaningful in the face of this adversity, yet he remains a morally ambiguous character. It’s an empowering, humanizing portrayal.

Jacob frequently wonders how to classify his relationships with Bill and all the other members of his makeshift group, but to the reader, it’s clear that what they share are the unconditional bonds of family. Painful as it is to watch each of them make their mistakes, it’s impossible not to love these characters through it all. 

In Allison Epstein’s imaginative retelling of Oliver Twist, Fagin the Thief, Jacob Fagin gets his own remarkable story.

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