Discover: Historical Fiction

Death narrates this now-iconic young adult novel about an illiterate young girl whose hunger for reading incites her to steal books, beginning with the gravedigger's manual she finds at the cemetery where her younger brother is buried. When the war begins, Liesel Meminger is sent to live with a foster family in the town of Molching. Her foster father teachers her to read and her new best friend (and would-be paramour) Rudy... Steiner assists her on her thieving missions – some designed to help themselves in wartime poverty, others to rebel against the atrocities of Nazism. In the meantime, Liesel's foster parents take in a Jew, hiding him in their basement from the S.S. As his relationship with Liesel warms, Max writes new books especially for her, painting over pages of Mein Kampf with his own illustrations. With Death as the storyteller and the Holocaust as the historical backdrop, the plot has a certain inevitability – we all know how this will end. Nevertheless, Zusak illuminates the humanity of his foul-mouthed, mostly well-meaning characters in their efforts to both resist and survive, and his lyrical writing gives new form to well-trodden subject matter.

This fictionalized account of Ernest Hemingway's first marriage, to Hadley Richardson from 1921-27, is a companion of sorts to his memoir A Moveable Feast. Only, McLain's book is told through the scorned wife's point of view. After meeting in Chicago through mutual friends, Hadley becomes Mrs. Hemingway and follows the aspiring author to Paris where they fall in with a coterie of bohemians, flappers, and artists, including Gertrude Stein, the Fitzgeralds, Ezra... Pound, and others – the epicenter of Parisian artistic culture. The hard-drinking couple who call each other "Tatie" soon meet conflict in the form of Hemingway's temper, his frustrations with his career, and an ambivalence toward the arrival of their first child. But it's the machinations of a seductive fashion editor named Pauline Pfeiffer who tests their loyalty to one another. As Papa entrenches himself in the publishing firmament, Hadley – sweet and dignified to the last – loses her hold on her Paris husband. Strewn with clever references to Hemingway's and his friends' work, The Paris Wife is a fresh spin on literary history, giving the missus the last word.

After surviving the pogroms that killed her parents, husband, and child, 22-year-old Lillian Leyb has left Turov, Russia, for Ellis Island. The year is 1924, and a young woman on her own has to beg, borrow and steal to survive – or occasionally take well-to-do lovers. But Lillian's plans of assimilating into American life are complicated when a visiting cousin arrives and informs her that her daughter is still alive in Russia.... Lillian knows she must go back but without enough money to book a ship, she has no option but to head west to Alaska and then Siberia. Hiding in the locked closets of trains takes her to Seattle, where she meets a black prostitute who takes her in only to involve her in the murder of a pimp, and then to Canada, where she ends up in a correctional facility. From there it's onward into the frozen tundra. A psychotherapist, Bloom is brilliant at capturing the obscure and winding thoughts of her characters and their subtext-laden dialogue as well as the exacting detail that brings her heroine's unlikely journey into believable focus. What begins as a familiar immigrant story becomes something wholly unexpected – a smart, moving novel that boldly traipses into foreign territory.

Reaching back to the first century, Hoffman offers a feminist retelling of the Roman siege of Masada – a grisly event that was documented by a single contemporary source. Each section of the novel is told by one of her four narrators, all women who are part of the band of religious zealots led by Eleazar ben Ya'ir that take up residence in Herod's old fortress. There's Yael, daughter of an assassin,... who has an affair with a soldier and gives birth out of wedlock in the desert. There's the "witch" of Moab, Shirah, a medicine woman who is romantically involved with ben Ya'ir, although he's married to someone else. Shirah's daughter Aziza poses as a man so she can take her brother's place in the war. Finally, there's Revka, who has lost her daughter to Roman soldiers and is now raising her two mute grandchildren. The women's stories eventually interlock as they each work in the fortress dovecote, producing fertilizer for the desert soil. As the final act of the battle with its dramatic mass suicide draws near, each must fight her individual struggle for independence and self-definition. Hoffman's novel is skillfully researched, poetically imagined, and epic in scope.

Following up Walls' excellent family memoir The Glass Castle is a "true-life novel" that explores the story of her feisty maternal grandmother. Lily Casey was born in Texas in 1901 to an ex-convict and a God-fearing mother. As a child, she was taught how to break mustangs on her family ranch; later, the frontier woman with an adventurous streak would drive a taxi, play poker, sell bootleg hooch, and fly bush planes... when she wasn't raising two kids and teaching school. Casey's life is told here through her own words, with Walls enlisting a folksy-tough narrative voice drawn from oral history. She leaves Chicago after a disastrous marriage to a "crumb bum" and talks her way into a wartime teaching job in Arizona, despite having no real experience. But though Casey's hardscrabble journey takes place through the Depression and two World Wars, she is largely untouched by these forces, at least directly – in her desolate, tumbleweed-strewn landscape, the concerns of most Americans are less important to her than finding a good source of water to keep the ranch going. Self-reliant, thrifty, and fearless, Casey is an endearing proto-feminist heroine, ahead of her time yet nevertheless a product of her moment in history.

In this slim tale centered around a London ladies' hostel at the end of World War II, the titular girls are under thirty, working for a living, and waiting for their lives to start. The residents of the May of Teck Club include Selina Redwood, the local beauty with a heart of ice; Jane Martin, a brainy but overweight publishing professional who sells authors' letters on the black market; Joanna Childe, the... daughter of the country rector who now gives elocution lessons; and Pauline Fox, who dresses up in evening gowns and (delusionally) claims to have dinner with a famous actor every night. Times are tight: The girls share rationed soap and chocolate and pass around a single Elsa Schiaparelli dress. Years later, when a former hanger-on, the anarchist author Nicholas Farringdon, is discovered dead in Haiti, it is Jane who reconnects with her fellow residents to find out more about him and the incidents that lead to his death. With her minimal, playful, unsentimental writing style, Spark dances over the characters and their shared tenuous moment in time before a tragedy changes everything. Girls is filled with nostalgia for young unmarried women in a strange but hopeful era.