Our Holiday Gift Guides are here to help you find the perfect page-turner for every bookworm on your list this year!
This year’s offering of historical fiction continues the new renaissance of the western noir, an adventure in Hemingway’s Havana, and a deeply personal, emotional tale set in one of Asia’s most tumultuous eras.
The House of Doors
Tan Twan Eng
Bloomsbury
The year is 1921. Lesley Hamlyn and her husband, Robert, a lawyer and war veteran, are living at Cassowary House on the Straits Settlement of Penang. When “Willie” Somerset Maugham, a famed writer and old friend of Robert’s, arrives for an extended visit with his secretary Gerald, the pair threatens a rift that could alter more lives than one. Maugham, one of the great novelists of his day, is beleaguered: Having long hidden his homosexuality, his unhappy and expensive marriage of convenience becomes unbearable after he loses his savings—and the freedom to travel with Gerald. His career deflating, his health failing, Maugham arrives at Cassowary House in desperate need of a subject for his next book. Lesley, too, is enduring a marriage more duplicitous than it first appears. Maugham suspects an affair, and, learning of Lesley’s past connection to the Chinese revolutionary, Dr. Sun Yat Sen, decides to probe deeper. But as their friendship grows and Lesley confides in him about life in the Straits, Maugham discovers a far more surprising tale than he imagined, one that involves not only war and scandal but the trial of an Englishwoman charged with murder. It is, to Maugham, a story worthy of fiction. A mesmerizingly beautiful novel based on real events, The House of Doors traces the fault lines of race, gender, sexuality, and power under empire, and dives deep into the complicated nature of love and friendship in its shadow.
Chenneville: A Novel of Murder, Loss, and Vengeance
Paulette Jiles
William Morrow
Union soldier John Chenneville suffered a traumatic head wound in battle. His recovery took the better part of a year as he struggled to regain his senses and mobility. By the time he returned home, the Civil War was over, but tragedy awaited. John’s beloved sister and her family had been brutally murdered. Their killer goes by many names. He fought for the North in the late unpleasantness, and wore a badge in the name of the law. But the man John knows as A. J. Dodd is little more than a rabid animal, slaughtering without reason or remorse, needing to be put down. Traveling through the unforgiving landscape of a shattered nation in the midst of Reconstruction, John braves winter storms and confronts desperate people in pursuit of his quarry. Untethered, single-minded in purpose, he will not be deterred. Not by the U.S. Marshal who threatens to arrest him for murder should he succeed. And not by Victoria Reavis, the telegraphist aiding him in his death-driven quest, yet hoping he’ll choose to embrace a life with her instead. And as he trails Dodd deep into Texas, John accepts that this final reckoning between them may cost him more than all he’s already lost…
The Frozen River: A Novel
Ariel Lawhon
Doubleday
Maine, 1789: When the Kennebec River freezes, entombing a man in the ice, Martha Ballard is summoned to examine the body and determine cause of death. As a midwife and healer, she is privy to much of what goes on behind closed doors in Hallowell. Her diary is a record of every birth and death, crime and debacle that unfolds in the close-knit community. Months earlier, Martha documented the details of an alleged rape committed by two of the town’s most respected gentlemen—one of whom has now been found dead in the ice. But when a local physician undermines her conclusion, declaring the death to be an accident, Martha is forced to investigate the shocking murder on her own. Over the course of one winter, as the trial nears, and whispers and prejudices mount, Martha doggedly pursues the truth. Her diary soon lands at the center of the scandal, implicating those she loves, and compelling Martha to decide where her own loyalties lie. Clever, layered, and subversive, Ariel Lawhon’s newest offering introduces an unsung heroine who refused to accept anything less than justice at a time when women were considered best seen and not heard. The Frozen River is a thrilling, tense, and tender story about a remarkable woman who left an unparalleled legacy yet remains nearly forgotten to this day.
The Wildest Sun: A Novel
Asha Lemmie
Dutton
When tragedy forces Delphine Auber, an aspiring writer on the cusp of adulthood, from her home in postwar Paris, she seizes the opportunity to embark on the journey she’s long dreamed of: finding the father she has never known. But her quest—spanning from Paris to New York’s Harlem, to Havana and Key West—is complicated by the fact that she believes him to be famed luminary Ernest Hemingway, a man just as elusive as he is iconic. She desperately yearns for his approval, as both a daughter and a writer, convinced that he holds the key to who she’s truly meant to be. But what will happen if she is wrong, or if her real story falls outside of the legend of her parentage that she’s revered all her life?
Sisters Under the Rising Sun
Heather Morris
St. Martin’s Press
On February 14, 1942, the Vyner Brooke, a merchant ship carrying a desperate group of expats fleeing Singapore as it became clear that it would soon fall to the Japanese, was sunk by Japanese dive bombers. Nesta James was one of 65 Australian nurses on board; Norah and John Chambers among 150 civilians and military personnel. Though many of the passengers drowned straight away, Nesta and Norah miraculously survive and reach the beaches of Bangka ISland, then controlled by the Japanese. They are immediately taken as prisoners of war, and separated from the men, Norah is uncertain of John’s fate. For nearly four years, Norah and Nesta fought for survival as their fellow prisoners, friends and comrades, died. Moved from one camp to another, they finally settled in the notorious Camp Palembang, deep in the jungle of Sumatra. There, women and children battled disease, starvation, and unthinkable brutality meted out by the Japanese soldiers: less than half of the inmates in their camp lived to see the Japanese defeated. Yet these women found, in themselves and in each other, an extraordinary courage and resourcefulness.
The War Begins in Paris: A Novel
Theodore Wheeler
Little, Brown and Company
Paris, 1938. Two women meet: Mielle, a shy pacifist and shunned Mennonite who struggles to fit in with the elite cohort of foreign correspondents stationed around the city; the other, Jane, a brash, legendary American journalist, who is soon to become a fascist propagandist. When World War II makes landfall in the City of Lights, Mielle falls under Jane’s spell, growing ever more intoxicated by her glamour, self-possession, and reckless confidence. But as this recklessness devolves into militarism and an utter lack of humanity, Mielle is seized by a series of visions that show her an inescapable truth: Jane Anderson must die, and Mielle must be the one to kill her. Structured as a series of dispatches filed from around Europe and based on the misadventures of a real journalist-turned-Nazi mouthpiece, The War Begins in Paris is a cat-and-mouse suspense that examines the relentlessness of propaganda, the allure of power, and how far one woman will go for the sake of her morality.
