4 new historical novels uncover new stories in familiar places

The Porcelain Moon

By Janie Chang

William Morrow, 352 pages, $34.99

During the second half of the Great War, 140,000 Chinese men were recruited by the French and British governments to provide manual labour on the front. They transported supplies and cleared trenches and battlefields of corpses and debris.

Set mostly in France during 1918, with flashbacks to a decade earlier in Shanghai and a coda that leaps ahead to 1937, this dual narrative intertwines the lives of two intrepid young women.

Shanghai-born Pauline Deng clerks for her Uncle Louis at Pagoda Antiques in Paris, while her cousin Theo studies at the Sorbonne and then enlists as a translator hoping to make a difference to the way the Chinese labourers are treated.

French native Camille Roussel, a postal worker in Noyelles-sur-Mer — a northern town where the Chinese labour camps thrive — is determined to escape her abusive husband through the help of a kind stranger.

An unsentimental, wonderfully researched page-turner about a little-known aspect of First World War history, it’s rife with life’s wisdom.

The House of Eve

By Sadeqa Johnson

Simon & Schuster, 384 pages, $24.99

Ruby Pearsall and Eleanor Quarles, intelligent young Black women, navigate secrets and heartache in 1950s America where to move forward sometimes you must forget your past.

Ruby, enrolled in weekend enrichment classes for gifted Philadelphia high-schoolers, hopes to earn a scholarship to study medicine. When her mother kicks her out, she’s raised by her aunt, a nightclub performer.

Eleanor, a sophomore at Howard University, is studying to become an archivist with a librarian building a collection of music, books and artifacts from the African diaspora. Marrying a medical student whose family is part of Washington’s Black elite, Eleanor is treated as an outsider by her snobbish mother-in-law.

When pregnancy alters Ruby’s and Eleanor’s paths, they connect in unexpected ways.

Compelling characters with richly developed inner lives drive this emotionally true tale of motherhood and ambition.

Künstlers in Paradise

Cathleen Schine

Henry Holt & Co., 272 pages, $36.99

Cathleen Schine reminds us that we are the storytelling animal in this engrossing story that juxtaposes the vibrant artist émigré community of 1940s Hollywood with 2020 pandemic lockdown.

Protagonist Mamie Künstler, now 93, is spending lockdown in her Venice Beach bungalow with her aging factotum, Agatha, and her beloved St. Bernard. She has broken her wrist. Her unemployed 24-year-old New Yorker grandson Julian, who has been “content to follow his intellectual inclinations wherever they inclined” (learning Arabic and transcribing Akira Kurosawa’s screenplays), moves in to help out.

As the world locks down to stanch the spread of COVID, Mamie takes the opportunity to tell Julian his family history: one that begins with her escaping 1939 Vienna with her parents and grandfather thanks to the European Film Fund, an organization that relocated artists safely to America, securing them jobs in film studios. As Julian’s father echoes over Zoom, “when the world is s–t, Jews have to pay attention.”

Mamie recounts charming (fictional) stories featuring cameos from stars — she knew Greta Garbo, bought a clunker from Christopher Isherwood and learned how to play tennis from composer Arnold Schoenberg.

Irresistible, full of wit and charm.

The Little Wartime Library

By Kate Thompson

Grand Central Publishing 480 pages, $22.99

In 1944 London, the Bethnal Green library is bombed on the first night of the Blitz. Undeterred by grief from acute personal loss, librarian Clara Button and her friend Ruby Monroe resolve to transfer reclaimed books from the rubble to a safe space 80 feet below ground.

Along the unused tracks of the nearby tube station an underground community thrives. Thousands seek refuge there daily, sleeping in bunks, patronizing the café and borrowing books from the makeshift library — its collection rebuilt from donations from Commonwealth libraries that received written requests from Bethnal Green, including hundreds of children’s books gathered from Toronto branches.

Captivating and remarkable, it reminds us that stories soothe and help us make sense of the chaos in our lives.

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