Four new historical fiction books to spark a conversation

The Other Daughter

By Caroline Bishop

Simon & Schuster Canada, 432 pages, $24.99

Thirty-something teacher Jess is at a crossroads in her London life in 2016, having discovered a secret about her recently deceased mother Sylvia’s past. The shocking news leads her to Switzerland where she hopes to find answers by tracking down some of the people Sylvia, an intrepid journalist, met while reporting on the courageous women fighting for equality in 1976. They hoped to dismantle the patriarchy in which married women, for one, had to secure their husband’s permission to have a job or a bank account in their own name.

In the present, Jess learns of the little-known Swiss shame of the enfants placés, a decades-long scheme in which the government removed children from their homes, relocating them to farms where they were often treated as forced labour, while the host families were paid. Finally, a few years after the government officially apologized, the victims will be compensated for their suffering.

Told in a riveting dual narrative that alternates between daughter Jess and mother Sylvia’s points of view, Bishop reminds us that the struggle for women’s rights remains.

One Brilliant Flame

By Joy Castro

Lake Union Publishing, 352 pages, $23.99

In this polyphonic narrative reminiscent of Southern U.S. writer William Faulkner, Castro reclaims the little known history of the rebel base of mostly Cuban immigrants working in the booming cigar industry in late 19th-century Florida.

Shifting seamlessly between the vibrant, distinct voices of schoolteacher Zenaida, power-hungry socialite Sofia, cigar roller Chaveta, anarchist Feliciano, cafetero Libano and guerrilla soldier Maceo as their lives intertwine, closely held secrets are revealed against the backdrop of the Great Fire of Key West in 1886.

A fascinating, irresistible page-turner that enthralls on every page.

The New Life

By Tom Crewe

Scribner, 400 pages, $37

In this startling debut novel that opens in summer 1894, a story that is rife with compassion and thrums with desire, Crewe dramatizes the lives of two married men — John Addington and Henry Ellis — strangers who begin to collaborate by correspondence on a revolutionary book about “inversion,” arguing that homosexuality is natural and harmless.

Addington and Ellis are based on historical figures John Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis who wrote a book together called “Sexual Inversion” (1897), having never met in person. Like their fictional analogues they were married to women.

Their daring project is up against the fact that, in Britain at the time, homosexuality was criminalized. Oscar Wilde’s 1895 case, in which he was tried and convicted of “gross indecency,” threads through the narrative, a stark reminder of how personal freedom was limited by the law even in the face of love.

A triumph of tenacity, tenderness and emotional truth.

The Three Lives of Alix St. Pierre

By Natasha Lester

Grand Central Publishing, 432 pages, $35

Shifting back and forth between the recent past of the Second World War and the “present day” of 1947 Paris, we get to know protagonist Alix St. Pierre both as an intrepid spy working for Allen Dulles in Switzerland in the Office of Strategic Services, and as a charismatic writer controlling publicity for up-and-coming fashion designer Christian Dior.

Due to a chance meeting and haunted by the role that she might have played in the deaths of some partisans during the war, including that of her fiancé, Alix is determined to track down one of her informants, a dangerous man code-named “La Voce.” Perhaps, finally, she will find justice. Quick-witted under pressure, resilient and wise, Alix serves as a model for those who understand the price of love and the cost of war.

A compelling story, vividly told.

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