Round-up: Four best new books for historical fiction lovers

Euphoria

By Elin Cullhed, translated by Jennifer Hayashida

Canongate Books, 304 pages, $37.95

This richly-imagined novel about the final years in Sylvia Plath’s life opens with a fictional list of reasons not to die, written two months before her suicide. The first: “to never again feel the skin of one’s beloved child;” the last: Frieda and Nicholas, her daughter and son.

Although grant money Plath receives sustains her young family with poet Ted Hughes, it is his creative life that is privileged over hers as she struggles to balance her domestic duty with her desire to write. Hughes’s productivity reminds Sylvia of “the awful hole” she has in her head from which she suspects “wonderful literature would never again pour forth.”

A May 1962 telegram brings news that her novel “The Bell Jar” will be published. Sylvia cries happy “authortears” and worries about Ted’s reaction to her success. Their marriage predictably fractures and Sylvia resolves to “take the liberties Ted took on a daily basis just by waking up,” deciding to own her narrative.

Sumptuous affecting prose creates a compelling portrait.

Hereafter: The Telling Life of Ellen O’Hara

By Vona Groarke

NYU Press, 184 pages, $29.95

Irish poet Groarke’s debut novel is about her maternal great-grandmother. She digs through archival material to ground Ellen O’Hara’s life in known fact and then re-imagines the interior emotional landscape she might have inhabited as an Irish-born immigrant who made her way as a domestic servant in late 19th century America.

Ellen’s authentic voice is created by folk sonnets threaded throughout the narrative. Back in Ireland as a young woman she had “as much notion of climbing on a ship/to sail off to New York City as I did of dancing with a pig.” Yet, she did just that in 1882 and worked to send money home to pay her family’s rent, noting that, like others in service, she sacrificed more than wages. Into the envelopes went “our girlhood. Lightheartedness. Our young days.”

Groarke not only exquisitely explores the nature of belonging in one family but also how Irish immigrant women transformed history both at home and abroad.

An Italian Girl in Brooklyn

By Santa Montefiore

Simon and Schuster Canada, 384 pages, $24.99

With her trademark warmth and emotional generosity, Montefiore returns with a dual narrative linked through its protagonist Evelina, transporting us from her current life in early 1980s Lower Manhattan to her adolescence in 1934 northern Italy where she’s raised with her siblings in a crumbling villa.

When her sister Benedetta marries in order to please their father, Evelina resolves that she will choose love. And, she does, with the local dressmaker’s son, Ezra Zanotti, a young Jewish man with whom she shares halcyon days. However, with the rise of fascism, gutting personal loss, and the dark cloud of war, Evelina travels to America to begin life anew.

An irresistible page-turner, rife with humanity.

The Call of the Wrens

By Jenni Walsh

HarperMuse, 368 pages, $21.99

In 1917 Birmingham, 18-year-old Marion Hoxton ages out of an orphanage and joins the Women’s Royal Navy Service — the Wrens. There, she finds purpose as a motorcycle courier delivering trained pigeons to the front and a sense of community with other young women hoping to make a difference during the Great War.

Two decades later, Marion is strong-armed out of her solitary life by her former fellow Wren Sara Brown to rejoin the service as a trainer while World War Two storms England and a new generation steps up. Twenty-year-old socialite Evelyn Fairchild — who spent her childhood sidelined by surgeries — is determined to prove she is just as capable as the next enlisted woman. As strangers connected by a shared secret, Marion and Evelyn bond.

Impeccably researched, full of life’s wisdom, and a tribute to intrepid women who risked their lives in the face of war.

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