1) "The Pillars of the Earth" by Ken Follett
Here, Follett sets the thrillers aside for a long, steady story about building a cathedral in 12th-century England. Bloodthirsty or adventure-crazed Follett readers will be frustrated, but anyone who has ever been moved by the splendors of a fine church will sink right into this highly detailed but fast-moving historical work--a novel about the people and skills needed to put up an eye-popping cathedral in the very unsettled days just before the ascension of Henry II. The cathedral is the brainchild of Philip, prior of the monastery at Kingsbridge, and Tom, an itinerant master mason. Philip, shrewd and ambitious but genuinely devout, sees it as a sign of divine agreement when his decrepit old cathedral burns on the night that Tom and his starving family show up seeking shelter. Actually, it's Tom's clever stepson Jack who has stepped in to carry out God's will by secretly torching the cathedral attic, but the effect is the same. Tom gets the commission to start the rebuilding--which is what he has wanted to do more than anything in his life. Meanwhile, however, the work is complicated greatly by local politics. There is a loathsome baron and his family who have usurped the local earldom and allied themselves with the powerful, cynical bishop--who is himself sinfully jealous of Philip's cathedral. There are the dispossessed heirs to earldom, a beautiful girl and her bellicose brother, both sworn to root out the usurpers. And there is the mysterious Ellen, Tom's second wife, who witnessed an ancient treachery that haunts the bishop, the priory, and the vile would-be earl. The great work is set back, and Tom is killed in a raid by the rivals. It falls to young Jack to finish the work. Thriller writing turns out to be pretty good training, since Follett's history moves like a fast freight train. Details are plenty, but they support rather than smother. It's all quite entertaining and memorable.
2) "Outlander" by Diana Gabaldon
Once-in-a-lifetime romantic passion and graphically depicted torture sessions are only the two extremes of this lively time-travel romance set in 18th-century Scotland—an imaginative and lighthearted debut by a promising newcomer. World War II has finally ended and Claire Beauchamp Randall, a British Red Cross nurse, has gone off to Scotland with her historian husband, Frank, to try to resume their married life where it left off six years before: Their diligent attempts to make a baby come to a halt, however, when Claire discovers an ancient stone circle on a nearby hilltop, slips between two mysterious-looking boulders, and is transported willy-nilly to the year 1743. Stumbling down the hillside, disoriented and confused, Claire is discovered by Jonathan "Black Jack" Randall, an evil English officer who happens to be her husband's direct ancestor and physical look-alike. Randall notes Claire's revealing 1940's summer dress, assumes she is a whore, and attempts to rape her, whereupon she is rescued by the fierce MacKenzie clan, who take her to their castle and confine her there. Claire adjusts to her changed circumstances with amazing ease, using her nursing experience to tend to her hosts' illnesses while she impatiently awaits a chance to return lo the circle of stones. Before she can get away, circumstances force her into a marriage with James Frazer, a Scottish renegade from English justice and Jonathan Randall's archenemy. Young Jamie's good looks, passion, and virility soon redirect Claire's energies to defending her stalwart new husband against her former mate's evil clone, and the fierce, courageous but historically doomed Scottish clans against the course of destiny itself. A satisfying treat, with extra scoops of excitement and romance that make up for certain lapses in credibility.
3) "Year of Wonders" by Geraldine Brooks
Painstaking re-creation of 17th-century England, swallowed by over-the-top melodramatics: a wildly uneven first novel by an Australian-born journalist.
The Year of the title is 1665: the date of the devastating bubonic epidemic chronicled in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. Brooks’s tale, framed by reveries set a year and a half after the plague burns itself out (in “Leaf-Fall, 1666”), is narrated by Anna Frith, an earnest and highly intelligent young widow who buries her own multiple bereavements (first her gentle husband, later their two small sons) in work, aiding her (unnamed) village rector’s wife in treating the sick with medicinal herbs and traditional cures. Brooks is at her best in lyrical, precise descriptions of country landscapes and village customs, and makes something very appealing and (initially) quite credible out of Anna’s wary hunger for learning and innate charitable kindness. But the novel goes awry when the panic of contagion isolates her village from neighboring hamlets, a forthright young woman and her distracted aunt are accused of witchcraft and hunted down, and Anna’s drunken, violent father, who profits as a gravedigger for hire, resorts to providing corpses that will require his services. The excesses continue, as Anna’s stepmother, crazed with grief, seeks vengeance against rector Michael Mompellion and his saintly wife (and Anna’s mentor and soulmate) Elinor, and rise to a feverish pitch when Anna, having found a new innocent victim to nurture and raise, offends the powerful Bradford family and must flee to safety—ending up (in a borderline-risible Epilogue) in North Africa in the sanctuary of a kindly “Bey’s” harem. It’s all more than a bit much: Thomas Hardy crossed with Erskine Caldwell, with more than a whiff of Jane Eyrein Anna’s conflicted devotion to the brooding, Mr. Rochester–like Mompellion.
In between the more hysterical moments, Brooks writes quite beautifully. But Year of Wonders was a mistake.
4) "Major Pettigrew's Last Stand" by Helen Simonson
Set-in-his-ways retired British officer tentatively courts charming local widow of Pakistani descent.
Shortly after being informed that his younger brother Bertie has suddenly passed away from a coronary, Maj. Ernest Pettigrew answers his door to find Mrs. Ali, proprietress of his village food shop. She’s on an errand, but when she steps in to help the somewhat older man during a vulnerable moment, something registers; then they bond over a shared love of Kipling and the loss of their beloved spouses. Their friendship grows slowly, with the two well aware of their very different lives. Though born in England, Mrs. Ali is a member of the Pakistani immigrant community and is being pressured by her surly, religious nephew Abdul Wahid to sign over her business to him. The major belongs to a non-integrated golf club in their village and is girding himself for a messy battle with his sister-in-law Marjorie over a valuable hunting rifle that should rightfully have gone to him after Bertie’s death. He also must contend with his grown son Roger, a callow, materialistic Londoner who appears in the village with a leggy American girlfriend and plans to purchase a weekend cottage for reasons that seem more complex than mere family unity. Add to that a single mum with a small boy who bears a striking resemblance to Abdul Wahid, and you have enough distractions to keep the mature sweethearts from taking it to the next level. But the major rallies and asks Mrs. Ali to accompany him to the annual club dance, which happens to have an ill-advised “Indian” theme. The event begins magically but ends disastrously, with the besotted major fearing he has lost his love forever. His only chance at winning her back is to commit to a bold sacrifice without any guarantees it will actually work.
Unexpectedly entertaining, with a stiff-upper-lip hero who transcends stereotype, this good-hearted debut doesn’t shy away from modern cultural and religious issues, even though they ultimately prove immaterial.
5) "A Duty to the Dead" by Charles Todd
World War I nurse keeps a burdensome promise.
Relinquishing for the moment Inspector Ian Rutledge (A Matter of Justice, 2008, etc.), the Todd writing partnership presents Bess Crawford, invalided home when the hospital ship she nursed on is shot out from under her. She’s bent on relaying a dying message—matters must be set right—from favored patient Arthur Graham to his brother Jonathan. Another matter, however, takes precedence for the Graham family: Peregrine, the Graham brother confined in an asylum since he was barely a teenager for murdering Lily the housemaid, is near death from pneumonia and needs nursing care. Providing it, Bess is struck by how rational Peregrine seems. Meanwhile, another village patient, a traumatized war victim who has fallen under her care, commits suicide—or does he? When Peregrine regains his strength, he takes Bess on the run to help him recover his memory of Lily’s death. A visit to the village rector reveals several other fatal calamities over the years that cast suspicion on other Graham family members: clubfooted Timothy, Mrs. Graham and, to Bess’s dismay, the late Arthur himself. A gruesome denouement lays bare all the family secrets and misalliances and releases Bess from her deathbed vow to Arthur.
Will readers miss Inspector Rutledge? You bet. But anyone who cares to loll in early-20th century English villages and mores and follow a plucky heroine as she confronts the stupidity of war will find solace in this old-fashioned mystery.
6) "The Lace Reader" by Brunonia Barry
In an ambitious debut, a wounded heroine returns home to confront ghosts and hallucinations, bereavements and beatings, a hellfire preacher with a witch-hunting flock and a murky family history with many missing pieces.
It’s been 15 years since Towner Whitney, descended from a long line of Salem eccentrics, fled the town, following her twin sister’s death and her own incarceration in a psychiatric hospital where she received shock therapy after claiming to have killed vicious Cal Boynton, whose abuse left his wife brain-damaged and blind. Now, Towner’s back, summoned by the disappearance of her great-aunt Eva, preeminent lace reader (it’s a skill similar to reading tea leaves, but using the intricate hand-made fabric instead), whose body is soon found at sea. Eva’s funeral is disrupted by the Calvinists, a fearsome religious group led by supposedly reformed Cal, currently suspected of further abuse or possibly worse by the local cop, Detective Rafferty, an ex-alcoholic from New York who starts to date Towner. Over-egged pudding doesn’t even begin to describe the torrent of content and genres in Barry’s first novel, which interweaves wise and half-crazed women, a gothic past involving a suicidal leap from a storm-tossed cliff and an occasionally thriller-ish present which includes Towner and a pregnant teen making a superhuman underwater escape from a burning building. Unusual and otherworldly, this is a blizzard of a story which surprisingly manages to pull together its historical, supernatural and psychiatric elements.
A survivor’s tale of redemption, reached via a long and winding road.
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