Book reviews: four enchanting historical novels | Things To Do

Tomorrow Is for the Brave

Kelly Bowen

Forever, 384 pages, $24.99

It’s June 1939 and socialite Violet St. Croix — car enthusiast and talented mechanic — volunteers with the Red Cross in Nice, hoping to become an ambulance driver. However, since women are only permitted to be nurses, that is what she agrees to do alongside her friend “George” Chastain.

Disinherited by her father for breaking off her engagement to a suitable fiancé and disobeying his direct order not to embarrass the family by volunteering for war, Violet finds herself first serving as a nurse in Finland during winter 1940 and later as a driver in North Africa for the French Foreign Legion.

Now nicknamed “La Fleur” and a legend among the troops for enduring the same horrors as the men on the front, Violet is convinced that there is a traitor in their midst.

With propulsive narrative drive, Bowen’s latest is an irresistible page-turner, rife with humanity.

Every Time We Say Goodbye

Natalie Jenner

St. Martin’s, 336 pages, $39

She’s a playwright and co-owner of Bloomsbury’s Sunwise Turn bookshop, but when Vivien Lowry’s most recent play flops in 1950s London, she accepts friend Peggy Guggenheim’s invitation to work for filmmaker Douglas Curtis in Rome as a script doctor for “When All Else Fails,” shooting at Cinecittà.

Vivien uses fallow time and new connections to try to uncover what happened to her dead fiancé, whose name recently surfaced on a list of missing POWs.

Her affair with charming lothario John Lassiter and vibrant cameos by legendary cultural figures Ada “Bricktop” Smith, Ava Gardner and Sophia Loren propel this sophisticated plot in post-war Italy, where the Vatican has an outsized censorial influence on film.

The deft connections to her previous novels will delight Jenner’s fans in this passionate and poignant story of secrets, sacrifice and true love.

This Strange Eventful History

Claire Messud

W.W. Norton, 448 pages, $39.99

In this immersive, sweeping family epic that covers seven generations and is inspired by Messud’s own personal history, protagonist Chloe, the author’s analog, assures that, “It doesn’t matter so much where this story begins as that it begins.”

We follow patriarch Gaston Cassar and his wife, Lucienne, their children François and Denise, and grandchildren Chloe and Loulou from 1940 Algeria to 1953 Massachusetts to 1960s Toronto, Buenos Aires and Geneva to 1974 Australia to 1989 Toulon to 1998 Cannes and through 2010 — the generations never at home, constantly wandering in search of self and belonging. Always, filial duty is juxtaposed with desire for freedom.

Messud’s impeccable ear for dialogue and her vibrant characters, who behave on their own terms, bring this story irresistibly to life.

In it she implies that we are never free of family. Like a loosened braid, ripples are crimped in — of self-deception, of uncomfortable truth, of kindness. When luck is with you, kindness triumphs.

The Titanic Survivors Book Club

Timothy Schaffert

Doubleday, 320 pages, $39

Yorick (his dad fancied himself a Shakespearean), a librarian responsible for curating the second-class book repository on the Titanic, by chance was left stranded on the dock the day the doomed ship sailed in 1912.

A year later, with other “survivors” who never boarded, Yorick forms a book club in his antiquarian Parisian shop, La Librairie Sirène. Together, they discuss Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening” and Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and more, trying to recognize themselves in these other lives or to heal old wounds.

A passionate love triangle mirrors for a time the plot of “Cyrano de Bergerac,” until the First World War flings the characters away from one another to Japan, to soldiering on the front, to working in the Paris censorship office.

Impeccably researched, with sumptuous, affecting prose, Schaffert’s novel is full of life’s wisdom.

Janet Somerville is the author of “How Midsummer Night: A Memoir of Friendship and Loss.”