Jessie Neilson reviews a selection of the latest historical fiction titles from around the world.
In 1935, one of the worst hurricanes in recorded history tore across the Florida Keys, and the aftermath exposed deep-seated racial and class prejudices both within the local community and at governmental level.
It is revealing that a natural disaster such as this Labour Day Hurricane, or Hurricane Katrina's swamping of New Orleans, can cause such utter chaos not only physically but also within the psyche of a nation.
A national tragedy like this can expose people's raw rage at each other's differences, which lurks beneath an uneasy facade of ''community''.
Summertime is Floridian Vanessa Lafaye's debut novel.
Based on a real natural event, it chronicles the unnecessary loss of life due to indifference and inadequate bureaucratic responses.
As in New Orleans, lack of disaster preparation and chaotic communication effected large-scale death. Predictably, it was the racial minorities and other most vulnerable sectors of society who suffered.
In part, this story is Lafaye's personal response to learning of a group of about 200 psychologically damaged war veterans who, after being denied their war pensions in Depression-era America, were sent, futilely, to the Keys to build a bridge.
It is also her reaction to the greater national horror: that the Ku Klux Klan, far from being a feature of distant southern states, had infiltrated seemingly ''progressive'' Florida as well.
Lafaye's characters show the complicity of the white community which largely sanctions violence here through its silence.
Lafaye's novel has as its strengths the painting of a convincing historical backdrop, and a fine, detailed sense of place.
She writes of a landscape of peacocks, strawberries, banyan trees, mangroves and country clubs; of fresh sweet coquinas, Key lime juice and fried conch.
The lush, humid setting is both compelling and unnerving.
Her characterisation, too, is detailed, for we can sense the trauma that exists in the wake of previous devastating storms, in the ravages of world war, and in the racial and class hatred.
There is Henry, who has the ''loping shuffle of the hobo on the rail'', and white man Dwayne, who finds that his wife has given birth to a ''mulatto baby''.
Less successful is the author's anticipation and depiction of the storm.
However, overall the novel is well paced and dramatic, and it leaves images that will long linger.
Three Souls is the poignant and sensitive debut novel of Taiwanese-Canadian writer Janie Chang.
Drawing on her own family's highly privileged lifestyle in early 20th-century China, Chang chronicles the consequences of stifling cultural restrictions for women, against the backdrop of political upheaval.
The story opens with young mother Song Leiyin watching over her own funeral, narrating her emotions and experiences as a first-person ''fly on the wall''.
Added to this unusual narrative device is the characterisation of three bright sparks circling in the air - her souls: yang, yin and hun - who urge that she has sinned and must fix her mistakes before she can enter the afterlife.
Three Souls looks back at Song's childhood of grandeur: of parties in 1920s Changchow; gatekeepers, sedan chairs, concubines and courtyard houses.
When she meets and falls in love with a young translator of Anna Karenina, a man who is also a fervent leftist sympathiser, life starts to become very complicated.
His beliefs clash violently with Song's father's household.
Yen Hanchin is a rousing speaker, with his motto: ''You may lose all that you acquire, but knowledge and wisdom remain yours forever.''
Rich was Chang's material for such a project, as the aristocratic characters featured, as well as the poets and others artistically and politically involved, emerge straight out of earlier generations of her family.
The plot has been rendered fictional by altered details and magical realism such as we also see in the works of Amy Tan.
Chang reveals multiple characters and plot twists in believable fashion, showing great empathy for the difficult ethical decisions that are continually measured against each other.
The reader will leave this story greatly affected by its strange and haunting sadnesses.
Kate Riordan is a British writer and journalist who sets her first novel largely within the dilapidated and haunted Fiercombe Manor in the bucolic English countryside.
Her main character, Alice Eveleigh, is the young and naive protagonist who, after a misguided affair ending in pregnancy, has been shipped off by her parents to a place of isolation.
The narrative structure alternates reassuringly between the two major plot strands: Alice in 1930s London and later the countryside; and an earlier resident of the house, the mysterious and angst-ridden Elizabeth Stanton.
Alice's main preoccupation as she whiles away her time is to uncover the secrets of the past, peeking as she does into corners of the property from which she has been forbidden.
There are few characters in this novel, living as Alice is in relative isolation, and so there is little chance to develop well-rounded characters that interact at all convincingly.
The Girl in the Photograph is to a large extent predictable, and the parallels between Alice and Elizabeth's situations and potential tragedies are too laboriously done.
The two main positives in this novel would be the pleasant, romantic setting, and the emphasis on women's suffering and discrimination in matters of career, family and general lifestyle in earlier decades.
The Nightingale is a large and ambitious novel set in France during World War 2.
It follows the experiences of two young sisters, Isabelle and Vianne, and their father, detailing their varied involvement in anti-war activities and their daily efforts simply to survive.
Writer Kristin Hannah has used as a starting point a true historical figure, a Belgian woman, who heroically led many Jews and other potential victims to safety through mountainous terrain.
Hannah's story, however, is fiction and she more or less successfully peoples the landscape with complicated characters who are all struggling to make their way in Nazi-occupied France and under the Vichy puppet government.
Part spy novel and part romance, The Nightingale introduces an assortment of villains and heroes, suggesting the boundaries are not always clear cut in this respect.
When Herr Captain Beck threatens a French family dynamic by boarding with them, he is still a creature worthy of understanding to some degree.
Hannah is concerned with the complications of human personality and relationships in times of greatest stress.
In the opening note to the reader, she asks us what we would do, as wives and mothers (or fathers) to risk our lives, and that of our child's, to save a stranger.
There is a lot of compassion and bravery in this novel, and the reader will become immersed in the plot despite some wooden descriptive writing.
However, the story is powerful, and the second, more recent timeframe emphasises how the past and present continue to shape each other and mould generations of family histories.
• Jessie Neilson is a University of Otago library assistant.
