A fresh batch of debut fiction introduces heroines – and an antiheroine – with impressive abilities and memorable flaws. None is as powerful as Polly Kimball, a 19th-century New Englander. Polly is just 15 at the start of Rachel Urquhart's The Visionist (Simon & Schuster 12.99), and already she's burned down the family farm, killing her abusive father in the process. Fleeing, she ends up in a Shaker community called the City of Hope, where she is hailed a "visionist" after a hallucinatory flashback is taken as a message from God. This new role brings added scrutiny from within the community, just as the local fire inspector's investigations are tightening the net without. Part mystery, part coming-of-age tale, it probes questions of faith and fear while deftly illuminating Shakerism.
The Undertaking by Audrey Magee (Atlantic 12.99) is a novel made all the more harrowing by its extreme readability. In the thick of the second world war, Katharina Spinell marries a stranger for convenience's sake: her new husband, a German soldier named Peter, gets leave from the Russian front, and she gains the security of a widow's pension should anything happen to him. But during his brief visit to Berlin, they fall in love, and she falls pregnant.
Though sparely told, greed, ignorance and chillingly affectless cruelty are everywhere, as Katharina moves with her parents into a stolen Jewish home, and Peter proselytises among his increasingly sceptical comrades. Yet Stalingrad and the Soviet invasion of Berlin are just the start of trials in store for Magee's lovers. As the tide of history turns, she pulls off a feat of high-wire empathy.
A young widow is the heroine of Amy Grace Loyd's The Affairs of Others (Weidenfeld 12.99). Since her husband's death, Celia has found solace in a small Brooklyn apartment building that she renovated herself, filling it with carefully chosen tenants who respect her need for boundaries. When one of them persuades her to let a friend stay in his absence, that equilibrium is imperilled. The newcomer, Hope, is in flight from a faithless marriage. She is also beautiful, precarious, and falling for a handsome childhood friend who likes things rough. As the sound of their games filters down into Celia's bedroom, it stirs messy desires as well as outrage. Poetic levity keeps this charged narrative from becoming overwrought, and as it cuts between Celia's past and present, it gestures to an optimistic future, allowing her to move forward without demanding that she move on.
In The Violet Hour (Viking 12.99), Katherine Hill studies three generations of a dysfunctional family through the prism of a divorce, six years in. When her marriage ended, artist Cassandra had only herself to blame. Abe was a good husband, a good father and a doctor to boot, yet still she drifted into an affair with a fickle young gallery owner. Considering its fallout from multiple perspectives, the novel splices humorous set pieces with gently searing revelations, capturing a fancy New York wedding as agilely as a family funeral in the suburbs of Washington, DC. It's a sophisticated saga, offering easy pleasures with no easy truths.
Set in America, eastern Europe and Israel, the eight stories that make up The UnAmericans by Molly Antopol (Fourth Estate, 12.99) also dwell on family ties. In The Quietest Man, a Czech dissident frets about how his neglected daughter might depict him in a play she's written. My Grandmother Tells Me This Story describes a woman's daredevil mission in Poland for the Yiddish Underground. In The Old World, a Ukrainian widow mourns her late husband in the arms of a small-scale Brooklyn dry-cleaning mogul, who himself feels as if he's lost his only daughter. Sometimes melancholy, often witty and always absorbing, these subtle stories of flawed humanity are a delight.
David Rose has more than 20 years' experience covering the intelligence world for newspapers including the Observer. It's the making of Taking Morgan (Quartet 12.99), a smartly paced political thriller that taps into Homeland territory via its heroine, Morgan Cooper, a CIA operative who gets too close to her Palestinian agent and is kidnapped in Gaza by Islamic militants. While her husband, a civil rights lawyer, strays far beyond his own comfort to help secure her release, Morgan herself proves gruesomely nifty with a penknife.
