6 Engrossing Historical Novels to Keep the Chill Away

Star 111

By Lutz Seiler

These days, it’s hard to envision what Seiler’s translator, Tess Lewis, calls “the heady atmosphere of hope and disorientation” that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall. Luckily, Seiler’s STAR 111 (New York Review Books, 496 pp., paperback, $19.95) brings it all vividly back. An autobiographical picaresque, his novel reconstructs the exhilarating yet often terrifying experiences of individual East Germans in that brief period between the collapse of the Communist regime and reunification. Its central character, a 26-year-old aspiring poet, drifts through East Berlin’s anarchic underground squatter scene even as his parents abandon their home in Thuringia for a refugee camp in the West. All three find that freedom is a frustratingly vague concept, requiring constant improvisation. But what choice do they have, fleeing the ruins of an “abruptly obsolete, discontinued life”?

The Last Whaler

By Cynthia Reeves

The discontinuity in THE LAST WHALER (Regal House, 326 pp., paperback, $20.95) is both personal and professional. Set mainly in Svalbard, an international no man’s land between northern Norway and the North Pole, the novel juxtaposes the grief-stricken testimony of a widowed former whaler with letters written by his botanist wife roughly a decade earlier — souvenirs of the winter of 1937-38, when they became stranded at a remote whaling station, cut off from the outside world as it teetered on the brink of war. Each narrative celebrates, in its own fashion, an icy landscape filled with enchantment and danger, even as it drifts toward an indictment of the slaughter that has upset the balance of nature. Each is also a wrenching account of good intentions gone horribly awry. In the endless dark of the polar winter, a journey meant to heal a marriage becomes its undoing.

Pearly Everlasting

By Tammy Armstrong

Don’t be put off by the odd title of Armstrong’s latest novel. PEARLY EVERLASTING (Harper, 352 pp., $28.99) is named for its beguiling tomboy narrator, who in turn is named for a plant found in the New Brunswick woods. The main action takes place during the Great Depression, in and around the province’s logging camps, as Armstrong’s teenage heroine embarks on a series of adventures aimed at protecting her “brother,” Bruno, the small black bear (“more sheepdog than old boar”) that’s been raised alongside her since they were infants. Armstrong’s novel was inspired by a photograph, taken in 1903, of a woman in a lumber camp in Maine, posing as she nursed both her newborn daughter and an orphaned bear cub.