ɫɫ��

Kensington Books, 323 pages, $22.95

In 1911, when 18-year-old Madeleine Force marries John Jacob Astor, a divorced man almost 30 years her senior, gossips follow eagerly their every move. However, their publicly scandalous relationship, privately rife with love and genuine affection, would soon be eclipsed.

On the way back from an extended honeymoon through Egypt and Europe, their beloved Airedale Kitty in tow, the newlyweds sail back on the Titanic’s maiden voyage in April 1912.

The pregnant Mrs. Astor survives in Lifeboat 4, insisting that they row back closer to the ship, at risk of being pulled under by the waves, to try to save more people from the frigid water, not knowing whether her husband will be among them.

Written by Madeleine as a journal for her infant son to later learn the story of the father he never knew, it moves convincingly back and forth between the 1912 present and the recent past, beginning in 1907 when Astor first meets her after Madeleine plays Ophelia in “Hamlet.”

An unexpectedly affecting interpretation of a well-known tale.

The Bookseller’s Secret: A Novel of Nancy Mitford and WWII

By Michelle Gable

Graydon House, 384 pages, $23.99

From 1942 to ’45, writer Nancy Mitford worked in the Heywood Hill bookshop in Mayfair, London. Her close pals, including Evelyn Waugh, treat the bookshop as their private club where they gather to gossip. During a three-month leave from the store, Nancy writes “The Pursuit of Love,” the novel that would change her life, selling 200,000 copies during its first year.

The shenanigans of the provocative, outrageous Mitford sisters were once well known: Nancy, the writer; Pamela, the farmer; Diana, the fascist; Unity, the Hitler sympathizer; Jessica, the communist; Deborah, the duchess. Gable’s novel revives them and their beloved brother Tom in vibrant detail.

A parallel narrative set in 2021 follows Katie Cabot, a novelist and Mitford enthusiast who, suffering from writer’s block, visits her best friend Jojo in London. When Katie learns of a lost Mitford manuscript as well as the curious absence of Nancy’s correspondence between 1942 and ’45, she is keen to help find some answers possibly secreted in the drawers at Heywood Hill.

A riveting page-turner that will leave you exclaiming, vive la littérature!

The Lost Notebook of Édouard Manet

By Maureen Gibbon

W.W. Norton, 240 pages, $23.95

In his final years, impressionist Édouard Manet is determined to find and replicate beauty in the face of increasingly distracting acute pain and diminished mobility. Manet begins a journal in 1880 as a distraction to chronicle his painful hydrotherapy to treat syphilis. Later, he reflects on his many affairs, realizing that the notebook reveals the kind of man he is.

At the provincial home where he stays, Manet comes to depend on the kindnesses of the young housekeeper Reine Piolet, her delightful eight-year-old brother Jeannot and his pet crow, Lucette. He remains enraptured by the natural world, understanding that “the trick is to always to be in love … with things,” like a sleeping bumblebee under the pink umbrella of a thistle, or realizing that being enveloped by hundreds of dragonflies along a river is an “ancient, secret rite.”

As Manet works in agonizing pain on “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère,” he abides by his imperative to make his painting as true as possible.

A poignant evocation of a creative life.

The Stars We Share

By Rafe Posey

Pamela Dorman Books, 400 pages, $35

Posey’s impressive, sweeping, moving debut follows Alec Oswin and June Attwell from 1927 when they meet as eight-year-olds in an English village where Alec — whose parents died of cholera in Jaipur — is being raised by his aunt and June is a math prodigy, obsessed with map-making, and the only child of the local vicar.

Although June relies on maps to make sense of the world and her place in it, Alec looks to the stars to orient him, from the ones that kept him company on his lonely shipboard journey as a boy to the ones that help him find his way as a Second World War pilot. For Alec, “the stars are as close as he can get to fact,” and when faced with adversity he finds comfort in them.

While Alec serves in the RAF, June signs the Official Secrets Act, working for the Foreign Office, first at Bletchley Park and then abroad where “codes run in her blood, fill her dreams.”

A deeply human story told in gorgeous prose.

Janet Somerville is the author of “Yours, for Probably Always: Martha Gellhorn’s Letters of Love & War 1930-1949,” available now in audio, read by Ellen Barkin.