Sylvia Plath, a New York vigilante and Shah of Iran featured in latest historical fiction

Scribner, 304 pages, $39

Helen Bain unwinds history from 1962 through 1961 as she depicts the English countryside life of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes in reverse, opening two months before 30-year-old Plath kills herself in a rented London flat.

The North Tawton, Devon home still known as Court Green — purchased by the couple in August 1961 — becomes a treasured place for the charismatic Sylvia who embraces rural life with her toddlers, Frieda and Nicholas. She sells flowers from her burgeoning garden at the local market and learns to keep bees and how to ride a horse across challenging landscape.

Sylvia rises at 4 a.m. to write, her cherished “blue silent hour,” while Ted works when he wants in the chaos of his study, papers and books scattered across the floor. Although Sylvia admires the way writers are supported financially in Britain both through BBC programming and the Arts Council, Ted’s relentless philandering takes a physical and emotional toll on his talented wife.

A year later, Hughes moves back to London alone and Plath relocates to the city with their children, intending to return to Court Green in spring 1963. Her friends believe her, noting, “She’s got her bees waiting for her. Her apple trees. Her garden. She loves this house.”

Like the pen-and-ink sketch Sylvia makes standing outside Reims Cathedral, Bain’s novel captures life “exactly in its complicated vivid depth.” It is a splendid, polyphonic debut.

Lady X

Molly Fader

Doubleday Canada, 352 pages, $26.99

This absorbing dual narrative shifts between 2024 Montecito and Pittsburgh and 1977 New York City as it tracks middle-aged Margot Cooper — a social media influencer married to an A-list Hollywood actor — and her mother Ginger Daughtry’s single life in the 1970s with roommates Faye and Rachel.

When Margo’s husband Jack is outed by many young women to whom he has texted sexually charged photos, she abandons California with teen daughter Skye, seeking refuge at her family home in Pittsburgh, where her journalist sister Julia lives, their ailing mother in a care facility nearby. Going through attic boxes, the sisters find a trove of ephemera including a 1977 stub from a legendary New York City disco, curious if their mother had a secret past.

The richly imagined 1977 narrative thread finds Ginger working as a coat check girl, dreaming of dancing on Broadway, her life pushing up against celebrities like Liza Minnelli, Halston and Bianca Jagger in the fast-paced, coked-up club. When one of the roommates is sexually assaulted and the cops do nothing, they decide to pursue justice in their own way.

Meanwhile, Lady X, a controversial graffiti artist and fictional vigilante political activist, known as Public Enemy No. 2 (behind the terrifying Son of Sam serial murderer), is a victim tired of being silenced.

Generations of women unite in their rage against patriarchal abuse in this affecting and timeless tale.

Love Lane

Patrick Gale

Headline, 304 pages, $28.99

Inspired by the author’s maternal great-grandfather and informed by family stories and letters passed down to him, this story of British-born, immigrant wheat farmer Harry Cane stretches from the 1918 flu pandemic that killed his wife and young daughter in rural Saskatchewan through the 1924 drought and deprivation of the Great Depression to the Second World War and then to the hope symbolized by the 1953 coronation of Elizabeth II.

In the unforgiving landscape of his chosen home, Harry embraces a simple, hard-working life that he shares with neighbouring farmer Paul, a man with whom he enjoys a one-time passion that “burned itself down to a steady tenderness.” When their relationship is disrupted by the appearance of Dimpy O’Connor and her son Davy, Harry realizes he is on his own.

A letter arrives from Betty — Harry’s now-adult daughter from his first marriage in England — inviting him to visit the postwar country, leading to secrets both kept and spoken.

Told from alternating points of view across generations, this is a vivid, moving and empathic tribute to a loving and compassionate man.

Mistress of the Persian Boarding House

Marina Nemat

Viking Canada, 304 pages, $26.95

In this gutting and glorious debut novel, Nemat mines her paternal grandmother Zina’s life, which began in glamour as an upper-class daughter in early 20th-century Russia, a young woman accustomed to fine clothes, Fabergé jewelry and dancing at palatial balls.

The bulk of the narrative shifts between life in 1914 St. Petersburg on the cusp of class revolution and assumed sanctuary in 1918 Tehran, a one-time haven for Russian émigrés. The final third of the novel provides a window into Zina’s ongoing role running a Tehran boarding house, providing a safe harbour for single women and their children through the 1940s and 1950s.

Actual violence and the threat of it are at the core of this tale, but are eased by the supportive rapport of the found family of strangers in Iran who bolster one another’s spirits through poverty, illness and political unrest. Widowed Zina finds herself basking in the loving attention of the ambitious Reza Khan, the future shah, a man who offers her temporary respite and joy and an abiding friendship.

Courage, decency and kindness to strangers form the emotional bedrock of this fascinating story.