The British novelist's new book, The Fortune Hunter, reimagines the life of a 19th-century Austrian empress.There are 3 things that happened in this book that made it an impossibility to take it remotely seriously, even if the rest of the book had been the pinnacle of sophisticated literature (it wasn't.) Daisy Goodwin is the author of the 2011 best-seller The American Heiress. The Heroes' Welcome, to be released in March 2015, is very perceptive about the Great War's long legacy. Their protagonist, Riley Purefoy, has half his face blown away by a shell, but the conflict also damages his friends and lovers in less visible ways. These two novels contain powerful imaginings of the collateral damage inflicted by World War I on a generation of young people. My Dear I Wanted to Tell You and The Heroes' Welcome by Louisa Young (Harper Perennial, $15 each). Some of it is offensive now (the sympathetic treatment of the Ku Klux Klan, for example), but as compelling storytelling with a splendidly amoral heroine fighting to survive the American Civil War, it still works. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (Pocket Books, $10). His description of the hypocrisies and hysteria of a 19th-century English coastal town are wonderfully acute. Fowles's reputation has dimmed since his death, but The French Lieutenant's Woman is a masterful deconstruction of a Victorian novel. The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles (Back Bay, $16). There is no exposition here the reader is completely immersed into the chilly world of King Christian and his adulterous queen. An eerily atmospheric book about intrigue at the Danish Court in the 17th century.
Music and Silence by Rose Tremain (Washington Square, $32).
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