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Bookshelf, Winter 2025

cplesley

An eclectic mix on this season’s bookshelf, although as usual all the books are in some way historical and, in this case, written by people I have agreed to interview either here or on my podcast. Imperial and Communist China, Soviet ballerinas, French revolutionaries, costume design in the glory days of Hollywood, and the Harlem Renaissance—there must be something in this collection to please just about everyone. Most of the novels are not out yet, but they will be by April. Read on to find out more.



Schematic drawing of a woman in a black high-necked jacket, surrounded by flames, with a traditional Chinese building dimly visible in green; cover of Su Chang's The Immortal Woman

Su Chang, The Immortal Woman (House of Anansi, 2025)


This novel by a Chinese-Canadian author explores fifty years of China’s history, from the Cultural Revolution of 1965 to the very different republic of 2014, through the experiences of several generations of women from a single family. Beginning with Lemei, the daughter of a long-time Mao supporter who nonetheless winds up on the wrong side of those who support the Gang of Four, and ending with her Americanized daughter’s return to the motherland with Lemei’s granddaughter, the novel puts human faces on years of great uncertainty and change that so far have attracted less fictional attention precisely because so many of us lived through them at a comfortable distance.

I’ll be interviewing Su Chang for this blog in early March, when her book comes out.



Two sketched young women, similar but not identical, seen from the back dressed in turquoise tutus against a contemporary painting in turquoise and pink; cover of Elyse Durham's Maya & Natasha

Elyse Durham, Maya & Natasha (Mariner, 2025)


Although not as popular as the Romanovs, the 1917 Revolution, or the Gulag, the Siege of Leningrad in 1941 has had its own share of fictional attention. Elyse Durham’s novel, like Su Chang’s Immortal Woman, takes a slightly different tack, beginning with twin girls born on the very day when the blockade begins to Elizaveta, an unmarried ballerina who was once a rising star with the Kirov.


Desperate and depressed, Elizaveta commits suicide, but her best friend, also a ballerina, rescues the infants and gets them out of the besieged city as the theater evacuates. Maya and Natasha, the twins, grow up to become ballerinas themselves, experiencing the Cold War but also the increase in cultural exchanges with the West. Until it becomes clear, that because of state restrictions in response to an increasing number of defections by artists, only one sister will be allowed to dance with the Kirov....

I loved this novel, and I plan to interview the author for New Books in Historical Fiction in a few weeks.



Wallpaper inscribed with purple drawings featuring a young man and woman in 18th-century French dress; cover of Lora Jones's The Woman in the Wallpaper

Lora Jones, The Woman in the Wallpaper (Union Square and Co., 2025)

As with the two books described above, Lora Jones takes what appears to be a well-trodden path but then veers off in a new direction. In this case, the backdrop is the French Revolution of 1789—and indeed, we get a good view, from both the aristocratic side and those of less “elevated” birth, of the issues that sparked the revolution. The novel reflects the perspectives of three women—Sophia, Lara, and Hortense. The first two are sisters, both artistically talented but of low rank, and the third an aristocrat resident at Versailles. What eventually brings them together is a wallpaper factory not far from Paris, where the owners, father and son, are harboring a mystery of their own.



Against a dingy backdrop of peeled plaster and a sketched set design stands a mannequin next to a stool covered with pieces of fabric and paper; cover of Kate Maruyama's Alterations

Kate Maruyama, Alterations (Running Wild Press, 2025)

This novel opens in Hollywood in the 1930s. Yes, it has to do with the film industry, but only peripherally with acting: what distinguishes the heroine (rather, one of several main characters), Adriana, is her gift not for the silver screen but for sewing. She lands a job with Edith Head, the first female costume designer in major motion pictures, and soon links up with Rose, an actress who takes Adriana under her wing from the moment they meet. Their relationship as roommates, then lovers—and especially the way they handle the intolerance they encounter in the late 1930s and early 1940s—creates an emotional whirlpool that continues to play out sixty years later, when two other point-of-view characters—the cousins Lizzie and Laura—find themselves dealing with personal crises of their own.


To say more about how these various threads intertwine to form a single, coherent story would be to give away spoilers. But you can find out more from my written interview with Kate Maruyama toward the end of March, a couple of weeks after her book appears in print.



Against a stylized backdrop of green New York City brownstones, a Black woman larger than the buildings and dressed in a long striped gown holds a book while people surround her, dancing on her skirt; cover of Victoria Christopher Murray's Harlem Rhapsody

Victoria Christopher Murray, Harlem Rhapsody (Berkley, 2025)


With its publication date of early February, this book is undoubtedly aimed at Black History Month. And indeed, its setting during the Harlem Renaissance of the early 1900s makes it a good match. But it is equally well suited for Women’s History Month in March, because it focuses on Jessie Redmon Fauset, an author and editor who worked closely with W. E. B. Dubois and the NAACP magazines The Crisis and The Brownies’ Book (for children).


Although Fauset and her novels have not attracted the widespread public attention given to many of the writers and poets she nurtured, she was well known and well respected in her own time and fully deserves a return to fame. She was, above all, a fighter—for literary causes, to be sure, but also for racial justice—and she comes roaring to life in this fictionalized biography.

To learn more about Fauset, her background and contributions but also her complicated relationship with Dubois, tune in to my forthcoming interview with the author for New Books in Historical Fiction.


Against a backdrop of green silk embroidered with golden dragons, a young Chinese girl with an upswept hairdo  decorated with flowers holds a red fan; cover of Jane Yang's The Lotus Shoes

Jane Yang, The Lotus Shoes (Park Row Books, 2025).


The imperial Chinese custom of binding elite women’s feet forms the backdrop to this sensitive yet disturbing exploration of power and privilege in a society at the cusp of change. Little Flower, sold into slavery at the age of six to save her family from destitution, takes pride in her “golden lilies” (bound feet), which her mother insists will ensure her a good marriage someday. But her young mistress Linjing resents her new maid’s gift for embroidery and the praise it garners from Linjing’s mother. Little Flower’s “golden lilies” are just the first loss she suffers as she adjusts to life as the property of an undisciplined girl not much older than herself.

It takes years, but eventually Linjing discovers that she, too, lives in a world that requires women to be seen, not heard, despite her father’s wealth and China’s position, in the late nineteenth century, on the tipping point between imperial tradition and enforced modernity in response to Western colonialism. Only then does she begin to understand the harm she has inflicted on the maid who could not fight back.

I expect to interview this author for the New Books Network, although I can’t fit her in until April.

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© 2015 by C. P. Lesley. All rights reserved.

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