A missing novelist, an early 20th-century painter and the Brontë sisters inspire new historical fiction

Hamilton Spectator

12-05-2025

'The Story She Left,' by Patti Callahan Henry, Simon & Schuster Canada, $25.99.
Inspired by the unsolved disappearance of 25-year-old fantasy novelist Barbara Newhall Follett in 1939, Henry's fictional version concerns Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham, who walks out on her husband and child in 1927 South Carolina.
In 1952, Bronwyn's daughter, Clara Harrington, an elementary school art teacher and award-winning children's book illustrator, receives a perplexing call from a London stranger, Charlie Jameson, who has a leather satchel with a manuscript; he has instructions from his recently deceased father to give it in person to Clara. She travels there with her asthmatic eight-year-old daughter Wynnie, where the Great Smog displaces them to the cleaner air of the pastoral Lake District.
A Russian nesting doll of secrets is revealed — including the whereabouts of a mysterious linguistic key that will unlock the story of the second novel Bronwyn left behind when she abandoned her family — in this tender narrative about the unbreakable bond between mothers and daughters.
'The Resistance Painter,' by Kath Jonathan, Simon & Schuster Canada, $24.99.
In a dual timeline that artfully shifts between occupied Poland during the Second World War and Toronto in 2010, we follow the lives of two women artists, painter Irena Marianowska and her granddaughter Josephine Blum, a sculptor who specializes in graveyard monuments that reveal the life stories of the deceased.
As a teenager, Irena joins the Polish resistance known as the AK, the Army Krajowa, in Warsaw, and works secretly for many years helping Jewish citizens escape through the underground network of sewers and aboveground safe houses.
When a commission introduces Josephine to an ailing Polish client, Stefan, who claims to have also served in the resistance, she discovers a threatening truth about his past that leads her to the horrors of Ravensbrück and her own family history, in which her intrepid, risk-taking, beloved grandmother dared all to do what was morally right.
Examining sacrifice, selflessness and resilience, Jonathan's atmospheric debut is both timely and timeless.
'Six Days in Bombay,' by Alka Joshi, MIRA, $25.99.
Amrita Sher-Gil, the early 20th-century painter known as 'the Frida Kahlo of India' and the daughter of a Hungarian Jewish mother and an Indian aristocrat father, inspires the fictional biracial figurative painter Mira Novak who is at the heart of this engrossing novel that opens in 1937 Bombay.
Hospitalized due to complications from a miscarriage, Mira is expected to make a full recovery. Yearning for a life larger than her own, attending nurse Sona Falstaff, only a few years younger, welcomes Mira's exotic and enchanting stories of travels and former lovers throughout Europe.
When Mira dies suddenly, the hospital administration wrongly focuses on Sona, dismissing her. Even though the nurse only knew her patient for a short time, four of Mira's paintings have been left in her care to pass along to people from her past in Prague, Florence and Paris.
Themes of identity and self-discovery drive this engaging portrait of young women daring to challenge societal expectations to become who they are meant to be.
'Fifteen Wild Decembers,' by Karen Powell, Europa Editions, $27.
With its title appropriately lifted from an Emily Brontë poem, this captivating coming-of-age novel opens with six-year-old Emily joining her sisters at a girls' school in 1824, where the unsanitary conditions lead to the rampant spread of tuberculosis and the Brontës' subsequent return home to Haworth.
Raised by their widowed father and his sister-in-law, and educated both at home and in boarding schools, encouraged to draw, write stories and stomp about the moors in the company of several cherished family dogs, the surviving Brontë children — Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne — share lives enriched and inspired by the natural world.
Powell's sumptuous, careful prose vividly recreates Victorian Yorkshire and richly conveys Emily's vibrant inner life that sets her imagination aflame as she writes 'Wuthering Heights,' its wildness in her heart.
An immersive, moving, literary page-turner.