Books We Loved, May 2025

Even in May, one of the loveliest months—at least here in the Eastern United States, where it is (usually) neither too hot nor too cold, too wet or too dry, and there are flowers in bloom wherever you look—there is always time to read. Here are three more suggestions from us of books we loved, in this case all historical, although from different times and places. Take a virtual journey to late nineteenth-century Paris and Scotland in two periods—an urban but rather benighted sixteenth century and an isolated island with a population under forty in the 1930s. You won’t be disappointed, and you don’t even need a passport!

Emma Donoghue, The Paris Express  (S&S/Summit Books, 2025)

In October 1895, a passenger train scheduled to leave Granville, France, and head, with stops along the way, to Paris overran the buffer stop at the Montparnasse-Paris station and flew, literally, through the concourse there, bursting through the outer wall of the building and landing with the engine dangling out over the street. This is the event that stirred the imagination of Irish-Canadian author Emma Donoghue, who might well be called the Queen of Tight Spaces. Her novel Room, readers will recall, is about a woman and her young son who are held captive for seven years in a single room. Haven takes place with three men in a small boat who travel to a really small uninhabited (if you don’t count the birds) island; The Pull of the Stars unfolds in a make-shift hospital maternity ward set aside for women who happen to have the new flu. In the Wonder takes place in a small house, mostly in one room, in rural Ireland. I haven’t read her others yet, but they are all on my TBR list because Donoghue is a great writer and I have no doubt that she could build a riveting drama in the space of a broom closet.

While The Paris Express is based on a true event, the characters are an interesting mix of real people known to have been on the train (a few of them government officials), real people who could have been on the train because they lived in right region at the right time, and characters she invented to fill some empty seats. One of the most interesting is Madeleine Pelletier (Mado), a real-lifer who, had she been on the train, was angry enough at the French government for its mistreatment of the poor, of which she was one, to have wanted to cause some trouble for the officials who would have been her fellow passengers. Then there is Blonska, a Russian émigrée and lifelong do-gooder, also a real-lifer, who, had she been on the train, might have been just the one to catch onto Mado’s radical plans and try to interfere with them.

But while readers may want to check the back of the book to see who was real and who was not, they won’t want to get off the train while it’s still in motion in order to do so. More interesting than their genesis is how the characters are divided by their wealth, and thus whether they are in first-, second-, or third-class cars. In first and second, there are artists, photographers, the government people mentioned above, and others. Some are truly passionate about their life’s trajectory, and others, while they may appear dignified, are not above rushing out of the train at pit stops to satisfy their baser cravings. One woman—so wealthy that she and her family must have their private carriage inserted into the middle of the train at one of the stops, thus threatening the bonus the crew receives if the train arrives at its final stop on time—has trained her dog to sit with a sugar cube on his nose. Yet she will not give a cube to her five-year-old grandson, even when he insists he can be trained too.

The third-class cars are, of course, overcrowded and the most fun to spend time in. Their passengers are black, white, and mulatto, young and old, sick and healthy. One, once Gauguin’s unmarried teenage model, is very pregnant, and though she insists she will not give birth until she arrives at her sister’s house in Paris, her baby has a different agenda entirely. (It’s very messy when a woman gives birth in a tight rail car, with women who want to help pressing forward and men who are only disgusted leaning away, and the most dangerous person in the car, the one who doesn’t even love her own life, is the only one who knows how to free an infant’s shoulder from where it’s stuck in the birth canal.) These people argue, shout, call one another names, advise, flirt, and piss out the window when they have to. Their interactions are ongoing, often wildly funny, and always beautifully human. And that’s not even getting to the train, Engine 721, herself, a masterwork of technology, and her devotees, the men who spend basically their every waking hour doing the very dirty and often dangerous work that keeps her running.

In terms of details, Donoghue’s research is meticulous, right down to the inner workings of the steam engine. As for dialogue, nobody does it better. This is a big (not in page length but in substance), noisy, generous, and explosive book—a treat of a read.—JS

Kate Foster, The King’s Witches  (Mantle, 2024)

The book opens with Princess Anna of Denmark readying herself for her sea journey to meet her intended husband, King James VI of Scotland. Anna is naïve and pliable; she’s worried about the trial betrothal period of six months, after which James can reject her if he decides she’s not suitable, but she does as she’s told. After all, the fate of women like the witch Doritte Olsen, who is burned the week Anna is to meet the king’s representative in Denmark, shows what’s in store for women who dance with the devil, rather than comporting themselves properly. Anna sets off by ship accompanied by Kirsten, a seemingly callous and stern lady-in-waiting.

Over in Scotland another thread of the story unspools. A young woman, Jura, seeks a job after her mother, a local healer dies. She’s hired as a housekeeper by the wife of the local baillie (sheriff), Stuart Kincaid. She has an innocent flirtation with a local boy, tries to stay on Kincaid’s good side, and occasionally performs harmless charms. Jura is a warm-hearted girl, and when she hears the fleet bearing Anna was almost wrecked in storms, she buys a ribbon just for Anna and performs a simple ceremony for her safety.

As it turns out, Anna’s and Jura’s fates will be tied together through a strange chain of events. Both young women become increasingly determined to have some agency of their own: Anna, because she is falling in love with her language tutor; and Jura, because the outwardly respected baillie expects to have his needs serviced by her. Kirsten is revealed to have an agenda of her own; yet at the same time she must guide Anna through the complications of her relationship with King James, who is in love with another man, and eventually, help Jura.

The King’s Witches was an interesting read, since I was aware of King James, the son of Mary Queen of Scots. His mother, a woman he barely knew, was executed, possibly leaving him with a deep distrust of women. He became fascinated with witchcraft and executed thousands of witches, most of them female. Kate Foster, a journalist by trade, manages to portray James as neither monster nor saint, but rather a fallible royal.—GM

Karen Swan, The Midnight Secret  (Macmillan, 2025)

This, the fourth and last installment of the Wild Isle series, concludes Karen Swan’s exploration of the fictionalized events surrounding the very real evacuation of the island of St. Kilda, in Scotland’s Outermost Hebrides, in 1930. The four books overlap chronologically to some degree, but each has a different heroine: Effie (The Last Summer), Mhairi (The Stolen Hours), Flora (The Lost Lover), and Jayne (The Midnight Secret). As the series progresses, the author delves ever deeper into the circumstances leading up to a mysterious death, highly unusual in the history of this isolated island with its tightly knit population of thirty-six people.

In 1926, when The Midnight Secret begins, Jayne Ferguson is a naive girl who jumps at a proposal from a handsome man. By 1930, as the island prepares to evacuate, marriage has shattered Jayne’s illusions. Her belief that she must conceal all evidence of her husband’s abusive behavior, coupled with a gift that she has inherited from her mother—a particular form of second sight that shows her the faces of people in her vicinity who are destined to die soon—have erected a barrier between her and those around her, especially after the transition to the unfamiliar landscape of the Scottish mainland.

Meanwhile, Effie, Mhairi, and Flora are wrestling with the consequences of their own prior choices as well as the difficulties of adapting to a completely unfamiliar world. And as things heat up, with various characters accused of involvement in the aforementioned mysterious death, Jayne’s extrasensory ability becomes ever more important to the survival of her community even as it undermines her already rocky relationship with her spouse.

Although all four books focus on island life, the evacuation, and the local population’s adjustment to life on the Scottish mainland, it’s best to read them in order, because the individual stories build on one another. Fortunately, they are such quick and rewarding reads that it is no hardship to get through all four.—CPL