Books We Loved, Mar. 2025

Here we are, back on Daylight Saving Time, which gave rise to remarkably little drama this year—perhaps because the world seems to have more than sufficient sources of drama, both financial and political, at present. Still, that extra hour in the evening calls out to be filled, and what better way to fill it than by reading a great novel? Here are three books we loved for March to enliven your evenings. Together, they provide their own doses of drama—the best kind, which you can control just by turning the page.

Elyse Durham, Maya & Natasha  (Mariner Books, 2025)

As Nazi tanks roll toward Leningrad in August 1941, an unmarried nineteen-year-old ballerina gives birth to twin girls in the soon-to-be besieged city. Bereft of hope, the dancer—once a rising star at the Kirov—slashes her wrists, but her babies survive, rescued by the devoted friend who arrives just too late to save their mother. The friend, too, is a dancer with the Kirov, and her tutelage and self-sacrifice ensure that the girls, Maya and Natasha, become students at the Vaganova Academy after the Siege of Leningrad is broken.

We meet the twins as they enter their senior year in 1958. At once inseparable and competitive, Maya and Natasha have developed quite different personalities, with Natasha the leader and future star, Maya her loyal follower. But as they turn seventeen, various factors pull them apart: boys; the changing climate of Khrushchev’s USSR; and the approaching end to their schooling, which even in a state-run economy doesn’t guarantee anyone a specific place in the world. But it’s when the state declares that, in response to recent defections by artists to the West, only one member of any given family can join the Kirov Ballet that Maya and Natasha must confront the reality that one sister’s success will come at the cost of the other’s. How each of them responds to that challenge drives the rest of this thoroughly engrossing novel. And although neither girl really recognizes it until near the end of the book, the choices each makes are driven at least in part by their determination to fulfill the goals their mother never had the chance to achieve.

Weaving together such disparate elements as the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Cold War competition that drove the exchange between the New York City Ballet’s visit to Moscow and the Kirov’s tour of the United States in 1962, the filming of Sergei Bondarchuk’s monumental version of War and Peace, and the difficult yet rewarding training that produces elite dancers, Maya and Natasha explores the eternal bond between sisters while prompting readers to consider just how far they would go to achieve a cherished goal.

For more information, listen to my New Books Network interview with the author.—CPL

Rachel Kushner, Creation Lake  (Scribner, 2024)

Sadie Smith (not her real name) is a thirty-four-year-old American spy working for bosses she will never meet and taking instruction from and reporting back to contacts who will never tell her more than she needs to know. Previously she worked for the F.B.I., but she was fired after pushing a troubled young man already on his way to “providing evidence” into hurrying things along. Her current job, in France, is to infiltrate a radical farming community looking for ways to put an end to state-run technologies that will leave farmers like themselves with insufficient water supply. Sadie has no trouble befriending people she will ultimately have to betray. She’s attractive (by nature as well as contrivance; she mentions that she has breast implants), bold, witty, shrewd, sarcastic, and as cold as ice.

In order to infiltrate the subversives whose activities she has been tasked with overseeing, she must first befriend a man who is not part of the farming community; the subversives know how to spot a spy. Lucien is a filmmaker who happens to be a childhood friend of one of the subversives. And he happens to have a house near the farming community. Sadie waits until Lucien is sufficiently seduced and then moves into his house while he is conveniently off in another part of France shooting a film. Her goal is to do what needs to be done and finish the job before he ever returns.

Even before she sets out to meet the subversive farmers, she hacks into the email of Pascal, their leader, and immediately becomes privy to correspondences he receives from an old man by the name of Bruno. Bruno, an agitator himself back in his younger days, is now a philosopher of sorts. He discovers that if you live in the dark, as in a deep cave, your senses will shut down enough to give your intuition the encouragement it needs to take over for a while. Bruno believes that his cave time (he also has non-cave time in his daughter’s house, hence his ability to email) has enabled him to pick up scraps of information about Neanderthal consciousness, Neanderthals having lived in the cave he frequents previously. His hope is to communicate this new-found wisdom to the subversives eager for his help.

One of the thrills of this novel is that danger is building all around Sadie as she goes about her business. While she’s not entirely likeable, she is captivating, and it’s impossible not to worry with every turn of the page if her over-confidence and increasingly heavy drinking will cause her to take things a step too far, especially when she becomes sexually attracted to one of the married subversives. Creation Lake, which was shortlisted for the Booker, is unputdownable, as brilliant as it is entertaining, a wallop of a read and thought-provoking, too.—JS

S. G. Maclean, The Bookseller of Inverness (Quercus, 2022)

In The Bookseller of Inverness, Iain MacGillivray, a traumatized and scarred veteran of the Scottish Highlands Jacobite uprising leads a quiet life after his release from a British prison. He’s given up on Prince Charlie’s cause, although he still feels occasional rage at the British soldiers he encounters in his home town of Inverness. His love life consists of a few hasty encounters with a milliner, and his spare time is spent around his grandmother and her stalwart group of old friends, the Grand Dames, who reminisce about the uprisings and lost family members, captured or killed by the British redcoats.

Then one day a strange man shows up in Iain’s bookshop, demanding access to Lord Lovat’s book collection. Lord Lovat, also known as the Old Fox, was a clan leader who played both sides of the conflict until his British allies, out of patience with him, had him executed. The next day that same man is found murdered in the bookshop, and Iain’s father, whom Iain believed to be dead, secretly returns from France on the exiled prince’s business. Hector is an excepted skulker, a wonderful historical term which means that Hector, because of his loyalty to the Stuart cause, was excepted from the general pardon that the British issued and is known for being a skulker, one who passed on messages to Prince Charlie’s supporters in the Highlands after the prince fled. Iain tries to remain distant from his father’s dangerous activities, but as more people are murdered in connection to the missing book, he finds himself pulled into a web of political intrigue and betrayal.

Author S. G. Maclean, who has a Ph.D. in history from Aberdeen University, has crafted a well-plotted historical mystery with a sympathetic narrator, moments of humor, and interesting historical details of life in eighteenth-century Scotland.—GM