Min imagines the interior life of Madame Mao Zedong, AKA the "white-boned demon," and her part in China's Cultural Revolution in this rousing, lyrical novel. (amazon.com)

Abraham Lincoln's killer, the shadowy stage actor John Wilkes Booth, comes to life in this harrowing, brilliantly detailed piece of historical fiction. (amazon.com)

In 1985, a train carrying Charles Dickens crashed at Staplehurst, killing ten passengers and injuring 40. The event had profound effects on the Oliver Twist author, who became obsessed "with a man—if man he was—named Drood, as well as with murder, death, corpses, crypts, mesmerism, opium, ghosts, and the streets and alleys of that black-biled lower bowel of London." Simmons’s taut, chilling thriller explores "the still-unsolved mysteries of the famous author’s last years and may provide the key to Dickens’s final, unfinished work: The Mystery of Edwin Drood." (amazon.com)

This whimsical fantasy novel centers on Samuel Clemens (you know him as Mark Twain) and his dream of building a magnificent riverboat to navigate the Mississippi and later the endless waters that dominate his new home planet. Appearances from the bloodthirsty Viking Erik Bloodaxe, King John of England, Odysseus and the infamous Nazi Hermann Goring make for a wonderful, wild ride. (amazon.com)

Graves's wonderful historical novel of the glory days of ancient Rome is narrated by the emperor Claudius, a stutterer who let everyone think he was an idiot in order to survive the reigns of Augustus, Tiberius and mad Caligula. (amazon.com)

Architect Frank Lloyd Wright's secret lover, Mamah Borthwick Cheney, narrates this ambitious novel, peppered with little-known facts about the pair, set in the early 1900s. (amazon.com)

Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer's servant, lover and eventually his muse is the inspiration for this captivating novel about what went on in Vermeer's prosperous household in the 1660s. (amazon.com)

The curious bond between Lewis Carroll and his pint-sized muse, Alice Liddell, is explored in Roiphe's haunting novel, which strives to answer what really happened when the Liddell family abruptly ended Carroll's relationship with their daughter when she was 11. (amazon.com)

Toibin enters the mind of Henry James in this gorgeously told story about the writer, who left his family in America to live among artists and writers in Paris, Rome, Venice and London.

Moses captures the life of Sylvia Plath in the moments leading up to her suicide in this engrossing novel. (amazon.com)

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