Janice Law's 3 favorite reads in 2023

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store has vigorous and distinctive prose and a big cast of vividly realized characters set in the Black and immigrant (mostly Jewish) section of a Pennsylvania industrial town in the 1920s and 1930s. The novel begins with the modern-day discovery of a body.

How the corpse got there and who he was in life, however, is a mere detail in the lively pagent provided by hardscrabble Chicken Hill and particularly its grocery store, a community lifeline in hard times, thanks to its good-natured proprietors Chona and Moshe Ludlow.

In a time of open racial discrimination, the Ludlows count both employees and friends across the color barrier, especially the Tamblins. When the latter asks for help in preventing a young deaf relative from being sent to a notorious orphanage, they agree, setting off a gripping and fast-moving plot.

This is history as it should be written: well-researched with sharp characterizations and lively prose.

A Fever in the Heartland recounts how a charismatic former salesman promoted the Klan in Indiana in the 1920s.  Glib and intelligent, D.C. Stephenson tapped into the fear of immigrants, Blacks, Catholics, and Jews. Selling robes and other regalia and peddling a mix of entertainment and violence, he made the Klan into a money-making machine.

He made himself rich and the Klan into a power that corrupted politicians, judges, and cops. Stephenson dreamed of a run for President, and but for Madge Oberholtzer, who survived a sadistic sexual violent attack long enough to testify, he might have succeeded.

A Fever in the Heartland is a cautionary tale still, alas, relevant.

There are so many characters to root for and so many threats to their happiness!

An ambitious and wide-ranging account of a South Indian family, The Covenant of Water begins in 1900 when a 12-year-old girl is married off to a 40ish landowner.

The marriage proves unexpectedly successful despite sorrows and troubles, many of which are connected with The Condition. This mysterious malady causes death by drowning and eventually impells the couple's granddaughter to become a doctor and to seek to unravel the family affliction.

The lively, well-observed characters range across the Indian caste system with memorable personalities from every station in life and include several important British personalities, too. All are set in a vast canvas from the rural plantations and the medical facilities of the British Raj to rapidly changing modern India.