Mid-winter is the time for fiction, so here we go.

Ishmael Beah’s second book, The Radiance of Tomorrow, has been received with great acclaim. After his semi-autobiographical first novel, A Long Way Gone, detailed fighting as a boy soldier in Sierra Leone, he has turned to the recovery effort of a group of survivors who return, friend and foe alike, to re-establish village life. Enter, then, a mining company that inadvertently pollutes the village water supply, and another civil strife begins.

The Wind is Not a River, by Andrew Payton, deals with another kind of survival. During the Japanese occupation of two Aleutian Islands in World War II, a journalist masquerading as his fighter pilot brother killed earlier in the war is shot down over the islands. His survival depends partly on his cave mate but mostly on his own will to go on. Meanwhile, his wife back in Seattle joins a USO troop stationed in Alaska, hoping she can discover her husband’s whereabouts.

In Sue Monk Kidd’s latest book, The Invention of Wings, she bases her story on the real life sisters Sarah and Angelique Grimke, two fiery and infamous radical feminists and abolitionists who were practically exiled from their home in Charleston, South Carolina in the 1830s.

Kidd re-imagines the friendship between Sarah and her birthday-present slave girl, Hetty, who learned to read and write under Sarah’s kind tutelage. Their relationship continues in letters and brief visits as both women come to maturity over the years of a broken and ultimately healed nation.

I’ll close with Kate DiCamillo’s Flora and Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures, in which 10-year-old Flora deals with her parents’ divorce with cynicism, humor, and the aid of a recently vacuumed up and spit out squirrel, who can now fly and type poetry. “Squirtl” becomes Flora’s super-hero in the same loving, though not literal, vein that Winn-Dixie did for India Opal in the author’s wonderful children’s book, Because of Winn-Dixie.