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Grove Press, 360 pages, $43.50

Recalling “Rashomon” by cleverly revealing different perspectives of the same events in the lives of fictional residents of a small Beaux Arts apartment building in Brussels, this novel is an elegant series of puzzle pieces that neatly fit together to reveal what happened to a community after Nazi occupation in 1939.

An architect, an art dealer, a colour-blind painter, an aspiring filmmaker, a busybody, a retired colonel, a nurse, a notary and a seamstress provide the believable, distinct first-person points of view, each as convincing as the next.

Under rationing and black-market corruption, it is a time when necessities like soap, food and medicine become luxuries. It is an age of cruelty, when by order of the German military, “wearing of the Yellow Star is obligatory for Jews six years of age and older.”

Yet, it is nevertheless a period of resistance and resilience, a courageous example of how to live in terrible times. As one of the characters rightly insists, “When this is over, and it will be over, we will remember everything.”

Poignant and stirring, “33 Place Brugmann” is an accomplished and artful debut that couldn’t be more timely.

The King’s Messenger

Susanna Kearsley

Simon & Schuster Canada, 384 pages, $25.99

At the heart of this compelling story is the mysterious death of the 18-year-old heir to the British throne, Henry, Prince of Wales, who, if rumours are to be believed, had been poisoned. The titular messenger, Andrew Logan, is dispatched by the mercurial King James I to 1613 Scotland to seek and capture Sir David Moray, the prince’s trusted adviser and companion since his boyhood. Either truths will be revealed, or Moray will be sacrificed to slake the king’s blood lust.

Accompanying Logan on his journey is ailing scrivener Laurence Westaway, tasked with recording what happens, and Westaway’s fiery, intelligent daughter Phoebe, who intends to care for her father along the way.

Flashback sequences burnish the genuine, loving paternal nature of Moray’s relationship with Henry, while Logan’s own secret of visionary “second sight” adds lustre to the tale.

Deeply researched, this novel has been written with a verve that brings this long-ago time irresistibly to life.

The Café With No Name

Robert Seethaler; translated by Katy Derbyshire

Europa Editions, 208 pages, $38.95

It’s summer 1966 and war orphan Robert Simon, a brawny odd-job manual labourer, now 31, has the opportunity to change his life and lease a space to open a simple little café in the vibrant working-class neighbourhood in Vienna, where for years he has rented a furnished room from an elderly widow.

The café soon becomes a local hub, enthusiastically patronized by ordinary folk like “the girls from the Shottenau yarn factory,” the butcher from across the street and eccentrics like a former bill collector who, after his fourth or fifth beer, pops out his glass eye and rolls it across the table to either shock or admiration.

The comedy and tragedy of life play out over the decade that kind-hearted, empathic Simon runs his café with his stalwart server Mila, both of them welcoming regulars and strangers alike to this community of found family.

Evocative and aching, Seethaler’s tale is as true as life itself.

The Night Sparrow

Shelly Sanders

HarperCollins, 368 pages, $25.99

When the Nazis invade Russia in 1941, gifted university language student Elena Bruskina and her family are sent to a Jewish ghetto in Minsk. Soon her brother and father are murdered, her sister hanged for helping soldiers, and her mother shot.

Motivated by grief and revenge, Elena joins Moscow’s Central Women’s Sniper Training School with the hope of disrupting fascists any way she can in order to prevent more fellow Jews from being eliminated. After all, “Existence is resistance.”

As part of an all-female sniper platoon, Elena is determined to fight for her country, but discovers herself undone by ghastly memories and ashamed by her limited kill tally. When in spring 1945 she is injured and redeployed as a German translator to Berlin, she finds herself on a secret mission to identify Hitler’s remains.

Meticulously researched and grounded in translated diaries by Russian women snipers in the Second World War, this gripping tale is told with compassion about a brutal time in history.