When Montezuma Met Cortés, by Matthew Restall (Ecco). In 1519, the emperor Montezuma received the conquistador Hernán Cortés and some of his men as guests in the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán. Within two years, Montezuma was dead, the Aztecs routed, and the city destroyed. This revisionist history contests received views of Cortés as either swashbuckling hero or bloviating villain, of the Aztecs as cannibals, and of Montezuma as a meek, mystical king who voluntarily capitulated. Restall skillfully describes a subtler story of relationships both loving and coercive. He offers a particularly bold interpretation of Montezuma’s devotion to his palace zoo, arguing that he saw Cortés and his men as exotic creatures and hoped to learn by studying them.
First Time Ever, by Peggy Seeger (Faber & Faber). This whirling memoir follows the folksinger and activist through international tours, crises in her famous musical family, and a long, all-consuming relationship with the British singer Ewan MacColl. Seeger’s conversational prose has a flair for capturing the common (a 1938 Chevy “had a vertical fish-mouth and a fat lady’s rump”) and the cataclysmic; remembering her mother’s early death, she writes, “I try to see and hear things for her, to lure her spirit back from the lost body.” Colorful characters flit in and out, and, remembering them, Seeger, who is now eighty-two, is often wistful. Of one friend, she writes, “He died, but he is still in my present tense.”
Brass, by Xhenet Aliu (Random House). Set in Waterbury, Connecticut, the working-class town of abandoned brass mills where the author grew up, this novel tells the parallel stories of a mother and a daughter struggling to improve their fates. The novel shifts between the perspectives of Elsie, a second-generation Lithuanian who begins a furtive romance, and, years later, her daughter, Luljeta, the issue of this ill-fated liaison. Luljeta, a promising student, embarks on a misguided search for her father after the shock of her rejection by N.Y.U. Both women yearn to escape Waterbury but face seemingly intractable obstacles. Aliu is witty and unsparing in her depiction of the town and its inhabitants, illustrating the granular realities of the struggle for class mobility.
Three Daughters of Eve, by Elif Shafak (Bloomsbury). Peri, the protagonist of this novel, is an Istanbul housewife and mother who lives a good, stable life as “a fine modern Muslim.” But a violent encounter unleashes memories of her time as a student at Oxford, which ended abruptly. We learn about her relationship with a handsome professor—who was forced to resign, amid scandal, soon after she took his controversial religion seminar—and also about her struggle with God. The child of a devout mother and a secular father, she entered college feeling spiritually conflicted, and deeply alone. Moments in the narrative are heavy-handed, but the book offers a complex portrayal of Turkey as a place that, like Peri herself, once “had great potential—and look how that had turned out.”
