Finley Minor has always considered himself a boring sort, aside from the fact that he’s had accurate premonitions of the future since he was a child. He’s mostly learned to ignore them, except for the ones that help him as a market analyst. While undergoing hypnotherapy after being dumped by his long-time girlfriend, he has a vision unlike anything he’s ever experienced; he’s not just seeing the future, he’s in it, inhabiting the body of Wallace Deng Moroz in the year 2131, searching for an artifact (a crucifix called the ikona) that’s supposed to lead everyone to Shambhala. (“If we find it, we can lead humankind to a new world, of perfect health, longevity.”) Finley isn’t the only one searching for the ikona: In Hong Kong, Jia Li wants the artifact to heal her mother, who’s been poisoned; in Atlanta, Kate Davies unwittingly ends up with the crucifix after a client leaves his coat in her home. As the pieces, and people, start coming together, Kate realizes that everything’s tied to an old science fiction novel her mother was obsessed with. Words from her past (from the author himself) start haunting her again: “Don’t forget Shambhala, my dear Katya.” In this time-twisting, centuries-spanning yarn, Dixon delivers an engaging narrative of searching for utopia. Though the story hops around in time, from the 1930s to the present to 2131 and back again, the plot is easy to follow. Each character feels unique, even with the clear connections and similarities between them, making them easy to distinguish despite their shared goals or intentionally obscured pasts. Threads of religion, mysticism, meditation, and past lives are woven throughout the narrative, giving this story a soul-touching, deep vibe. The text contains a link for readers who want to explore the themes and novel further.

The hamlet of Meat Cove gets its name from the carcasses that marauding Vikings once tossed into the sea at the northern tip of Cape Breton. Fundy Sutherland, a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, lives a complicated life there with her 16-year-old daughter, Skye, and her married lover, Pascal. She also has a secret past as a Canadian Armed Forces “sniper with kills on four continents.” Her cruel mother, Geneva, who had a temper that “could melt a Coke bottle,” ran off on Fundy’s fifth birthday, leaving her alone with an alcoholic, unemployed father. After a well-off local family with three boys took her in, Fundy became fiercely competitive, excelling in sports and winning the Junior National Championship in the biathlon. Skye’s latest school assignment, requiring an at-home DNA test, sends Fundy into panic mode, as it could reveal aspects of her life that she’d rather stay hidden. In addition, a criminal whom Fundy helped to put in prison six years ago has been released—and he appears headed for Meat Cove. Adding to her worries are sightings of two Venezuelan boats, which may be carrying drugs. Weber’s novel is populated with colorful, sharply drawn characters—especially Fundy, a no-nonsense cop who describes herself as “like Dudley Do-Right and Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, but instead of a horse, I ride a Taurus. And I wear a bra.” Also of note is Snuki Finsterblast, Skye’s science teacher: “the only woman in Cape Breton with a worse name than mine” says Fundy, and who dyes her long gray hair “black, but only once a year.” The author also appealingly shows Fundy’s relationship with Pascal to be loving and physical, marked by mutual acceptance of occasional absences and divided loyalties. The story moves quickly, shifting back and forth in time, with much of Fundy’s past revealed through passages she writes to Skye, detailing a life that’s both harrowing and exhilarating.

Weisser, a historian at the University of Massachusetts Boston, delivers a history lesson with a novelist’s eye for detail, resurrecting a London that is filthy, fearful, and alive with commerce and contagion. She begins, fittingly, with Samuel Pepys in 1664, fretting over his brother Tom, who is “deadly ill—and which is worse, that his disease is the pox.” Pepys calls in a second opinion, desperate to erase the stain, and persuades himself (and others) that the initial diagnosis was wrong. Weisser compares this quiet act of denial to the families of gay men in the 1980s and ’90s who altered obituaries to disguise AIDS-related deaths. The “pox,” she explains, was an elastic term encompassing many afflictions, mostly sexual, and all freighted with moral reproach. Londoners hid their shame behind wigs, face patches, and mercury-based ointments, while the city thrummed with peddlers and backstreet quacks hawking cures. At Bartholomew Fair, she conjures dancing monkeys, Venetian girls on rope, and prostitutes offering a good time—and a bad infection, scenes echoed in the bawdy ballads of the age. Remedies mixed mercury, sassafras, and jalap; some involved digesting quicksilver and turpentine. Edward Jewel’s “Incomparable Extractum Humorale” was sold in 23 shops across London, from grocers to cheesemongers—a forerunner of modern pharmaceutical branding. Each chapter opens with a vignette—a maid hiding pills under her bed, a wife using her infection as evidence in court of her husband’s infidelity—and together they trace the disease from street to sickroom to courtroom. The author draws heavily on John Marten’s A Treatise of All the Degrees and Symptoms of the Venereal Disease (1707), one of the few substantial sources available to her. “The pox was the first modern disease,” Weisser writes, “but not for the reasons we like to think.” Her argument—that shame, not science, shaped how people experienced illness—feels startlingly contemporary.

Dunaway, an author and professor of English, speculates on how some artists’ styles evolved because of their sight. The haziness of J.M.W. Turner’s paintings, he writes, “probably resulted from cataracts. For Turner, visual limitation became visual transcendence.” Paul Cézanne, who was myopic, “disdained help from lenses: ‘Take those vulgar things away,’ he reportedly said.” Dunaway discusses his own near-sightedness and how it affected him growing up: “The fact that my sight was weak left me with the feeling that I was not right, or whole—a visual loser.” The author’s own experience has him wondering about the origins of glasses. He writes about Roger Bacon, the 13th-century Oxford scholar “imprisoned for inventing glasses (or trying to).” The “first published mention of spectacles,” he notes, dates to a Venetian document, from 1300, that refers to “discs for the eye.” Inspired by Aldous Huxley’s The Art of Seeing (1942), Dunaway tries living a week without them, keeping readers posted on his progress: “It oddly resembled a drug trip….colors pulsed madly; walls undulated.” Dunaway touches on various conditions, including myopia, noting that the number of people needing glasses keeps going up. He delves into the longtime stigma to wearing glasses. One of the lines he heard as a kid—“a personal favorite”—was, “You reading that book or smelling it?” He devotes a chapter to fashion and, writing about literature and film, argues that “glasses in films have historically indicated a character’s disability or inadequacy.” Dunaway eventually gets cataract surgery. “Awaiting renewed vision, I am deeply grateful,” he writes. “For the entire optical industry, and of course, for friends and family who put up with me endlessly saying, ‘Would you move that a little closer?’ ‘What does that say?’ or ‘I’m sorry; I can’t see that.’”

Most jazz aficionados may not have heard of Mura Dehn (1902-87), but she played a significant role in the genre’s development. A white woman, Dehn discovered jazz as a young girl studying classical dance in her native Russia. Her appreciation deepened when she moved to Paris in the 1920s to further her studies, hanging out with progressive artists such as Josephine Baker. Dehn eventually came to New York, where she was a regular at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom, and “immersed herself in Black social dance.” As Vaccaro, professor emerita of dance at Rider University, puts it, Dehn “boldly wrote about it, beginning in the 1930s, when few others were paying attention.” Vaccaro has written this revelatory biography “to uncover what led a white, Russian, Jewish woman to an act of cultural preservation, and serves to credit, name and bring to the fore some of the artists who were the creators and originators of Black social dance during her lifetime.” She focuses on three main areas of Dehn’s career: the Academy of Swing, which Dehn co-founded in “an attempt to define the form and rhythm of jazz dance”; a film, The Spirit Moves, four volumes of footage shot between 1950 and 1984 that Vaccaro calls “one of the most important films made of the chronology of jazz dance in her time”; and Dehn’s Traditional Jazz Dance Company, the achievements of which included the show Rag to Rock and worldwide tours under the auspices of the State Department, including an eight-country tour of Africa. Vaccaro interviews figures who worked with Dehn, including Allen Blitz, who served as the dance company’s manager. And she does a good job of showcasing Dehn’s achievements, as well as the resistance she encountered from those who distrusted her because she was an outsider, a woman, and white.