The Rise and Fall of Great Powers by Tom Rachman

The blurb on the jacket makes this sound like a mystery but that is only because the story starts at the end and jumps around through three decades leaving blanks in the lives of the characters that are not fully colored in until the end.  We first meet Tooly as a young woman in 2011 doing her best to make no money at all in a small used bookstore in a sleepy village in Wales.  In 1988 she is ten, living with a quiet earnest man she calls Paul but is spirited away by a wild and free woman named Sarah and finally finds herself in the care of Humphrey, who appears to be a Russian intellect with great chess and ping-pong skills, and Venn, a mysterious man of the world.  In 1999, Tooly is sharing shabby digs with Humphrey but finds a useful pretend life among a nest of struggling students on the Columbia University campus.  Tooly, Humphrey and Sarah are all  waiting for Venn to re-enter their story. The unlikely events that lead to these fascinating characters sharing a life is gradually revealed as we, as readers, are invited to contemplate the nature of family, the purpose of wealth, and what choices we would make if all choices were possible.  Some of it is funny, much of the truth is hidden in pseudo-intellectual observations of the world,  at times nobody seems to be who they really are, and always there are books.  One of my favorite quotes:

"People kept their books, (Tooly) thought, not because they are likely to read them again but because these objects contained the past - the texture of being oneself at a particular place, at a particular time, each volume a piece of one's intellect, whether the work itself had been loved or despised or had introduced a snooze on page forty."

Shelterwood by Lisa Wingate

 This is based on the real disturbing history of the affect of the Dawes Act of 1887. Tribal lands were broken up and redistributed to every man, women and child on the tribal registry - even very young orphans. Disreputable scammers married 10 year old orphans to get their land once it proved to be rich with oil. In 1909, Nessa is one of those children. She and her sister were taken in by the Peele family and abused by the father. Young Olive Peele takes Nessa and runs into the woods where they meet other "elf children". Their lives become complicated and dangerous and folded into the hidded history of Oklahoma. Story number two, Valerie and her young son Charlie are hoping to start a new life in Oklahoma in 1990.  She is hired as a park ranger and faces push back from her male counterparts. When she meets a young Choctaw girl named Sydney who is concerned about her brother who is missing and her grandmother who has been sent to a home, the history and mystery combine. Leave it to historical fiction to teach me a real history I may never have known.