"The House of Windjammer," V.A. Richardson, Bloomsbury; 2003; 349 pp.

No matter where you grow up, whether it's in 21st-century Japan or in 17th-century Europe, some things never change. People everywhere, at every time, are at the mercy of larger forces -- political upheavals, market fluctuations, war and peace. With every new chapter in history, their lives get rewritten.

A good historical novel can tell a riveting story by combining the historical and the personal, the factual and the fictional. The author of such a novel imagines the lives of her central characters unfolding against a rich backdrop of events that really did take place. Alice Leader retold Roman history in this way in "Power and Stone"; Joan Lingard's "Tell the Moon to Come Out" was set in post-civil war Spain.

V.A. Richardson's first novel on a historical theme draws upon vivid descriptions and evocative language to re-create 17th-century Amsterdam, a shipping town at the center of the booming trade between Europe and the newly discovered Americas. By this time, sea routes to India and Africa had been discovered, and the Dutch were competing with the English, the Spanish and the Portuguese.