History provides the backdrop for these two stories two dramas. In Marie Benedict’s The Other Einstein,  Mileva Marić, a Serbian woman of modest means, becomes one of the few women to study math and science at the Zurich Polytechnic School. There, she gains the attention of a young Albert Einstein, who admires her maths but is more interested in romance than collaboration.  In this “compelling” drama, we see the price of romance on the life of a gifted woman.  News of the World by Paulette Jiles is a ‘taut, evocative story” (Publishers Weekly) set in post–Civil War Texas.  Capt. Jefferson Kyle Kidd, an army veteran in his 70s, undertakes a 400-mile odyssey from Wichita Falls to San Antonio with a reluctant girl, who has been recused from the Kiowa nation.  She has no memory of her life before she was kidnapped, speaks no English, and chafes at domestication.  Jiles, a poet before becoming a novelist, shows her gift with words in this lyrical tale.