The gulf between the living and the dead defines humanity. Yet artists and writers have always attempted to reach across the divide, whether through ghost stories, alternate universes, or historical fiction, hoping to bring people back to something resembling life. Even the attempt, when done well, can be powerful, restoring a voice and likeness to those with whom we can no longer interact. But this trope is also a minefield, especially when dealing with real people, and missteps have high stakes: Fictionalizing a life risks turning a person into a puppet, or reducing them to a symbol or a caricature. This week, we published two reviews that take very different approaches to resurrecting the dead—particularly victims of atrocious violence.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:

• A Palestinian story unlike any other
• The hipster grifter peaked too soon.
• The forgotten inventor of the rape kit
• A new kind of immigrant story

The South Korean author and 2024 Nobel laureate Han Kang writes novels informed by the history of her home country, especially its “bloody past as a pawn in great-power politics and the war against Communism,” as Judith Shulevitz writes about We Do Not Part, Han’s latest book to be translated into English. That past, according to Shulevitz, “seeps in, and all the more so when the details have largely been forgotten or obscured.” We Do Not Part contends with the long-suppressed story of the 1948 massacre on Jeju Island, in which anti-Communist authorities killed tens of thousands of people. Those dead have never been fully accounted for, because searching for them was a crime; they populate Han’s story, not as fully formed figures, but as ghosts that haunt the living. When the narrator arrives on Jeju, it seems “suspended between life and death.” She notices the howling wind and the falling snow. Shulevitz writes that these elements strike the reader as “restless spirits” of the untold numbers who died decades ago, and notes Han’s “characteristically light touch”: The presence of her ghosts is felt in the weather, rather than in characters who speak or act.

In her recent novel The Rest Is Memory, Lily Tuck takes a different approach. She imagines the life of Czesława Kwoka, a real Polish girl who died at Auschwitz in 1943. Tuck had been struck by a few photos of her in The New York Times, and was able to find only the sparsest biographical information. Curious, she decided to write a novel that would, as Robert Rubsam writes, “fill in the blanks.” Tuck weaves her invented story with passages of nonfiction—facts, records, statistics about the Holocaust. Though this approach certainly contextualizes Czesława’s life, it also means that the biographical information Tuck fabricates about the girl feels “flimsy, easily dwarfed by the documentation,” Rubsam points out.

These two novels show how fraught literary efforts to revive the dead can be. In Han’s book, the massacred remain anonymous and inaccessible, their memories seeping into living Koreans in strange and eerie ways. Tuck, conversely, tries to enliven her Czesława with invented details and anecdotes, but her portrait has something of the opposite effect—a character who doesn’t feel quite real. Yet there is a way to breathe life into the dead without ventriloquizing them, Rubsam argues: One effective example is Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder, inspired by the story of a young Jewish girl who ran away from home during World War II and was later deported to Auschwitz. Modiano concludes that no one, himself included, can know how Dora spent those days when she was missing. By acknowledging this, Rubsam writes, “Modiano allows the absence to testify on her behalf,” proving that the sum of Dora was much greater than the parts he can assemble after the fact. Perhaps the key is to let the absences lie, to acknowledge the blank spaces and honor the things we don’t—and can’t—know.

The Radium Girls, by Kate Moore

In the late 1910s, corporations used radium, a radioactive material found in uranium ore, to make the numbers and dials on watches glow in the dark. They hired young women to paint the substance on, and employees were encouraged to twirl the brushes between their lips to get them to a fine point. The radium accumulated in their bones, killing many of them—they glowed at night as it destroyed their bodies from the inside. Ultimately, groups of these women took two separate companies—the United States Radium Corporation and the Radium Dial Company—to court, and after years of efforts, their former employers were finally held accountable. Although financial compensation was important to cover medical bills and support their families, the women mainly wanted the truth exposed; at least 50 of them died before the trials concluded. Moore demonstrates that USRC and Radium Dial knowingly sentenced the painters to death for the sake of profit, denying that there was any risk to their health even when their own medical examinations proved otherwise. More important, she puts these workers front and center, as women who had full lives before, and after, they picked up a paintbrush.  — Vanessa Armstrong

From our list: What to read when the odds are against you