There are times and places when reality becomes utterly surreal. Consider, for example, the trenches of World War I, which Katherine Arden invests with a brilliantly spooky aura in THE WARM HANDS OF GHOSTS (Del Rey, 324 pp., $28.99). Her heroine is a Canadian nurse, furloughed after being wounded, who has returned to the Belgian battlefields in search of her brother, missing in action and presumed dead. But there are others haunting this “forbidden zone,” and at least one of them is intent on some very devilish manipulation.

The spectral voice in Katya Apekina’s tragicomic MOTHER DOLL (Overlook, 320 pp., $28) is Irina, the great-grandmother of Zhenia, a feckless would-be actress stuck in Los Angeles during the early stages of a pregnancy her husband would rather ignore. When a psychic contacts her out of the blue, Zhenia embarks on a long-distance visit to the Russian Revolution via her domineering ancestor’s tales. Irina, it turns out, is seeking forgiveness for past actions and abandonments that have warped mother-daughter relations for three generations. Will these revelations arrive in time to spare a fourth?

Apekina’s novel illuminates a crucial historical event from the perspective of a few minor players. This is also the tactic Cristina Henríquez employs in THE GREAT DIVIDE (Ecco, 336 pp., $30), set in early-20th-century Panama during the vast canal-building project. Her focus is not on the outsiders intent on reshaping the isthmus but on the local people whose lives — and livelihoods — will be reshaped in the process. Chief among these are Omar, a young workman on an excavation crew whose fisherman father dreads the changes he sees coming, and Ada, a teenager from Barbados who has smuggled herself into the country, desperate to earn money to pay for her sister’s medical care.