Think Isaac Bashevis Singer, Charles Dickens, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and you will have some idea of the scope of literary influences behind Lilian Nattel’s new novel, The Singing Fire. The story begins with two young Jewish women from Eastern Europe who escape their families, and, practically penniless, flee to dirty, deceitful London near the end of the 19th century.

Nehama arrives first, to be tricked into prostitution, which she escapes only by luck and her ability to blend into London’s Jewish community. When Emilia arrives 10 years later, Nehama takes her in, even though the younger woman is pregnant. Nattel deftly portrays what being Jewish meant to women at the time. Readers fascinated by Jewish lore will love the way Nattel shows the strains and strengths of a faith tested by the Industrial Age.

Like Dickens, Nattel convincingly describes the tenements, streets, food, smells, clothes, working conditions, and what passed for leisure in London’s East End. Her solidly researched descriptions of details – the dress a new whore would be forced to buy or how to set up a garment shop in a two-room flat – transport the reader to another place and time. But when Nattel tries to pull off a bit of Marquezian magic realism, the novel goes astray. Ghosts of grandmothers comment on what is happening to Nehama and Emilia, and occasionally the ghosts intervene. Presumably Nattel wants to remind readers of folk beliefs or of the mystical elements of Judaism, as she did in her first novel, The River Midnight. This time, though, the spectral visitations seem frivolous, as if they were imported from a comedy like I Dream of Jeannie or Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit, where the supernatural is tamed for laughs.

Much better are Nattel’s rich characterizations of the flesh-and-blood women, particularly Nehama. Her hunger for a child and her sorrow when she miscarries are enough to make you weep.