Mouse, you might like The Thrall's Tale by Judith Lindbergh. It's very "stark" and realistic and full of old powers versus new (it's an historically accurate novel about the Vikings and the founding and subsequent loss of Greenland at the same time as the waning of the Vikings/Odin to Christianity). Just when you think the "heroine" is going to finally win through, all is lost but not without the "good fight" :-) It reminds me a little bit of Hess.

For something a little lighter, I enjoyed Last Voyage of the Valentina by Santa Montefiore. "Sensual, sensitive, and complex. . .a passionate page-turning life journey and a dark mystery that sweeps from war-torn Italy to aristocratic 1960s London." It has inappropriate stepmothers and noncommunicative fathers, etc. :-)