STILL LIFE By Sarah Winman. ... Momentous events occur, and sometimes we’re caught up in them, but we are — simultaneously, inescapably — the main characters in our own stories.

An authoritative artist has many rules for his still life painting. Too bad! Because the mouse, the dragon, the knight, and the princess are here to break them in this raucous new picture book.

Katherine Packert Burke’s debut novel, “Still Life,” opens with a homecoming. Edith, the story’s protagonist, has briefly returned, after eight years, to Boston, where she lived after college.

When Juan Sánchez Cotán painted this masterpiece, no one even knew what a still life was Coming into the Art Institute of Chicago off that great city’s streets (where, as Saul Bellow wrote ...