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The Essex Serpent

Sarah Perry · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
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Year of Wonders

Geraldine Brooks · 310 pages

This is the story of a young woman's struggle to save her family and her soul during the year of 1666, when plague suddenly visits her small Derbyshire village and the villagers, inspired by a charismatic preacher, elect to quarantine themselves.

Widowed ProtagonistFaith CrisisAtmosphericCharacter-Driven
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Middlemarch

George Eliot · 795 pages

Eliot’s epic of 19th century provincial social life, set in a fictitious Midlands town in the years 1830-32, has several interlocking storylines blended effortlessly together to form a fully coherent narrative. Its main themes are the status of women, social expectations and hypocrisy, religion, political reform and education. It has often been called the greatest novel in the English language.

Victorian EraWidowed ProtagonistFaith CrisisCharacter-Driven
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The Wonder

Emma Donoghue · 304 pages

Set in the Irish Midlands in the 1850s, Emma Donoghue's *The Wonder* - inspired by numerous European and North American cases of 'fasting girls' between the sixteenth century and the twentieth - is a psychological thriller about a child's murder threatening to happen in slow motion before our eyes. Pitting all the seductions of fundamentalism against sense and love, it is a searing examination

Victorian EraFaith CrisisCharacter-DrivenAtmospheric
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The Lady Julia Grey Bundle

Deanna Raybourn

"To say that I met Nicholas Brisbane over my husband's dead body is not entirely accurate. Edward, it should be noted, was still twitching on the floor."Starting with her husband's sudden death, Lady Julia Grey is swept into a world of mystery and deceit. It is also the world of the enigmatic and maddeningly attractive private investigator Nicholas Brisbane...From the extravagant world of Victoria

Widowed ProtagonistVictorian EraAtmosphericCharacter-Driven
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Charlotte and Emily: a novel of the Brontes

Jude Morgan

From an obscure country parsonage came three extraordinary sisters, who defied the outward bleakness of their lives to create the most brilliant literary works of their time. Now, in an astonishingly daring novel by the acclaimed Jude Morgan, the genius of the haunted Brontës is revealed and the sisters are brought to full, resplendent life: Emily, who turned from the world to the greater temptati

Victorian EraLyrical ProseAtmosphericCharacter-Driven
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Corrag

Susan Fletcher · 366 pages

The Massacre of Glencoe happened at 5am on 13th February 1692 when 37 members of the Macdonald clan were killed by government troops who had enjoyed the clan's hospitality for the previous ten days. Many more died from exposure in the mountains.

AtmosphericFaith CrisisCharacter-DrivenLyrical Prose
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Signs for Lost Children

Sarah Moss · 368 pages

Only weeks into their marriage a young couple embark[s] on a six-month period of separation. Tom Cavendish goes to Japan to build lighthouses and his wife Ally, a doctor, takes work at the Truro asylum where she must struggle against the terrible conditions imposed on the patients, the mores of late Victorian society and her own demons.

Victorian EraLyrical ProseCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Menewood

Nicola Griffith · 720 pages

AtmosphericLyrical ProseFaith CrisisCharacter-Driven
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The Night Circus

Erin Morgenstern · 514 pages

The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, and it is only open at night. But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway—a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, wh

Victorian EraAtmosphericLyrical ProseCharacter-Driven
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The Shell Seekers

Rosamunde Pilcher · 582 pages

The Shell Seekers is a novel of connection: of one family, and of the passions and heartbreak that have held them together for three generations. The Shell Seekers is filled with real people--mothers and daughters, husband and lovers--inspired with real values. The Shell Seekers centers on Penelope Keeling--a woman you'll always remember in world you'll never forget. The Shell Seekers is a magical

Widowed ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenAtmosphericLyrical Prose
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The Lowland

Jhumpa Lahiri · 406 pages

Brothers Subhash and Udayan Mitra pursue vastly different lives--Udayan in rebellion-torn Calcutta, Subhash in a quiet corner of America--until a shattering tragedy compels Subhash to return to India, where he endeavors to heal family wounds.

Lyrical ProseWidowed ProtagonistAtmosphericCharacter-Driven
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A Golden Age

Tahmima Anam · 276 pages

As young widow Rehana Haque awakes one March morning, she might be forgiven for feeling happy. Today she will throw a party for her son and daughter. In the garden of the house she has built, her roses are blooming, her children are almost grown, and beyond their doorstep, the city is buzzing with excitement after recent elections. Change is in the air. But none of the guests at Rehana's party can

Widowed ProtagonistLyrical ProseCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Prodigal Summer

Barbara Kingsolver · 444 pages

Prodigal Summer weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives inhabiting the forested mountains and struggling small farms of southern Appalachia.From her outpost in an isolated mountain cabin, Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive wildlife biologist, watches a den of coyotes that have recently migrated into the region. She is caught off guard by a young hunter who invades her

Widowed ProtagonistLyrical ProseAtmosphericCharacter-Driven
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The Shipping News

Annie Proulx · 337 pages

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, The Shipping News is a celebration of Annie Proulx's genius for storytelling and her vigorous contribution to the art of the novel. Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a "head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair...features as bunched as kissed fingertips," is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing

Widowed ProtagonistLyrical ProseAtmosphericCharacter-Driven
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There Are Rivers in the Sky

Elif Shafak · 446 pages

Victorian EraLyrical ProseAtmosphericLiterary Fiction
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Miss Garnet's Angel

Salley Vickers · 365 pages

Faith CrisisAtmosphericLyrical ProseCharacter-Driven
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Jane Eyre

Charlotte Bronte · 474 pages

The novel is set somewhere in the north of England. Jane's childhood at Gateshead Hall, where she is emotionally and physically abused by her aunt and cousins; her education at Lowood School, where she acquires friends and role models but also suffers privations and oppression; her time as the governess of Thornfield Hall, where she falls in love with her Byronic employer, Edward Rochester; her ti

Victorian EraAtmosphericCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Tender Is the Night

F. Scott Fitzgerald · 349 pages

A psychiatrist, Dick Diver, treats and eventually marries a wealthy patient, Nicole. Eventually, this marriage destroys him.

Victorian EraLyrical ProseAtmosphericCharacter-Driven
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The Listeners

Maggie Stiefvater · 382 pages

AtmosphericCharacter-DrivenLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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Afterimage

Helen Humphreys · 243 pages

"When Annie Phelan arrives at the Dashell farm to begin work as a maid, she finds her new mistress strapping turkey wings on a naked boy who is to play the Angel of Death. Annie knows one thing for sure - she's not at the prim Mrs. Gilbey's anymore.". "England in 1865 is aswirl with change. This is the age of invention, the Crystal Palace, progress, and the colonies. At the farm, the master, Eldo

Victorian EraLyrical ProseCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Far from the Madding Crowd

Thomas Hardy · 416 pages

Independent and spirited Bathsheba Everdene has come to Weatherbury to take up her position as a farmer on the largest estate in the area. Her bold presence draws three very different suitors: the gentleman-farmer Boldwood, soldier-seducer Sergeant Troy and the devoted shepherd Gabriel Oak. Each, in contrasting ways, unsettles her decisions and complicates her life, and tragedy ensues, threatening

Victorian EraLyrical ProseAtmosphericCharacter-Driven
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Icefields

Thomas Wharton · 240 pages

Leaving England for Canada in 1898, Doctor Edward Byrne has no idea that the glacier he has set out to study will come to absorb his every thought. When he arrives in Jasper, he finds himself attracted to then mysterious presence of the big white chunk. His religious appreciation of its movement keeps him in town much longer than anticipated, living out a symbiotic relationship with a block of ice

Lyrical ProseAtmosphericVictorian EraCharacter-Driven
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The Jump-Off Creek

Molly Gloss · 186 pages

Lydia Sanderson writes about her life on Jump Off Creek in the higher mountain country of Oregon in 1895. She tells of friendship, loss, daily struggles, and achievements.

Widowed ProtagonistAtmosphericCharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction
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The Forgotten Garden

Kate Morton · 648 pages

Victorian EraAtmosphericCharacter-DrivenLyrical Prose
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