AmongReaders.com
πŸ“š AmongReaders β€” track what you read, talk chapter by chapter without spoilers, and read with friends. Free.Join AmongReadersSign in

🧲 Books like this

Illuminations

Mary Sharratt Β· back to the book

What’s in it

Tap a tag: ❀ = this matters to me Β· tap again βœ• = don’t care Β· again to reset. The list below updates each time.

24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❀️

Year of Wonders

Geraldine Brooks Β· 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.

HealerReligious IdentityFeminismCharacter-Driven
❀️

Corrag

Susan Fletcher Β· 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.

HealerCharacter-DrivenLyrical ProseAtmospheric
πŸ™‚

Sacred Hearts

Sarah Dunant Β· 443 pages

The year is 1570, and in the convent of Santa Caterina, in the Italian city of Ferrara, noblewomen find space to pursue their lives under God's protection. But any community, however smoothly run, suffers tremors when it takes in someone by force. And the arrival of Santa Caterina's new novice sets in motion a chain of events that will shake the convent to its core. Ripped by her family from an il

HealerReligious IdentityFeminismAtmospheric
πŸ™‚

The Red Tent

Anita Diamant Β· 321 pages

Her name is Dinah. In the Bible, her life is only hinted at in a brief and violent detour within the more familiar chapters of the Book of Genesis that are about her father, Jacob, and his dozen sons. Told in Dinah's voice, this novel reveals the traditions and turmoils of ancient womanhood--the world of the red tent. It begins with the story of her mothers--Leah, Rachel, Zilpah, and Bilhah--the f

HealerFeminismLyrical ProseCharacter-Driven
πŸ™‚

The Book of Longings

Sue Monk Kidd Β· 384 pages

FeminismReligious IdentityLyrical ProseCharacter-Driven
πŸ™‚

The Poisonwood Bible

Barbara Kingsolver Β· 596 pages

The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it -- from garden seeds to Scripture -- is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of on

Religious IdentityFeminismLyrical ProseCharacter-Driven
πŸ™‚

Bless Me, Ultima

Rudolfo Anaya Β· 252 pages

Ultima, a curandera, one who cures with herbs and magic, comes to Antonio Marez's New Mexico family when he is six years old, and she helps him discover himself in the magical secrets of the pagan past.

HealerReligious IdentityLyrical ProseCharacter-Driven
πŸ™‚

The Anchoress

Robyn Cadwallader Β· 317 pages

"England, 1255. Sarah is only seventeen when she chooses to become an anchoress, a holy woman much like Saint Hildegard of Bingen, shut away in a small cell, measuring seven by nine paces, at the side of the village church. Fleeing the grief of losing a much-loved sister in childbirth and the pressure to marry, she decides to renounce the world, with all its dangers, desires, and temptations, and

Religious IdentityFeminismCharacter-DrivenAtmospheric
πŸ™‚

The Tiger's Wife

Tea Obreht Β· 360 pages

Remembering childhood stories her grandfather once told her, young physician Natalia becomes convinced that he spent his last days searching for "the deathless man," a vagabond who claimed to be immortal. As Natalia struggles to understand why her grandfather, a deeply rational man would go on such a farfetched journey, she stumbles across a clue that leads her to the extraordinary story of the ti

HealerReligious IdentityCharacter-DrivenLyrical Prose
πŸ™‚

The Color Purple

Alice Walker Β· 274 pages

The Color Purple is a 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker which won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. The novel has been the frequent target of censors and appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2000–2009 at number seventeenth because of the sometimes explicit content, particula

Religious IdentityFeminismLyrical ProseCharacter-Driven
πŸ™‚

The Weight of Ink

Rachel Kadish Β· 576 pages

Religious IdentityFeminismCharacter-DrivenAtmospheric
πŸ™‚

Jane Eyre

Charlotte Bronte Β· 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

FeminismReligious IdentityCharacter-DrivenAtmospheric
πŸ™‚

Menewood

Nicola Griffith Β· 720 pages

Lyrical ProseReligious IdentityCharacter-DrivenAtmospheric
πŸ™‚

The Scarlet Letter

Nathaniel Hawthorne Β· 272 pages

Religious IdentityFeminismCharacter-DrivenAtmospheric
πŸ™‚

Peony in Love

Lisa See Β· 304 pages

"I finally understand what the poets have written. In spring, moved to passion; in autumn only regret."For young Peony, betrothed to a suitor she has never met, these lyrics from The Peony Pavilion mirror her own longings. In the garden of the Chen Family Villa, amid the scent of ginger, green tea, and jasmine, a small theatrical troupe is performing scenes from this epic opera, a live spectacle f

FeminismLyrical ProseCharacter-DrivenAtmospheric
πŸ™‚

Girl with a Pearl Earring

Tracy Chevalier Β· 248 pages

This book "centres on Vermeer's prosperous household in Delft in the 1660s. The appointment of the quiet, perceptive heroine of the novel, the servant Griet, gradually throws the household into turmoil as Vermeer and Griet become increasingly intimate, an increasingly tense situation that culminates in her working for Vermeer as his assistant, and ultimately sitting for him as a model. Chevalier d

Lyrical ProseReligious IdentityCharacter-DrivenAtmospheric
πŸ™‚

Spinning Silver

Naomi Novik Β· 465 pages

Religious IdentityCharacter-DrivenLyrical ProseAtmospheric
πŸ™‚

Priestess of Avalon

Marion Zimmer Bradley, Diana L. Paxson Β· 394 pages

Religious IdentityFeminismCharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction
πŸ™‚

The Beacon at Alexandria

Gillian Bradshaw Β· 376 pages

A fictional story set in late antiquity in the Mediterranean, mainly in the cities of Ephesus (western Turkey) and Alexandria (Egypt), about a young aristocratic girl with a gift for medicine and science who flees her home in Ephesus, disguises herself as a eunuch, and studies medicine at the school in Alexandria, eventually becoming a well respected surgeon and physician and even serving a stint

HealerFeminismCharacter-DrivenAtmospheric
πŸ™‚

The Frozen River: A GMA Book Club Pick

Ariel Lawhon Β· 448 pages

Maine, 1789: When the Kennebec River freezes, entombing a man in the ice, Martha Ballard is summoned to examine the body and determine cause of death. As a midwife and healer, she is privy to much of what goes on behind closed doors in Hallowell. Her diary is a record of every birth and death, crime and debacle that unfolds in the close-knit community. Months earlier, Martha documented the details

HealerFeminismCharacter-DrivenAtmospheric
πŸ™‚

The Wonder

Emma Donoghue Β· 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

HealerCharacter-DrivenReligious IdentityAtmospheric
πŸ™‚

The Forty Rules of Love

Elif Shafak, lyf shfq Β· 354 pages

Religious IdentityFeminismCharacter-DrivenLyrical Prose
πŸ™‚

The Bear and the Nightingale

Katherine Arden Β· 352 pages

At the edge of the Russian wilderness, winter lasts most of the year and the snowdrifts grow taller than houses. But Vasilisa doesn't mindβ€”she spends the winter nights huddled around the embers of a fire with her beloved siblings, listening to her nurse's fairy tales. Above all, she loves the chilling story of Frost, the blue-eyed winter demon, who appears in the frigid night to claim unwary souls

Religious IdentityFeminismLyrical ProseAtmospheric
πŸ™‚

Pope Joan

Donna Woolfolk Cross Β· 448 pages

HealerReligious IdentityFeminismHistorical Fiction
πŸ“– New 2026 Kindles just released. See them on Amazon β†—