What’s in it
Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.
24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorLonging
Mary Balogh · 398 pages
The illegitimate daughter of an English lord, Siân Jones abandoned her heritage to live in a stalwart coal mining community in South Wales. Empowered by their cause, she's engaged to be married to the leader of a revolutionary movement that is bracing itself against the tyranny of English mine owners. But Siân's principles are unexpectedly shaken when she accepts a job as governess under Alexander
How Green Was My Valley
Richard Llewellyn · 495 pages
**This is a story set in a south Wales coal mining valley and tells of a family striving to improve their lives through hard work, education and their non-conformist faith.** The main character is the youngest son, Huw Morgan and his life's journey through the difficulties associated with the mining industry and the awful risks involved in deep coal mining in the **mid nineteenth century**. The
The Ha'Penny Place
Gemma Jackson · 408 pages
"Through hard work and determination, Ivy Rose Murphy has come up in the world. She still begs for discards from the homes of the wealthy which lie only a stone's throw from The Lane, the poverty-ridden tenements where she lives. These discards she repairs and sells around the Dublin markets. But being in the ha'penny place may soon be a thing of the past for Ivy. She is fast turning herself into
Coal River
Ellen Marie Wiseman · 345 pages
"As a child, Emma Malloy left isolated Coal River, Pennsylvania, vowing never to return. Now, orphaned and penniless at nineteen, she accepts a train ticket from her aunt and uncle and travels back to the rough-hewn community. Treated like a servant by her relatives, Emma works for free in the company store. There, miners and their impoverished families must pay inflated prices for food, clothing,
Me Before You
Jojo Moyes · 451 pages
Louisa Clark is an ordinary young woman living an exceedingly ordinary life—steady boyfriend, close family—who has never been farther afield than their tiny village. She takes a badly needed job working for ex-Master of the Universe Will Traynor, who is wheelchair-bound after an accident. Will has always lived a huge life—big deals, extreme sports, worldwide travel—and now he’s pretty sure he cann
The Dwelling Place
Catherine Cookson · 391 pages
When fifteen-year-old Cissie Brodie loses her parents to cholera, she is forced out of the family cottage and left to raise her nine siblings alone. Although desperately poor, the strong-willed Cissie determines to build a new home for the Brodies. It is only a rough stone shelter, but to Cissie and her family it is enough to keep them from the workhouse. They have friends, but charity cannot a
Girl with a Pearl Earring
Tracy Chevalier · 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
Dilly's Lass
Rosie Goodwin · 442 pages
Years ago Dilly made the devastating decision to give her baby daughter to wealthy local family, the Farthings. She is still living with the consequences of her choice when the daughter she gave away all those years ago turns up on Dilly's doorstep, with a baby girl in tow, begging for help. Olivia has a secret she only feels safe telling Dilly. Sworn to secrecy, Dilly agrees to help, delighted to
The Wicked and the Just
J. Anderson Coats · 352 pages
Sea Glass
Anita Shreve · 368 pages
New bride Honoria sees her life change as the Great Depression strikes her small New England beach town.
A Woman of Substance
Barbara Taylor Bradford · 843 pages
Emma Harte Lowther Ainsley is seventy-eight years old and one of the richest most powerful women in the world. Self-reliant and ruthless, she uses money as a weapon and adversity as a tool. In her poverty-stricken youth, Emma exhibited an uncommon amount of initiative and intelligence even as a maidservant on a Yorkshire estate. Pregnant and unwed at fifteen, she fled her shameful situation to s
The Kashmir Shawl
Rosie Thomas · 468 pages
Spanning decades and moving from the stark beauty of the Welsh landscape to the Himalayas and Kashmir, this is a story of bravery, courage and love. Newlywed Nerys Watkins leaves rural Wales for the first time in her life, to accompany her husband on a missionary posting to India. As war engulfs Europe, the Watkins are in remote Ladakh, high up in the Himalayas. Nerys is lonely, but she makes a gl
Maggie
Lena Kennedy · 424 pages
**A haunting and compelling family saga spanning four decades and four generations, MAGGIE is the life story of a resilient Cockney woman.**
The Tea Rose
Jennifer Donnelly · 762 pages
East London, 1888 - a city apart. A place of shadow and light where thieves, whores, and dreamers mingle, where children play in the cobbled streets by day and a killer stalks at night, where bright hopes meet the darkest truths. Here, by the whispering waters of the Thames, Fiona Finnegan, a worker in a tea factory, hopes to own a shop one day, together with her lifelong love, Joe Bristow, a cost
Tipping the Velvet
Sarah Waters · 480 pages
Nan King, an oyster girl, is captivated by the music hall phenomenon Kitty Butler, a male impersonator extraordinaire treading the boards in Canterbury. Through a friend at the box office, Nan manages to visit all her shows and finally meet her heroine. Soon after, she becomes Kitty's dresser and the two head for the bright lights of Leicester Square where they begin a glittering career as music-h
Longbourn
Jo Baker · 331 pages
A novel whose principal characters are the servants in Jane Austen's Pride and prejudice. Sarah, the orphaned housemaid, spends her days scrubbing the laundry, polishing the floors, and emptying the chamber pots for the Bennet household. But there is just as much romance, heartbreak, and intrigue downstairs at Longbourn as there is upstairs. When a mysterious new footman arrives, the orderly real
Daughter of the Loom
Tracie Peterson, Judith McCoy Miller · 495 pages
The mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, comes to life with intrigue and drama from the creative writing team of Judith Miller and Tracie Peterson. Young women at the end of the 19th century seek employment from driven men intent on transforming America's textile industry. Daughters of the Loom features Lilly Armbruster, who is forced to work in the mills as her only means for survival. But Lilly's
The Space Between Us
Thrity Umrigar · 328 pages
Each morning, Bhima, a domestic servant in contemporary Bombay, leaves her own small shanty in the slums to tend to another woman's house. In Sera Dubash's home, Bhima scrubs the floors of a house in which she remains an outsider. She cleans furniture she is not permitted to sit on. She washes glasses from which she is not allowed to drink. Yet despite being separated from each other by blood and
The Handsome Road
Gwen Bristow · 326 pages
The Angel Tree
Lucinda Riley · 655 pages
This is a compelling mystery of family secrets and forgotten pasts from the author of The Seven Sisters. Thirty years have passed since Greta left Marchmont Hall, a grand and beautiful house nestled in the hills of rural Monmouthshire. But when she returns to the Hall for Christmas, at the invitation of her old friend David Marchmont, she has no recollection of her past association with it - the r