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The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar

Robert Alexander · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

The House of Special Purpose

John Boyne · 432 pages

The stunning new novel from the author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.Russia, 1915: At the age of 16, Georgy Jachmenev steps in front of an assassin's bullet intended for the heart of a senior member of the Russian Imperial Family. He is instantly proclaimed a hero. Before the week is out, his life as the son of a peasant farmer is changed forever when he is escorted to St Petersburg to take up

Princes and PrincessesBittersweetDual TimelineRoyal Court
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The Red Queen

Philippa Gregory

TragicPrinces and PrincessesRoyal CourtHistorical Fiction
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The Blind Assassin

Margaret Atwood · 638 pages

More than fifty years on, Iris Chase is remembering Laura's mysterious death. And so begins an extraordinary and compelling story of two sisters and their secrets. Set against a panoramic backdrop of twentieth-century history, The Blind Assassin is an epic tale of memory, intrigue and betrayal...

Secret PastTragicDual TimelineBittersweet
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The House at Riverton

Kate Morton · 192 pages

Summer 1924. On the eve of a glittering society party, by the lake of a grand English country house, a young poet takes his life. The only witnesses, sisters Hannah and Emmeline Hartford, will never speak to each other again. Winter 1999. Grace Bradley, ninety-eight, one-time housemaid at Riverton Manor, is visited by a young director making a film about the poet's suicide. Ghost awaken and old me

Secret PastTragicBittersweetDual Timeline
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The Reader

Bernhard Schlink · 224 pages

Secret PastTragicBittersweetHistorical Fiction
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The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald · 182 pages

Here is a novel, glamorous, ironical, compassionate – a marvelous fusion into unity of the curious incongruities of the life of the period – which reveals a hero like no other – one who could live at no other time and in no other place. But he will live as a character, we surmise, as long as the memory of any reader lasts. "There was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to

Secret PastBittersweetTragicFirst Person Narrator
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Anastasia and Her Sisters

Carolyn Meyer · 310 pages

A novel in diary form in which the youngest daughter of Czar Nicholas II describes the privileged life her family led up until the time of World War I and the tragic events that befell them. This novel in diary form shares the story of the youngest daughter of Czar Nicholas II, describing the privileged life her family led up until the time of World War I and the tragic events that befell them.

Princes and PrincessesTragicRoyal CourtHistorical Fiction
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Dual TimelineTragicBittersweetHistorical Fiction
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The Echo of Old Books

Barbara Davis

A novel about the magical lure of books and summoning the courage to rewrite our stories by the Amazon Charts bestselling author of The Keeper of Happy Endings and The Last of the Moon Girls. Rare-book dealer Ashlyn Greer's affinity for books extends beyond the intoxicating scent of old paper, ink, and leather. She can feel the echoes of the books' previous owners--an emotional fingerprint only sh

Secret PastTragicBittersweetDual Timeline
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Confessions of Marie Antoinette

Juliet Grey · 445 pages

The final years of Louis XVI's reign is told through the eyes of the legendary Austrian woman who became the French queen and never actually said, "Let them eat cake."

TragicPrinces and PrincessesRoyal CourtHistorical Fiction
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Beneath a Marble Sky

John Shors · 334 pages

Princes and PrincessesRoyal CourtTragicHistorical Fiction
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Sarah's Key

Tatiana de Rosnay · 342 pages

Tatiana de Rosnay offers us a brilliantly subtle, compelling portrait of France under occupation and reveals the taboos and silence that surround this painful episode. Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is brutally arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family's apartment, thinking th

Secret PastBittersweetTragicDual Timeline
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Broken Country

Clare Leslie Hall · 307 pages

*“The farmer is dead. He is dead, and all anyone wants to know is who killed him.”* Beth and her gentle, kind husband Frank are happily married, but their relationship relies on the past staying buried. But when Beth’s brother-in-law shoots a dog going after their sheep, Beth doesn’t realize that the gunshot will alter the course of their lives. For the dog belonged to none other than Gabriel W

BittersweetSecret PastDual TimelineFirst Person Narrator
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The Last Queen

C.W. Gortner · 350 pages

Princes and PrincessesTragicRoyal CourtHistorical Fiction
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Innocent Traitor

Alison Weir · 432 pages

I am now a condemned traitor . . . I am to die when I have hardly begun to live.Historical expertise marries page-turning fiction in Alison Weir's enthralling debut novel, breathing new life into one of the most significant and tumultuous periods of the English monarchy. It is the story of Lady Jane Grey--"the Nine Days' Queen"--a fifteen-year-old girl who unwittingly finds herself at the center o

Princes and PrincessesTragicRoyal CourtHistorical Fiction
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The Hidden Diary of Marie Antoinette

Carolly Erickson · 336 pages

Princes and PrincessesTragicRoyal CourtHistorical Fiction
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The Best of Me

Nicholas Sparks · 336 pages

In the spring of 1984, high school students Amanda Collier and Dawson Cole fell deeply, irrevocably in love. Though they were from opposite sides of the tracks, their love for one another seemed to defy the realities of life in the small town of Oriental, North Carolina. But as the summer of their senior year came to a close, unforeseen events would tear the young couple apart, setting them on rad

Dual TimelineTragicSecret PastBittersweet
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Enchantments

Kathryn Harrison · 314 pages

Rasputin's daughter, Masha, is sent to live with the royal family after her father's death. Tsarina Alexandra asks her to tend to Prince Aloysha, hoping that she has inherited Rasputin's healing powers. After Tsar Nikolay is forced to abdicate, Masha and Aloysha find solace in each other's company and tell stories as a way to escape their confinement by the Bolsheviks. In the worlds of their imagi

Princes and PrincessesRoyal CourtBittersweetHistorical Fiction
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This Side of Brightness

Colum McCann · 303 pages

In the early years of the century, Nathan Walker leaves the Okefenokee swamps of his native Georgia for New York City and the most dangerous job in America. A sandhog, he burrows beneath the East River, digging the underground tunnel that will carry trains between Brooklyn and Manhattan. In the bowels of the riverbed the sandhogs - black, white, Irish, Italian - dig together; above ground, thou

TragicBittersweetDual TimelineHistorical Fiction
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The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

Dominic Smith · 344 pages

Secret PastBittersweetDual TimelineHistorical Fiction
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The Remains of the Day

Kazuo Ishiguro · 245 pages

In the summer of 1956, Stevens, the ageing butler of Darlington Hall, embarks on a leisurely holiday that will take him deep into the countryside and into his past . . .A contemporary classic, The Remains of the Day is Kazuo Ishiguro's beautiful and haunting evocation of life between the wars in a Great English House, of lost causes and lost love.

TragicBittersweetRoyal CourtHistorical Fiction
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Orphan Train

Christina Baker Kline · 400 pages

Close to aging out of the foster care system, Molly Ayer takes a position helping an elderly woman named Vivian and discovers that they are more alike than different as she helps Vivian solve a mystery from her past. When 17-year-old Molly Ayer is sent to perform community service at elderly Vivian Daly's home in order to avoid juvenile hall, she discovers the two are very much alike, despite the

Secret PastDual TimelineBittersweetHistorical Fiction
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Above All Things

Tanis Rideout · 400 pages

“Above All Things” relates the gripping story of Mallory's third and final attempt to conquer Mount Everest. He wass 37 and married, with three small children.

TragicBittersweetDual TimelineHistorical Fiction
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The Commoner

John Burnham Schwartz · 368 pages

It is 1959 when Haruko, a young woman of good family, marries the Crown Prince of Japan, the heir to the Chrysanthemum Throne. She is the first non-aristocratic woman to enter the longest-running, almost hermetically sealed, and mysterious monarchy in the world. Met with cruelty and suspicion by the Empress and her minions, Haruko is controlled at every turn. The only interest the court has in her

Princes and PrincessesBittersweetRoyal CourtHistorical Fiction

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