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🧲 Books like this

The Danish Girl

David Ebershoff · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

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

Gender IdentitySelf-DiscoveryLGBTQ+ ProtagonistCharacter-Driven
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The Hours

Michael Cunningham

LGBTQ+ ProtagonistSelf-DiscoveryMarriage in TroubleCharacter-Driven
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Middlesex

Jeffrey Eugenides · 544 pages

A unique coming of age story. While the main character in this novel is dealing with gender identity issues the main focus of this brilliantly written story is the confusion we all face as we grow into the person we were meant to be. The reader finds himself identifying with the main character's experiences. This is a brilliantly written story. The prose is honest in a way that few authors dare t

Gender IdentitySelf-DiscoveryLGBTQ+ ProtagonistCharacter-Driven
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Villa America

Liza Klaussmann · 448 pages

A tale based on the real-life inspirations for Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night finds expats Sara and Gerald Murphy sharing freewheeling days, hosting parties and hiding heartbreaking secrets in the 1920s French Riviera.

Artist ProtagonistParisMarriage in TroubleCharacter-Driven
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I am J

Cris Beam · 326 pages

J, who feels like a boy mistakenly born as a girl, runs away from his best friend who has rejected him and the parents he thinks do not understand him when he finally decides that it is time to be who he really is.

Gender IdentitySelf-DiscoveryArtist ProtagonistLGBTQ+ Protagonist
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The Chaperone

Laura Moriarty · 419 pages

"A novel about the friendship between an adolescent, pre-movie-star Louise Brooks, and the 36-year-old woman who chaperones her to New York City for a summer, in 1922, and how it changes both their lives"--

Self-DiscoveryMarriage in TroubleCharacter-DrivenEmotional
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Loving Frank

Nancy Horan · 380 pages

I have been standing on the side of life, watching it float by. I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current.So writes Mamah Borthwick Cheney in her diary as she struggles to justify her clandestine love affair with Frank Lloyd Wright. Four years earlier, in 1903, Mamah and her husband, Edwin, had commissioned the renowned architect to design a new home for them. During the construction

Artist ProtagonistSelf-DiscoveryMarriage in TroubleCharacter-Driven
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Stone Butch Blues

Leslie Feinberg · 366 pages

Stone Butch Blues is a historical fiction novel written by Leslie Feinberg about life as a butch lesbian in 1970s America. While fictional, the work also takes inspiration from Feinberg's own life, and she describes it as her "call to action."

Gender IdentitySelf-DiscoveryLGBTQ+ ProtagonistEmotional
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The Last Nude

Ellis Avery · 331 pages

Paris, 1927. In the heady years before the crash, financiers drape their mistresses in Chanel, while expatriates flock to the avant-garde bookshop Shakespeare and Company. One day in July, a young American named Rafaela Fano gets into the car of a coolly dazzling stranger, the Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka. Struggling to halt a downward slide toward prostitution, Rafaela agrees to model f

Artist ProtagonistParisLGBTQ+ ProtagonistCharacter-Driven
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We Are Water

Wally Lamb · 564 pages

Anna Oh, a middle-age wife, mother and artist, divorces her husband after 27 years of marriage to marry Vivica, the Manhattan art dealer who orchestrated her professional success.

Artist ProtagonistMarriage in TroubleLGBTQ+ ProtagonistSelf-Discovery
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Marriage in TroubleCharacter-DrivenArtist ProtagonistLGBTQ+ Protagonist
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Becoming Ted

Matt Cain · 432 pages

Self-DiscoveryLGBTQ+ ProtagonistMarriage in TroubleGender Identity
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The Painted Girls

Cathy Marie Buchanan · 368 pages

In belle époque Paris, the Van Goethem sisters struggle for survival after the sudden death of their father, a situation that prompts young Marie's ballet training and her introduction to a genius painter.

Artist ProtagonistSelf-DiscoveryCharacter-DrivenParis
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Every Day

David Levithan · 330 pages

Every morning A wakes in a different person's body, in a different person's life, learning over the years to never get too attached, until he wakes up in the body of Justin and falls in love with Justin's girlfriend, Rhiannon.

Gender IdentitySelf-DiscoveryLGBTQ+ ProtagonistEmotional
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Of Human Bondage

W. Somerset Maugham · 582 pages

Of Human Bondage is a moving exploration of loneliness, obsessive love, and a young man's search for meaning and direction in life. Written in the third person, it tells the story of Philip Carey, a self-conscious orphan with a club-foot who learns medicine. Not only is this a significant work in the Bildungsroman tradition, but its largely autobiographical basis gives it a special interest in vie

Self-DiscoveryParisArtist ProtagonistCharacter-Driven
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Artist ProtagonistParisLGBTQ+ ProtagonistCharacter-Driven
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Giovanni's Room

James Baldwin · 224 pages

Considered an 'audacious' second novel, GIOVANNI'S ROOM is set in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence. This now-classic story of a fated love triangle explores, with uncompromising clarity, the conflicts between desire, conventional morality and sexual identity.

Self-DiscoveryLGBTQ+ ProtagonistParisCharacter-Driven
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The Zahir

Paulo Coelho · 320 pages

Set in Paris and in the enchanting landscape of central Asia, this new novel by the author of the international bestsellers The Alchemist and Eleven Minutes follows the journey of a man obsessed with finding the wife who left him without an explanation.The narrator of The Zahir is a bestselling novelist who lives in Paris and enjoys all the privileges that money and celebrity bring. His wife of te

Self-DiscoveryParisCharacter-DrivenMarriage in Trouble
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Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O'Keeffe

Dawn Tripp · 336 pages

Artist ProtagonistMarriage in TroubleSelf-DiscoveryCharacter-Driven
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The Awakening

Kate Chopin · 190 pages

The Awakening is a novel by Kate Chopin, first published in 1899. Set in New Orleans and on the Louisiana Gulf coast at the end of the 19th century, the plot centers on Edna Pontellier and her struggle between her increasingly unorthodox views on femininity and motherhood with the prevailing social attitudes of the turn-of-the-century American South. It is one of the earliest American novels that

Self-DiscoveryArtist ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenMarriage in Trouble
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Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

Therese Anne Fowler · 375 pages

A tale inspired by the marriage of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald follows their union in defiance of her father's opposition and her abandonment of the provincial finery of her upbringing in favor of a scandalous flapper identity that gains her entry into the literary party scenes of New York, Paris and the French Riviera.

Marriage in TroubleParisCharacter-DrivenEmotional
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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

Artist ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenSelf-DiscoveryEmotional
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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.

ParisMarriage in TroubleCharacter-DrivenEmotional
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The Paris Wife

Paula McLain · 320 pages

Meeting through mutual friends in Chicago, Hadley is intrigued by brash "beautiful boy" Ernest Hemingway, and after a brief courtship and small wedding, they take off for Paris, where Hadley makes a convincing transformation from an overprotected child to a game and brave young woman who puts up with impoverished living conditions and shattering loneliness to prop up her husband’s career.

ParisCharacter-DrivenMarriage in TroubleEmotional

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