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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque
Jeffrey Ford · 320 pages
"The toast of 1893 New York society, the portraitist Piero Piambo has his pick of choice assignments. Acclaimed by his peers and his "betters," he is a fixture in the city's most opulent salons, yet he fears he has sold his soul to arrive there. But then comes a commission unlike any other - one that will test Piambo's talents, his will .. and his sanity.". "The client is a Mrs. Charbuque, and th
Secrecy
Rupert Thomson · 312 pages
It is Florence, 1691. The Renaissance is long gone, and the city is a dark, repressive place, where everything is forbidden and anything is possible. The Enlightenment may be just around the corner, but knowledge is still the property of the few, and they guard it fiercely. Art, sex and power - these, as always, are the obsessions. Facing serious criminal charges, Gaetano Zummo is forced to flee h
Market Day
James Sturm · 88 pages
This graphic novel is set in an unspecified country in eastern Europe, around the year 1900. The story follows one day in the life of Mendelman, an artisan, as he visits the nearest town on market day to sell his rugs. However, times are changing, and demand for his and other fellow artisan's high-quality ware has disappeared with the arrival of cheaper, mass produced items.
The Mask Carver's Son
Alyson Richman · 374 pages
"Set in turn-of-the-century Japan against the backdrop of a declining Noh theatre and in Paris during the heady days when French Impressionism was in full bloom, this novel tells the story of a young Japanese artist who sacrifices everything: family, love, and fortune, for his art.". "The artist's father, a reclusive carver renowned for his haunting masks, dedicates his life to the theatre after
The Praise Singer
Mary Renault · 289 pages
'Mary Renault's portraits of the ancient world are fierce, complex and eloquent, infused at every turn with her life-long passion for the Classics. Her characters live vividly both in their own time, and in ours' MADELINE MILLER Mary Renault is a shining light to both historical novelists and their readers. She does not pretend the past is like the present, or that the people of ancient Greece
The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye
Sonny Liew · 320 pages
Doctor Zhivago
Boris Pasternak · 542 pages
***This epic tale about the effects of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath on a bourgeois family was not published in the Soviet Union until 1987.*** One of the results of its publication in the West was Pasternak's complete rejection by Soviet authorities; when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 he was compelled to decline it. ***The book quickly became an international be
Dancer
Colum McCann · 352 pages
A Russian peasant who became an international legend, a Cold War exile who inspired millions, an artist whose name stood for genius, sex, and excess--the magnificence of Rudolf Nureyev's life and work are known, but in this novel McCann reinvents this erotically charged figure, willful, lustful, and driven by a never-to-be-met need for perfection, through the light he cast on those who knew him. S
The Last Painting of Sara de Vos
Dominic Smith · 344 pages
Portrait of a Marriage
Pearl S. Buck · 224 pages
A wealthy painter finds his inspiration, and tumultuous love, in a girl he meets by chance At the turn of the century, an upper-class painter from Philadelphia goes searching for inspiration. He finds his muse on a farm & mdash;the farmer & rsquo;s beautiful and humble daughter. His portrait of her becomes one of his most inspired works, but his passion for the illiterate girl doesn & rsquo;t stop
Mr Mac and Me
Esther Freud · 304 pages
1914 - In the village of Dunwich on the Suffolk coast young Thomas Maggs befriends mysterious Scotsman and artist, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, whom the locals call Mac. Just as Thomas and Mac's friendship begins to bloom, war with Germany is declared and as the war weighs increasingly heavily on the community, the villagers on the home front become increasingly suspicious of Mac and his curious be
The Electric Michelangelo
Sarah Hall · 352 pages
"In the lyrical prose that has already become her trademark, Sarah Hall's new novel tells the story of Cy Parks, from his childhood years spent in a seaside guest house for consumptives with his mother, Reeda, to his apprenticeship as a tattoo-artist with Eliot Riley - a scraper with a reputation as a Bolshevik and a drinker to boot." "His skills acquired and a thirst for experience burning within
The Way to Paradise
Mario Vargas Llosa
The Bird Artist
Howard Norman · 289 pages
Howard Norman's The Bird Artist, the first book of his Canadian trilogy, begins in 1911. Its narrator, Fabian Vas is a bird artist: He draws and paints the birds of Witless Bay, his remote Newfoundland coastal village home. In the first paragraph of his tale Fabian reveals that he has murdered the village lighthouse keeper, Botho August. Later, he confesses who and what drove him to his crime--a m
Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish
Richard Flanagan · 404 pages
The most remarkable novel yet from the internationally acclaimed author of Death of a River Guide and The Sound of One Hand Clapping, this is a marvelous historical epic of 19th century Australia, a world of convicts and colonists, thieves and catamites, whose bloody history is recorded in a very unusual taxonomy of fish.
The Lacuna
Barbara Kingsolver · 528 pages
In her most accomplished novel, Barbara Kingsolver takes us on an epic journey from the Mexico City of artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo to the America of Pearl Harbor, FDR, and J. Edgar Hoover. The Lacuna is a poignant story of a man pulled between two nations as they invent their modern identities.Born in the United States, reared in a series of provisional households in Mexico-from a coastal
Remember Ben Clayton
Stephen Harrigan
War and Turpentine
Stefan Hertmans · 320 pages
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
The Dollmaker
Harriette Simpson Arnow · 624 pages
The Danish Girl
David Ebershoff · 288 pages
A stunning first novel that probes the mysteries of sex, gender, and love with insight and subtletyInspired by the true story of Danish painter Einar Wegener and his California-born wife, this tender portrait of a marriage asks: What do you do when someone you love wants to change? It starts with a question, a simple favor asked of a husband by his wife on an afternoon chilled by the Baltic wind w
The Bridal Chair
Gloria Goldreich · 491 pages
Beautiful Ida Chagall, the only daughter of Marc Chagall, is blossoming in the Paris art world beyond her father's controlling gaze. But her newfound independence is short-lived. In Nazi-occupied Paris, Chagall's status as a Jewish artist has made them all targets, yet his devotion to his art blinds him to their danger.