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24 books with the same feel
Hide books by the same authorSecrecy
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
Amadeus
Peter Shaffer · 128 pages
0riginating at the National Theatre of Great Britain, Amadeus was the recipient of both the Evening Standard Drama Award and the Theatre Critics Award. In the United States, the play won the coveted Tony Award and went on to become a critically acclaimed major motion picture winning eight Oscars, including Best Picture. Now, this extraordinary work about the life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is avai
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
Blindspot
Jane Kamensky, Jill Lepore · 522 pages
"Tis a small canvas, this Boston," muses Stewart Jameson, a Scottish portrait painter who, having fled his debtors in Edinburgh, has washed up on America's far shores. Eager to begin anew in this new world, he advertises for an apprentice, but the lad who comes knocking is no lad at all. Fanny Easton is a lady in disguise, a young, fallen woman from Boston's most prominent family. "I must make thi
The Second Mrs. Giaconda
E.L. Konigsburg · 138 pages
The Second Mrs. Giaconda," a historical novel by E.L. Konigsburg, explores the background of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa through the experiences of his servant, Salai, in Milan, Italy. The story delves into the lives of da Vinci, Salai, and Beatrice d'Este, weaving a narrative that hints at the reasons behind the iconic painting. The novel uses Salai's perspective to unravel the mysteries surrou
Fugitive Colors
Lisa Barr · 400 pages
Julian Klein, a young American artist, rebels against his religious upbringing and is eager for the artistic freedom of 1930s Paris. He flees Chicago only to find himself consumed by a world in which a paintbrush is far more lethal than a gun. An artist turned spy, Julian at the same time competes with jealous inferior artists who feverishly attempt to destroy those with true talent.
The Agony and the Ecstasy
Irving Stone · 710 pages
Mr. Stone gives his signature style and thought to this story of Michelangelo. He points out often in this book that Michelangelo, before beginning a work, asks what it is he is trying to capture in the moment of his painting, sculpture, or poem. So it is with Mr. Stone. He wants to portray, as close as he can find, the moments of the life of this artist. What shaped him, what he loved, what (and
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 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
Oil and Marble: A Novel of Leonardo and Michelangelo
Stephanie Storey · 320 pages
From 15011505, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti both lived and worked in Florence. Leonardo was a charming, handsome fifty year-old at the peak of his career. Michelangelo was a temperamental sculptor in his mid-twenties, desperate to make a name for himself. Michelangelo is a virtual unknown when he returns to Florence and wins the commission to carve what will become one of the most
The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye
Sonny Liew · 320 pages
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
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.
Summer in February
Jonathan Smith · 356 pages
During the 1949 Annual Banquet of the Royal Academy, retiring President Sir Alfred Munnings launches an incoherent and savage attack on modern art--only to stumble on a name that brings back memories of a celebrated Edwardian artistic community where he enjoyed the last days of a golden age soon to be shattered by war.
The Last Painting of Sara de Vos
Dominic Smith · 344 pages
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 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 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.
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