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 authorThe Other Side of the World
Stephanie Bishop · 269 pages
In the tradition of Rachel Cusk's A Life's Work or Maggie O'Farrell's The Hand That First Held Mine comes a complex, tender and gorgeously written novel of parenthood, love and marriage that is impossible to put down. Cambridge 1963. Charlotte struggles to reconnect with the woman she was before children, and to find the time and energy to paint. Her husband, Henry, cannot face the thought of anot
The Seagull
Anton Chekhov · 90 pages
The Cranes Dance
Meg Howrey · 373 pages
Kate is conflicted after she is offered her sister Gwen's starring role in a ballet, especially since her jealously prevented her from seeing the signs of the mental breakdown that made Gwen lose the role.
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 Woman Upstairs
Claire Messud · 304 pages
Relegated to the status of schoolteacher and friendly neighbor after abandoning her dreams of becoming an artist, Nora advocates on behalf of a charismatic Lebanese student and is drawn into the child's family until his artist mother's careless ambition leads to a shattering betrayal.
Lust for Life
Irving Stone · 479 pages
A fictional account of the life of Vincent van Gogh, the tormented genius who put so much of himself into his art that he found it difficult to maintain himself in ordinary society.
The Ecliptic
Benjamin Wood · 480 pages
On a forested island off the coast of Istanbul stands Portmantle, a gated refuge for beleaguered artists. There, a curious assembly of painters, architects, writers and musicians strive to restore their faded talents. Elspeth 'Knell' Conroy is a celebrated painter who has lost faith in her ability and fled the dizzying art scene of 1960s London. On the island, she spends her nights locked in her b
Vincent and Theo: The Van Gogh Brothers
Deborah Heiligman · 355 pages
This incredible story about brotherly love and the famous artist who was shaped by it is a meticulously researched account of the Van Gogh brothers' intertwined lives.
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.
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
A Line Made by Walking
Sara Baume · 321 pages
Retreating to her family's rural house in Ireland to escape the challenges of urban life, artist Frankie explores the chain of events that have challenged her mental stability and art education. As she picks up photography once more, she searches for meaning and healing while examining the natural world around her.
Hold Still
Nina LaCour · 272 pages
An arresting story about starting over after a friend's suicide, froma breakthrough new voice in YA fictiondear caitlin, there are so many things that i want so badly to tell you but i just can't.Devastating, hopeful, hopeless, playful...in words and illustrations, Ingrid left behind a painful farewell in her journal for Caitlin. Now Caitlin is left alone, by loss and by choice, struggling to find
The Forest Lover
Susan Vreeland
Losing Clementine
Ashley Ream · 306 pages
"A new writer makes her fiction debut with a tale involving a renowned artist's impending suicide"--
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.
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 Swan Thieves
Elizabeth Kostova · 564 pages
Psychiatrist Andrew Marlowe, devoted to his profession and the painting hobby he loves, has a solitary but ordered life. When renowned painter Robert Oliver attacks a canvas in the National Gallery of Art and becomes his patient, Marlow finds that order destroyed. Desperate to understand the secret that torments the genius, he embarks on a journey that leads him into the lives of the women closest
Little
Edward Carey · 448 pages
Afterimage
Helen Humphreys · 243 pages
"When Annie Phelan arrives at the Dashell farm to begin work as a maid, she finds her new mistress strapping turkey wings on a naked boy who is to play the Angel of Death. Annie knows one thing for sure - she's not at the prim Mrs. Gilbey's anymore.". "England in 1865 is aswirl with change. This is the age of invention, the Crystal Palace, progress, and the colonies. At the farm, the master, Eldo
The Printmaker's Daughter
Katherine Govier · 501 pages
Recounting the story of her life, Oei plunges us into the colorful world of nineteenth-century Edo, in which courtesans rub shoulders with poets, warriors consort with actors, and the arts flourish in an unprecedented moment of creative upheaval. Oei and Hokusai live among writers, novelists, tattoo artists, and prostitutes, evading the spies of the repressive shogunate as they work on Hokusai's c
Marie, Dancing
Carolyn Meyer · 257 pages
Marie van Goethem, a fourteen-year-old ballet dancer in the famed Paris Opéra, has led a life of hardship and poverty. For her, dancing is the only joy to counter the pain inflicted by hunger, her mother's drinking, and her selfish older sister. But when famed artist Edgar Degas demands Marie's presence in his studio, it appears that her life will be transformed: He will pay her to pose for a new
Signs for Lost Children
Sarah Moss · 368 pages
Only weeks into their marriage a young couple embark[s] on a six-month period of separation. Tom Cavendish goes to Japan to build lighthouses and his wife Ally, a doctor, takes work at the Truro asylum where she must struggle against the terrible conditions imposed on the patients, the mores of late Victorian society and her own demons.
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