AmongReaders.com Add a tiny library
📚 AmongReaders — track what you read, talk chapter by chapter without spoilers, and read with friends. Free.Join AmongReadersSign in

🧲 Books like this

The Paying Guests

Sarah Waters · back to the book

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 author
❤️

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...

Roaring TwentiesSecret RelationshipForbidden LoveAtmospheric
❤️

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

Secret RelationshipSlow Burn RomanceForbidden LoveAtmospheric
❤️

The Age of Innocence

Edith Wharton · 320 pages

Edith Wharton's most famous novel, written immediately after the end of the First World War, is a brilliantly realized anatomy of New York society in the 1870s, the world in which she grew up, and from which she spent her life escaping. Newland Archer, Wharton's protagonist, charming, tactful, enlightened, is a thorough product of this society; he accepts its standards and abides by its rules but

Secret RelationshipSlow Burn RomanceAtmosphericLiterary Fiction
❤️

The Kingdoms

Natasha Pulley · 448 pages

Slow Burn RomanceForbidden LoveAtmosphericCharacter-Driven
🙂

Mudbound

Hillary Jordan · 335 pages

"It is 1946, and city-bred Laura McAllan is trying to raise her children on her husband's Mississippi Delta farm; a place she finds foreign and frightening. In the midst of the family's struggles, two young men return from the war to work the land. Jamie McAllan, Laura's brother-in-law, is everything her husband is not; charming, handsome, and haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eld

Secret RelationshipForbidden LoveLiterary FictionAtmospheric
🙂

Almost Life

Kiran Millwood Hargrave · 384 pages

Secret RelationshipForbidden LoveLondonLiterary Fiction
🙂

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

Roaring TwentiesForbidden LoveAtmosphericCharacter-Driven
🙂

Fortune's Rocks

Anita Shreve · 464 pages

Everywhere hailed for its emotional intensity and unflagging narrative momentum, this magnificent novel transports us to the turn of the twentieth century, to the world of a prominent Boston family summering on the New Hampshire coast, and to the social orbit of a spirited young woman who falls into a passionate, illicit affair with an older man, with cataclysmic results.

Secret RelationshipSlow Burn RomanceForbidden LoveAtmospheric
🙂
Roaring TwentiesForbidden LoveLiterary FictionLGBTQ+ Protagonist
🙂

The Miniaturist

Jessie Burton · 416 pages

Engaging the services of a miniaturist to furnish a cabinet-sized replica of her new home, 18-year-old Nella Oortman, the wife of an illustrious merchant trader, soon discovers that the artist's tiny creations mirror their real-life counterparts in eerie and unexpected ways.

Secret RelationshipForbidden LoveCharacter-DrivenAtmospheric
🙂

This Is How You Lose the Time War

Amal El-Mohtar · 209 pages

Secret RelationshipSlow Burn RomanceForbidden LoveAtmospheric
🙂

The Winter Sea

Susanna Kearsley · 527 pages

When novelist Carrie McClelland decides to set her new novel in Slains Castle in Scotland and uses her ancestor, Sophia Paterson, as one of the characters, the novel begins to take on a life of its own and Carrie soon realizes that an unusual bond with her ancestor may be providing her with an immediate window into the past.

Secret RelationshipSlow Burn RomanceForbidden LoveCharacter-Driven
🙂

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

Roaring TwentiesForbidden LoveAtmosphericCharacter-Driven
🙂

Atmosphere: A Love Story

Taylor Jenkins Reid · 352 pages

Joan Goodwin has been obsessed with the stars for as long as she can remember. Thoughtful and reserved, Joan is content with her life as a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University and as aunt to her precocious niece, Frances. That is, until she comes across an advertisement seeking the first women scientists to join NASA’s Space Shuttle program. Suddenly, Joan burns to be one of the f

Secret RelationshipSlow Burn RomanceForbidden LoveCharacter-Driven
🙂

Written on the Body

Jeanette Winterson · 190 pages

The most beguilingly seductive novel to date from the author of The Passion and Sexing the Cherry. Winterson chronicles the consuming affair between the narrator, who is given neither name nor gender, and the beloved, a complex and confused married woman.

Secret RelationshipForbidden LoveLiterary FictionAtmospheric
🙂

Memoirs of a Geisha

Arthur Golden · 456 pages

A literary sensation and runaway bestseller, this brilliant debut novel tells with seamless authenticity and exquisite lyricism the true confessions of one of Japan's most celebrated geisha.Speaking to us with the wisdom of age and in a voice at once haunting and startlingly immediate, Nitta Sayuri tells the story of her life as a geisha. It begins in a poor fishing village in 1929, when, as a n

Slow Burn RomanceForbidden LoveAtmosphericCharacter-Driven
🙂

The Countess Conspiracy

Courtney Milan · 316 pages

Secret RelationshipSlow Burn RomanceCharacter-DrivenLondon
🙂

Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil

V E Schwab · 544 pages

This is a story about hunger. 1532. Santo Domingo de la Calzada. A young girl grows up wild and wily—her beauty is only outmatched by her dreams of escape. But María knows she can only ever be a prize, or a pawn, in the games played by men. When an alluring stranger offers an alternate path, María makes a desperate choice. She vows to have no regrets. This is a story about love. 1827. London

Forbidden LoveLondonAtmosphericCharacter-Driven
🙂

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

Secret RelationshipForbidden LoveAtmosphericLiterary Fiction
🙂

Possession

A.S. Byatt · 555 pages

Winner of England’s Booker Prize and the literary sensation of the year, *Possession* is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once an intellectual mystery and triumphant love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets. As they uncover their letters, journals, and poems, and track their movements from London to Yorkshire—from spiritualist

Secret RelationshipForbidden LoveLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
🙂

Sister Carrie

Theodore Dreiser · 450 pages

Young Caroline Meeber leaves home for the first time and experiences work, love, and the pleasures and responsibilities of independence in late-nineteenth-century Chicago and New York.

Secret RelationshipForbidden LoveLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
🙂

Learned by Heart

Emma Donoghue · 338 pages

Secret RelationshipForbidden LoveCharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction
🙂

Bel-Ami

Guy de Maupassant · 303 pages

.I Quand la caissiere lui eut rendu la monnaie de sa piece de cent sous, Georges Duroy sortit du restaurant. Comme il portait beau, par nature et par pose d'ancien sous-officier, il cambra sa taille, frisa sa moustache d'un geste militaire et familier, et jeta sur les dineurs attardes un regard rapide et circulaire, un de ces regards de joli garcon qui s'etendent comme des coups d'epervier. Les fe

Secret RelationshipForbidden LoveLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
🙂

The Red and the Black

Stendhal · 472 pages

Secret RelationshipForbidden LoveLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
📖 New 2026 Kindles just released. See them on Amazon ↗