What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe House of Doctor Dee
Peter Ackroyd · 277 pages
This novel centres on the famous 16th-century alchemist and astrologer John Dee. Reputedly a black magician, he was imprisoned by Queen Mary for allegedly attempting to kill her through sorcery. When Matthew Palmer inherits an old house in Clerkenwell, he feels that he has become part of its past.
Ghostwalk
Rebecca Stott · 307 pages
A Cambridge historian, Elizabeth Vogelsang, is found drowned, clutching a glass prism in her hand. The book she was writing about Isaac Newton's involvement with alchemy--the culmination of her lifelong obsession with the seventeenth century--remains unfinished. When her son, Cameron, asks his former lover, Lydia Brooke, to ghostwrite the missing final chapters of his mother's book, Lydia agrees a
The Geographer's Library
Jon Fasman · 374 pages
A twelfth-century Sicilian cat burglar snatches a sack of artefacts from the king's geographer's library, and the tools and talismans of transmutation and eternal life are soon scattered all over the world. The bizarre and dangerous circumstances under which these alchemical objects change hands are testament to their extraordinary value, but it is not until nine hundred years later that a young r
Fludd
Hilary Mantel · 202 pages
One dark and stormy night in 1956, a stranger named Fludd mysteriously turns up in the dismal village of Fetherhoughton. He is the curate sent by the bishop to assist Father Angwin-or is he? In the most unlikely of places, a superstitious town that understands little of romance or sentimentality, where bad blood between neighbors is ancient and impenetrable, miracles begin to bloom. No matter how
The Reckoning
Alma Katsu · 346 pages
Follows the experiences of immortal woman Lanny, whose obsessive desires compel her to risk everything and influence the destinies of Luke, Adair, and Jonathan.
The Alchemist
Paulo Coelho · 192 pages
Combining magic, mysticism, wisdom and wonder into an inspiring tale of self-discovery, The Alchemist has become a modern classic, selling millions of copies around the world and transforming the lives of countless readers across generations. Paulo Coelho's masterpiece tells the mystical story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who yearns to travel in search of a worldly treasure. His ques
The World Before Us
Aislinn Hunter · 386 pages
"Deep in the woods of northern England, somewhere between a dilapidated estate and an abandoned Victorian asylum, fifteen-year-old Jane Standen lived through a nightmare. She was babysitting a sweet young girl named Lily, and in one fleeting moment, lost her. The little girl was never found, leaving her family and Jane devastated. Twenty years later, Jane is an archivist at a small London museum t
The Collector of Dying Breaths
M.J. Rose · 431 pages
"From one of America's most imaginative storytellers comes a passionate tale of love and treachery, spanning the days of Catherine de Medici's court to the twenty-first century and starring a woman drawn back, time and again, to the past. In 1533, an Italian orphan with an uncanny knack for creating fragrance is plucked from poverty to become Catherine de Medici's perfumer. To repay his debt, over
Birdsong
Sebastian Faulks · 483 pages
Set before and during the great war, Birdsong captures the drama of that era on both a national and a personal scale.Set before and during the great war, Birdsong captures the drama of that era on both a national and a personal scale. It is the story of Stephen, a young Englishman, who arrives in Amiens in 1910. His life goes through a series of traumatic experiences, from the clandestine love aff
Angle of Repose
Wallace Stegner · 569 pages
Wallace Stegner's Pultizer Prize-winning novel is a story of discovery—personal, historical, and geographical. Confined to a wheelchair, retired historian Lyman Ward sets out to write his grandparents' remarkable story, chronicling their days spent carving civilization into the surface of America's western frontier. But his research reveals even more about his own life than he's willing to admit.
The Chemistry of Tears
Peter Carey · 288 pages
London, 2010. Grieving the loss of her lover, Swinburne museum curator Catherine Gehrig is given a special project--bring back to life an automaton whose original owner, 19th century Englishman Henry Brandling, was also confronted with the mystery of life and death.
Wanting
Richard Flanagan · 256 pages
Assuming the governorship of the penal colony of Van Diemen's Land, Sir John Franklin and his wife adopt a young Aboriginal girl, Mathinna, and ten years later after Franklin and his crew disappear in the Arctic, Charles Dickens takes an interest in the story, which has a profound effect on his own life.
Snow Falling on Cedars
David Guterson · 424 pages
On San Piedro, an island of rugged, spectacular beauty in Puget Sound, home to salmon fishermen and strawberry farmers, a Japanese-American fisherman stands trial, charged with murder. The year is 1954, and the shadow of World War II, with its brutality abroad and internment of Japanese Americans at home, hangs over the courtroom. Ishmael Cambers, who lost an arm in the Pacific war and now runs th
The Dream of Scipio
Iain Pears · 398 pages
In national bestseller *The Dream of Scipio*, acclaimed author Iain Pears intertwines three intellectual mysteries, three love stories, and three of the darkest moments in human history. United by a classical text called "The Dream of Scipio," three men struggle to find refuge for their hearts and minds from the madness that surrounds them in the final days of the Roman Empire, in the grim years o
Out Stealing Horses
Per Petterson · 264 pages
An early morning adventure out stealing horses leads to the tragic death of one boy and a resulting lifetime of guilt and isolation for his friend, in this moving tale about the painful loss of innocence and of traditional ways of life that are gone forever.
The Diviners
Margaret Laurence · 467 pages
For Morag Gunn, growing up in a small Canadian prairie town made her a fighter, a cynic, a romantic. A failed marriage, a heartbreaking affair and solitude forced her to develop a special way of being with a life strengthened by dignity and the ability to give and receive love.
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
Daemonomania
John Crowley · 451 pages
Pierce Moffett finds himself and his friends drawn into a world of mystery and magic that seems to be tied to the life and death of a Renaissance wizard.
Great Circle
Maggie Shipstead · 608 pages
The Mathematics of Love
Emma Darwin · 472 pages
In 1976, Anna is sent to her uncle's rural school. She becomes entangled in the lives of Theo and Stephen. Stephen Fairhurst owned the house, her uncle's school, one hundred and fifty years ago.