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I, Mona Lisa

Jeanne Kalogridis · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❤️

Portrait of an Unknown Woman

Vanora Bennett · 400 pages

Artist ProtagonistPolitical IntrigueFirst Person NarratorHistorical Fiction
❤️

The True Memoirs of Little K

Adrienne Sharp · 389 pages

"Exiled in Paris, tiny, one-hundred-year-old Mathilde Kschessinska sits down to write her memoirs before all that she believes to be true is forgotten. A lifetime ago, she was the vain, ambitious, impossibly charming prima ballerina assoluta of the tsar's Russian Imperial Ballet in St. Petersburg. Now, as she looks back on her tumultuous life, she can still recall every slight she ever suffered, e

Artist ProtagonistPolitical IntrigueHistorical FictionFirst Person Narrator
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The Birth of Venus

Sarah Dunant · 430 pages

Artist ProtagonistPolitical IntrigueHistorical FictionFirst Person Narrator
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The Creation of Eve

Lynn Cullen · 392 pages

Renaissance portraitist Sofonisba Anguissola joins the Spanish court of Felipe II after a scandal in her native Italy and becomes embroiled in a love triangle involving the royal couple and the king's illegitimate half-brother, Don Juan.

Artist ProtagonistPolitical IntrigueHistorical FictionFirst Person Narrator
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The Queen's Rising

Rebecca Ross · 439 pages

Artist ProtagonistPolitical IntrigueFirst Person NarratorFemale Lead
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In a Treacherous Court

Michelle Diener · 301 pages

In 1525, artist Susanna Horenbout is sent from Belgium to be Henry VIII's personal illuminator. After an attempt is made on Susanna's life, John Parker, the king's most lethal courtier, is charged with keeping her safe.Further attacks are made and Susanna and Parker realize that she unknowningly carries the key to a plot against the throne. With a gang of urchins, their wits and instincts, the two

Artist ProtagonistPolitical IntrigueHistorical FictionFemale Lead
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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

Artist ProtagonistPolitical IntrigueHistorical FictionFirst Person Narrator
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Without a Summer

Mary Robinette Kowal · 364 pages

Up-and-coming fantasist Mary Robinette Kowal enchanted fans with her novels *Shades of Milk and Honey* and *Glamour in Glass*, which introduced Regency glamourists Jane and David Vincent. In *Without a Summer*, Jane and Vincent take a break from their international travels. But in a world where magic is real, nothing--even the domestic sphere--is quite what it seems. After a dramatic trip to Be

Artist ProtagonistPolitical IntrigueHistorical FictionFemale Lead
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The Splendor Before the Dark

Margaret George · 528 pages

Artist ProtagonistPolitical IntrigueFirst Person NarratorHistorical Fiction
❤️

Children of Earth and Sky

Guy Gavriel Kay · 571 pages

"The bestselling author of the groundbreaking novels Under Heaven and River of Stars, Guy Gavriel Kay is back with a new novel, Children of Earth and Sky, set in a world inspired by the conflicts and dramas of Renaissance Europe. Against this tumultuous backdrop the lives of men and women unfold on the borderlands--where empires and faiths collide. From the small coastal town of Senjan, notorious

Artist ProtagonistPolitical IntrigueHistorical FictionFemale Lead
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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

Artist ProtagonistPolitical IntrigueHistorical FictionFirst Person Narrator
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The Painted Kiss

Elizabeth Hickey · 288 pages

Artist ProtagonistHistorical FictionFirst Person NarratorFemale Lead
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Da Vinci's Tiger

L.M. Elliott · 312 pages

Artist ProtagonistHistorical FictionFirst Person NarratorFemale Lead
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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

Artist ProtagonistPolitical IntrigueHistorical FictionFemale Lead
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Leonardo's Swans

Karen Essex · 347 pages

Isabella d'Este, daughter of the Duke of Ferrara, born into privilege and the political and artistic turbulence of Renaissance Italy, is a stunning black-eyed blonde and a precocious lover and collector of art. Worldly and ambitious, she has never envied her less attractive sister, the spirited but naieve Beatrice, until, by a quirk of fate, Beatrice is betrothed to the future Duke of Milan. Altho

Artist ProtagonistPolitical IntrigueHistorical FictionFemale Lead
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Eliza's Daughter

Joan Aiken · 366 pages

A Young Woman Longing for Adventure and an Artistic Life...Because she's an illegitimate child, Eliza is raised in the rural backwater with very little supervision. An intelligent, creative, and free-spirited heroine, unfettered by the strictures of her time, she makes friends with poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge, finds her way to London, and eventually travels the world, all the whi

Artist ProtagonistHistorical FictionFirst Person NarratorFemale Lead
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As Death Draws Near

Anna Lee Huber · 342 pages

"The latest mystery from the national bestselling author of A Study in Death tangles Lady Kiera Darby and Sebastian Gage in a dangerous web of religious and political intrigue. July 1831. In the midst of their idyllic honeymoon in England's Lake District, Kiera and Gage's seclusion is interrupted by a missive from Kiera's new father-in-law. A deadly incident involving a distant relative of the Duk

Artist ProtagonistFirst Person NarratorHistorical FictionFemale Lead
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Mariana

Susanna Kearsley

Artist ProtagonistHistorical FictionFirst Person NarratorFemale Lead
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Sea Glass

Maria V. Snyder · 379 pages

"Student glass magician Opal Cowan's newfound ability to steal a magician's powers makes her too powerful. Ordered to house arrest by the Council, Opal dares defy them, traveling to the Moon Clan's lands in search of Ulrick, the man she thinks she loves. Thinks, because another man--now her prisoner--claims Ulrick's desire for blood magic has eclipsed his passion for her. In hostile territory, wit

Artist ProtagonistPolitical IntrigueFirst Person NarratorFemale Lead
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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

Artist ProtagonistHistorical FictionFirst Person NarratorFemale Lead
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Patience & Sarah

Isabel Miller · 192 pages

"Set in the nineteenth century, Isabel Miller's classic lesbian novel traces the relationship between Patience White, a painter, and Sarah Dowling, a farmer, whose romantic bond does not sit well with the puritanical New England farming community in which they live. Ultimately, they are forced to make life-changing decisions that depend on their courage and their commitment to one another." "First

Artist ProtagonistHistorical FictionFirst Person NarratorFemale Lead
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Life Mask

Emma Donoghue · 650 pages

In eighteenth-century England, the eccentric widow, Mrs. Damer, works as the period's only woman sculptor, the horse race innovator, Lord Derby, endures public mockery, and a Drury Lane actress endeavors to gain entry into aristocratic circles.

Artist ProtagonistPolitical IntrigueHistorical FictionFemale Lead
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Song of the Nile

Stephanie Dray · 398 pages

Political IntrigueHistorical FictionFirst Person NarratorFemale Lead
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The Garden of Evening Mists

Tan Twan Eng · 352 pages

"On a mountain above the clouds, in the central highlands of Malaya lived the man who had been the gardener of the Emperor of Japan.” Teoh Yun Ling was seventeen years old when she first heard about him, but a war would come, and a decade would pass before she travels up to the Garden of Evening Mists to see him, in 1951. A survivor of a brutal Japanese camp, she has spent the last few years

Artist ProtagonistHistorical FictionFirst Person NarratorFemale Lead

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