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 Gold-Rimmed Spectacles

Giorgio Bassani · 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
❤️

Learned by Heart

Emma Donoghue · 338 pages

Sexual OrientationBittersweetRacismLiterary Fiction
❤️

The Story of a Marriage

Andrew Sean Greer · 266 pages

A Today Show Summer Reads Pick A Washington Post Book of the Year "We think we know the ones we love." So Pearlie Cook begins her indirect, and devastating exploration of the mystery at the heart of every relationship--how we can ever truly know another person. It is 1953 and Pearlie, a dutiful young housewife, finds herself living in the Sunset District in San Francisco, caring not only

Sexual OrientationBittersweetRacismLiterary Fiction
❤️

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

Taylor Jenkins Reid · 400 pages

Aging and reclusive Hollywood movie icon Evelyn Hugo is finally ready to tell the truth about her glamorous and scandalous life. But when she chooses unknown magazine reporter Monique Grant for the job, no one is more astounded than Monique herself. Why her? Why now? Monique is not exactly on top of the world. Her husband has left her, and her professional life is going nowhere. Regardless of w

Sexual OrientationBittersweetRacismHistorical Fiction
❤️

The Chaperone

Laura Moriarty · 419 pages

"A novel about the friendship between an adolescent, pre-movie-star Louise Brooks, and the 36-year-old woman who chaperones her to New York City for a summer, in 1922, and how it changes both their lives"--

Sexual OrientationBittersweetRacismLiterary Fiction
❤️

When the Tides Held the Moon

Venessa Vida Kelley · 466 pages

The Shape of Water meets The Greatest Showman in this beautifully illustrated queer historical cozy fantasy, as a young Puerto Rican immigrant goes through a journey of love and self-discovery after capturing a merman for a Coney Island sideshow act in turn-of-the 20th century New York. “Venessa gives life to the most unexpected things. I have a strong, strong feeling that this is the start of som

Sexual OrientationRacismBittersweetHistorical Fiction
❤️

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Michael Chabon · 639 pages

The novel begins in 1939 with the arrival of 19-year-old Josef "Joe" Kavalier as a refugee in New York City, where he comes to live with his 17-year-old cousin Sammy Klayman. Joe escaped from Prague with the help of his teacher Kornblum by hiding in a coffin along with the inanimate Golem of Prague, leaving the rest of his family, including his younger brother Thomas, behind. Besides having a shar

Sexual OrientationBittersweetLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
❤️

Almost Life

Kiran Millwood Hargrave · 384 pages

Sexual OrientationBittersweetLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
❤️

Giovanni's Room

James Baldwin · 224 pages

Considered an 'audacious' second novel, GIOVANNI'S ROOM is set in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence. This now-classic story of a fated love triangle explores, with uncompromising clarity, the conflicts between desire, conventional morality and sexual identity.

Sexual OrientationBittersweetLiterary FictionRacism
❤️

The Night Watch

Sarah Waters · 506 pages

A novel of relationships set in 1940s London that brims with vivid historical detail, thrilling coincidences, and psychological complexity, by the author of the Booker Prize finalist Fingersmith. Sarah Waters, whose works set in Victorian England have awards and acclaim and have reinvigorated the genres of both historical and lesbian fiction, returns with novel that marks a departure from ninetee

Sexual OrientationBittersweetLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
❤️
Sexual OrientationBittersweetLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
🙂

A Place Called Winter

Patrick Gale · 368 pages

"A privileged elder son, and stammeringly shy, Harry Cane has followed convention at every step. Even the beginnings of an illicit, dangerous affair do little to shake the foundations of his muted existence - until the shock of discovery and the threat of arrest cost him everything. Forced to abandon his wife and child, Harry signs up for emigration to the newly colonized Canadian prairies. Remote

Sexual OrientationBittersweetLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
🙂

The Color Purple

Alice Walker · 274 pages

The Color Purple is a 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker which won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. The novel has been the frequent target of censors and appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2000–2009 at number seventeenth because of the sometimes explicit content, particula

Sexual OrientationRacismLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
🙂

The Buddha in the Attic

Julie Otsuka · 129 pages

Presents the stories of six Japanese mail-order brides whose new lives in early twentieth-century San Francisco are marked by backbreaking migrant work, cultural struggles, children who reject their heritage, and the prospect of wartime internment.

RacismBittersweetLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
🙂

Stone Butch Blues

Leslie Feinberg · 366 pages

Stone Butch Blues is a historical fiction novel written by Leslie Feinberg about life as a butch lesbian in 1970s America. While fictional, the work also takes inspiration from Feinberg's own life, and she describes it as her "call to action."

Sexual OrientationLiterary FictionRacismHistorical Fiction
🙂

Half Blood Blues

Esi Edugyan · 331 pages

"Berlin, 1939. The Hot-Time Swingers, a popular German American jazz band, have been forbidden to play live because the Nazis have banned their 'degenerate music.' After escaping to Paris, where they meet Louis Armstrong, the band's brilliant young trumpet-player, Hieronymus Falk, is arrested in a café by the Gestapo. It is June 1940. He is never heard from again. He is twenty years old, a German

RacismBittersweetLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
🙂

The Hours

Michael Cunningham

Sexual OrientationBittersweetLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
🙂

Boy Underground

Catherine Ryan Hyde · 336 pages

Sexual OrientationRacismHistorical FictionLGBTQ+ Protagonist
🙂

Pachinko

Min Jin Lee · 560 pages

In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant--and that her lover is married--she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision

RacismBittersweetLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
🙂

Everything I Never Told You

Celeste Ng · 300 pages

"Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet. So begins the story of this exquisite debut novel, about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee; their middle daughter, a girl who inherited her mother's bright blue eyes and her father's jet-black hair. Her parents are determined that Lydia will fulfill the dreams they were unabl

RacismLiterary FictionSexual OrientationBittersweet
🙂

Shanghai Girls

Lisa See · 417 pages

In 1937, Shanghai is the Paris of Asia, a city of great wealth and glamour, the home of millionaires and beggars, gangsters and gamblers, patriots and revolutionaries, artists and warlords. Thanks to the financial security and material comforts provided by their father's prosperous rickshaw business, twenty-one-year-old Pearl Chin and her younger sister, May, are having the time of their lives. Th

RacismBittersweetLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
🙂

Mother of Pearl

Melinda Haynes · 466 pages

RacismBittersweetLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
🙂

Sugar

Bernice L. McFadden · 234 pages

"In a debut novel that blends the rich, earthy atmosphere of the deep South and a voice imbued with spiritual grace, Bernice L. McFadden tells the story of two women: a modest, churchgoing wife and mother, and the young prostitute she befriends.". "When Sugar arrives in 1950s Bigelow - waltzing down the main square of the sweltering tiny Arkansas town as if she has every right to be there - no on

RacismBittersweetLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
🙂

The Joy Luck Club

Amy Tan · 332 pages

Four mothers, four daughters, four families, whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's telling the stories. In 1949, four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, meet weekly to play mahjong and tell stories of what they left behind in China. United in loss and new hope for their daughters' futures, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Their daughters, who have neve

BittersweetRacismLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
🙂

Natural Order

Brian Francis · 384 pages

Sexual OrientationBittersweetLiterary FictionLGBTQ+ Protagonist

In the works

To be read SpinnerCan’t pick your next book? Spin your Want to read.Blind date with a bookPick a mood, unwrap a surprise.Add a tiny librarySnap a little free library and its books.