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 Last Rose of Shanghai

Weina Dai Randel · 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
❤️

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

Refugee ExperienceWorld War IIBittersweetEmotional
❤️

Nineteen Steps

Millie Bobby Brown · 320 pages

World War IIBig CityBittersweetEmotional
❤️

Suite Française

Irene Nemirovsky · 426 pages

Écrit dans le feu de l'Histoire, Suite française dépeint presque en direct l'Exode de juin 1940, qui brassa dans un désordre tragique des familles françaises de toute sorte, des plus huppées aux plus modestes. Avec bonheur, Irène Némirovsky traque les innombrables petites lâchetés et les fragiles élans de solidarité d'une population en déroute. Cocottes larguées par leur amant, grands bourgeois dé

Refugee ExperienceWorld War IIForbidden LoveBittersweet
❤️

The House at Tyneford

Natasha Solomons

Refugee ExperienceWorld War IIForbidden LoveBittersweet
❤️

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

Forbidden LoveWealthy ProtagonistBittersweetEmotional
🙂

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

World War IIForbidden LoveBittersweetEmotional
🙂

The Lost Wife

Alyson Richman · 344 pages

During the last moments of calm in prewar Prague, Lenka, a young art student, and Josef, who is studying medicine, fall in love. With the promise of a better future, they marry--only to have their dreams shattered by the imminent Nazi invasion. Like so many others, they are torn apart by the currents of war.

World War IIForbidden LoveBittersweetEmotional
🙂

The Reader

Bernhard Schlink · 224 pages

World War IIForbidden LoveBittersweetEmotional
🙂

The Piano Teacher

Janice Y.K. Lee · 328 pages

In the sweeping tradition of The English Patient, a gripping tale of love and betrayal set in war-torn Hong Kong. In 1942, Will Truesdale, an Englishman newly arrived in Hong Kong, falls headlong into a passionate relationship with Trudy Liang, a beautiful Eurasian socialite. But their love affair is soon threatened by the invasion of the Japanese as World War II overwhelms their part of the world

World War IIForbidden LoveMusicianHistorical Fiction
🙂

Corelli's Mandolin

Louis de Bernieres · 437 pages

The Greek island of Cephallonia - peaceful, remote, famed for its beauty, its light, its mythic history - and only just beginning to enter the twentieth century when the tide of World War II rolls onto its shores. This is the setting for Louis de Bernieres's lyrical, heartbreaking, and hilarious chronicle of the days and nights of the island's inhabitants over fifty tumultuous years. "It was an i

World War IIBittersweetForbidden LoveEmotional
🙂

Bridge of Scarlet Leaves

Kristina McMorris · 443 pages

Violinist Maddie elopes with Lane Moritomo, the ambitious son of Japanese immigrants, but after Pearl Harbor is bombed, Lane is seen as the enemy and she must sacrifice her Juilliard ambitions when he is interned at a war relocation camp.

World War IIForbidden LoveMusicianEmotional
🙂

Tipping the Velvet

Sarah Waters · 480 pages

Nan King, an oyster girl, is captivated by the music hall phenomenon Kitty Butler, a male impersonator extraordinaire treading the boards in Canterbury. Through a friend at the box office, Nan manages to visit all her shows and finally meet her heroine. Soon after, she becomes Kitty's dresser and the two head for the bright lights of Leicester Square where they begin a glittering career as music-h

Forbidden LoveBig CityBittersweetEmotional
🙂

Everyone Brave is Forgiven

Chris Cleave · 464 pages

World War IIBittersweetEmotionalHistorical Fiction
🙂

A Thousand Splendid Suns

Khaled Hosseini · 416 pages

After 103 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and with four million copies of The Kite Runner shipped, Khaled Hosseini returns with a beautiful, riveting, and haunting novel that confirms his place as one of the most important literary writers today. Propelled by the same superb instinct for storytelling that made The Kite Runner a beloved classic, A Thousand Splendid Suns is at once an

Refugee ExperienceForbidden LoveBittersweetEmotional
🙂

The Things We Cannot Say

Kelly Rimmer · 448 pages

World War IIForbidden LoveBittersweetEmotional
🙂

Salt to the Sea

Ruta Sepetys · 393 pages

Winter, 1945. Four teenagers. Four secrets. Each one born of a different homeland; each one hunted, and haunted, by tragedy, lies…and war. As thousands of desperate refugees flock to the coast in the midst of a Soviet advance, four paths converge, vying for passage aboard the Wilhelm Gustloff, a ship that promises safety and freedom. Yet not all promises can be kept. Inspired by the si

Refugee ExperienceWorld War IIEmotionalHistorical Fiction
🙂

The English Patient

Michael Ondaatje · 307 pages

With ravishing beauty and unsettling intelligence, Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. Hana, the exhausted nurse; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burned man who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of

World War IIForbidden LoveEmotionalHistorical Fiction
🙂

Exodus

Leon Uris · 626 pages

The lives of many people were involved in the long-dreamed-of birth of the new Israeli nation. A novel of Israel.

Refugee ExperienceWorld War IIEmotionalHistorical Fiction
🙂

Tatiana and Alexander

Paullina Simons · 672 pages

World War IIForbidden LoveEmotionalHistorical Fiction
🙂

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

Jamie Ford · 290 pages

"Sentimental, heartfelt....the exploration of Henry's changing relationship with his family and with Keiko will keep most readers turning pages...A timely debut that not only reminds readers of a shameful episode in American history, but cautions us to examine the present and take heed we don't repeat those injustices."-- Kirkus Reviews"A tender and satisfying novel set in a time and a place lost

World War IIForbidden LoveBittersweetEmotional
🙂

The Chosen

Chaim Potok · 284 pages

It's about two jewish boys from different jewish sects with very differing doctrine. The kids meet in the unlikely circumstance of a baseball game, and a terrible accident, that leads them to be lifelong friends

World War IIBittersweetBig CityEmotional
🙂

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

Forbidden LoveBittersweetWorld War IIEmotional
🙂

The End of the Affair

Graham Greene · 217 pages

"This is a record of hate far more than of love," writes Maurice Bendrix in the opening passages of The End of the Affair, of which he is the narrator. And it is a strange hate indeed that compels him to set down the retrospective account of his adulterous love affair with Sarah Miles - a hate bred of a passion that ultimately lost out to God. Now, a year after Sarah's death, Bendrix seeks to exor

Forbidden LoveWorld War IIBig CityBittersweet
🙂

The Listeners

Maggie Stiefvater · 382 pages

World War IIForbidden LoveHistorical FictionBittersweet
📖 New 2026 Kindles just released. See them on Amazon ↗