18 books like Atonement
The Remains of the Day
In the summer of 1956, Stevens, the ageing butler of Darlington Hall, embarks on a leisurely holiday that will take him deep into the countryside and into his past . . .A contemporary classic, The Remains of the Day is Kazuo Ishiguro's beautiful and haunting evocation of life between the wars in a Great English House, of lost causes and lost love.
Shares: Historical Fiction, History
The secret life of bees
Sue Monk Kidd's ravishing debut novel has stolen the hearts of reviewers and readers alike with its strong, assured voice. Set in South Carolina in 1964, The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily's fierce-hearted "stand-in mother," Rosaleen, insults three of the town's fiercest…
Shares: Teenage Girls, Sisters, Domestic fiction, Historical Fiction
Daddy
El mundo alrededor de Oliver Watson parece disolverse cuando Sarah, su esposa durante dieciocho an os, regresa a Harvard para graduarse. Oliver es abandonado a su suerte, con tres hijos y una libertad que jama s deseo. Cuando la madre de Oliver muere, su padre tambie n ha cambiado: ma s osado que su hijo y con menos tiempo por vivir, George Watson pronto reencontrara el amor y un nuevo…
Shares: Life change events, Domestic fiction
Annie John
Since her first, prize-winning collection of stories, At the Bottom of the River, Jamaica Kincaid's work has been met with nothing short of amazement. The New York Times hailed her "prophetic power" and the Los Angeles Times Book Review said: "No one else seems to be writing quite this way right now." With Annie John, the story of a young girl coming of age in Antigua, Kincaid tore open the theme…
Shares: Teenage Girls, Domestic fiction
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
Meet the Cooke family: Mother and Dad, brother Lowell, sister Fern, and Rosemary, who begins her story in the middle. She has her reasons. "I was raised with a chimpanzee," she explains. "I tell you Fern is a chimp and, already, you aren't thinking of her as my sister.... Until Fern's expulsion... she was my twin, my fun-house mirror, my whirlwind other half.... I loved her as a sister." As a…
Shares: Life change events, Psychological fiction, Domestic fiction
The Vanishing Act Of Esme Lennox
In Edinburgh in the 1930s, the Lennox family is having trouble with its youngest daughter. Esme is outspoken, unconventional and repeatedly embarrasses them in polite society. Something will have to be done. Years later, a young woman named Iris Lockhart receives a letter informing her that she has a great-aunt in a psychiatric unit who is about to be released. Iris has never heard of Esme…
Shares: Sisters, Psychological fiction, Domestic fiction
Les Misérables
In this story of the trials of the peasant Jean Valjean--a man unjustly imprisoned, baffled by destiny, and hounded by his nemesis, the magnificently realized, ambiguously malevolent police detective Javert--Hugo achieves the sort of rare imaginative resonance that allows a work of art to transcend its genre.
Shares: Ex-convicts, Historical Fiction, History
Pan Michael An historical novel
The third and final book of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Trilogy takes a closer and more intimate look at one of the series’ protagonists: Pan Michael Volodyovski. The Polish Commonwealth has been through intense periods of war, and the peace that follows leaves one of its greatest heroes, Pan Michael, finally free to marry his beloved Panna Anusia. But in a twist of fate, she falls ill and dies, leaving…
Shares: Historical Fiction, History
St. George and St. Michael
It was the middle of autumn, and had rained all day. Through the lozenge-panes of the wide oriel window the world appeared in the slowly gathering dusk not a little dismal. The drops that clung trickling to the dim glass added rain and gloom to the landscape beyond, whither the eye passed, as if vaguely seeking that help in the distance, which the dripping hollyhocks and sodden sunflowers…
Shares: Historical Fiction, History
Pearl Harbor
Pearl Harbor is a beautifully written and suspenseful epic saga of love and war. Rafe McCawley and Danny Walker are two daring young pilots in the U.S. Army Air Corps who have grown up like brothers and first learned to fly in crop-dusting planes. Rafe has fallen in love with Evelyn Stewart, a beautiful and courageous nurse serving in the U.S. Navy. But they are soon separated by war when Rafe…
Shares: Historical Romance, Historical Fiction
The Invisible Circus
In Jennifer Egan’s highly acclaimed first novel, set in 1978, the political drama and familial tensions of the 1960s form a backdrop for the world of Phoebe O’Connor, age eighteen. Phoebe is obsessed with the memory and death of her sister Faith, a beautiful idealistic hippie who died in Italy in 1970. In order to find out the truth about Faith’s life and death, Phoebe retraces her steps from San…
Shares: Teenage Girls, Sisters
The Third Circle:(Arcane Society, #4)
Called "supremely addictive" by Booklist, the Arcane Society novels, written under both the Amanda Quick and Jayne Ann Krentz names, have pulled readers into a saga filled with steamy romance, drama, and dark intrigue. Her newest novel promises to mesmerize as well. Leona Hewitt, disguised in men's formal evening clothes, has secretly made her way into Lord Delbridge's private museum to retrieve…
Shares: Historical Romance, Historical Fiction, History
Novels (A Tale of Two Cities / Great Expectations)
Tale of Two Cities
After eighteen years as a political prisoner in the Bastille, the ageing Doctor Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England. There the lives of the two very different men, Charles Darnay, an exiled French aristocrat, and Sydney Carton, a disreputable but brilliant English lawyer, become enmeshed through their love for Lucie Manette. From the tranquil…
Shares: Ex-convicts, Historical Fiction, History
Unless
Reta Winters has many reasons to be happy. Then in the spring of her forty-fourth year, all the quiet satisfactions of her well-lived life disappear in a moment: her eldest daughter Norah suddenly runs from the family and ends up mute and begging on a Toronto street corner with a hand-lettered sign reading GOODNESS around her neck.
Piercing and sad, astute and evocative, full of tenderness and…
Shares: Teenage Girls, Psychological fiction, Domestic fiction
The Lady of Lyon House
He was a tall man in a wide, checked cloak, and when the swirling London mist could not hide his face, he slipped into the shadows...
Someone had been following Julia Meredith night after night - someone whose footsteps rang on the fog-wet cobblestones when she walked, and stopped when she stopped. And so her guardians sent her to the country to stay with an old friend, Corinne Lyon, mistress of…
Shares: Historical Romance, Historical Fiction
Mischief
Imogen Waterstone has always prided herself on being a thoroughly independent young woman, but now she needs a man of implacable will and nerves of iron. That's why she invited Matthias Marshall, infamous Earl of Colchester, to her home in Upper Strickland. Who better than the legendary explorer to help her lay the perfect trap? Her scheme is simple, really: She plans to let it be known that when…
Shares: Historical Romance, Historical Fiction, History
The Glass Palace
Set in Burma during the British invasion of 1885, this masterly novel by Amitav Ghosh tells the story of Rajkumar, a poor boy lifted on the tides of political and social chaos, who goes on to create an empire in the Burmese teak forest.
When soldiers force the royal family out of the Glass Palace and into exile, Rajkumar befriends Dolly, a young woman in the court of the Burmese Queen, whose love…
Shares: Domestic fiction, Historical Fiction, History
The Painted Veil
A story of the beautiful but love-starve Kitty Fane who is forced to accompany her husband to the heart of a cholera epidemic. She is compelled by her awakening conscience to reassess her life and learn how to love.
Shares: Psychological fiction, Domestic fiction