77 books like The Devine Doughnut Shop

As someone perpetually in search of a good romcom, I found this story of three sisters who have inherited their family’s wedding planning business delightful.

While there is no shortage of spats and disagreements as each sister attempts to define her role within the business and family, when disaster strikes, it’s lovely to see them rally together and help each other find her own happily ever after. 

This novel, set in sixteenth-century Venice, reminds us that the Italian Renaissance was a great time to be a devotee of the pictorial arts. And it does so without getting caught up in the scandals surrounding the Borgias, who are almost as overdone as the Tudors. Luca Vianello is the heir to Venice’s premier gondola maker, until tragedy sends him off on a journey through poverty and hard work that ends when he becomes the personal boatman of the painter Trevisan. Morelli, who trained as an art historian, is intimately acquainted with the former Italian city-states, and like the other novels on my list, hers immerses you in Renaissance everyday life at a very personal level.

The Prince of Steel Pier begins with a line which immediately grabbed my attention: “It’s nine o’clock on Friday morning and Mrs. Goldberg is definitely dead.”

Joey, the main character, is on vacation in Atlantic City and helping out at his grandparents’ hotel. He is a self-conscious boy who  wants to prove to his big Jewish family that he is more than a “squirt.” Along the way he gets himself into unexpected trouble with mobsters in Atlantic City.

Set during the 1970’s, this book features an endearing protagonist navigating adolescence to learn what family and Jewish tradition mean to him. I particularly enjoyed Joey’s honesty as he observes his own behavior and struggles to create a new self-image. 

Dombey and Son, first published in 1846–8, is, for me, a take-down of Victorian gender roles.

Mr. Dombey is everything Victorian men were meant to be: unemotional, focused on money and commerce, driven by duty not passion – and he is clearly in the wrong. He entirely dismisses his daughter, Florence, caring only for his business and for the son who will inherit it; for him, girls and women are scarcely human.

Through the characters of Mr. Dombey and his daughter, Dickens sets up a debate between traditional Victorian ideals of masculinity and femininity – in which femininity emerges victorious. There is so much I find wonderfully proto-feminist in Dombey and Son – I haven’t even started on the wonderful character of Edith! – and I can’t recommend it enough.

While perhaps a little late to be truly classed as ‘early-modern’, Andrew Popp’s Entrepreneurial Families is one of the books that sparked my own interest in a social approach to business history. Revitalising the exploration of the role of families in business after Davidoff and Hall’s seminal 1987 study Family Fortunes, this micro-study primarily employs correspondence as its source. This not only allows Popp to explore the validity of this approach, but it also helps him to realise his aim to ‘re-humanise the economic’. The focus on family makes this work appealing not only to those interested in business history, but to those interested in debates about the public/private spheres, gender history, and kinship.

This was a feel-good read about a 3-generation rivalry between two sisters in a small town involving fried chicken. (You cannot go wrong with southern food in a novel, I’m just saying.)

What I thoroughly enjoyed about this book was how the plot got thicker and thicker, revealing the backstory throughout the story in a way that made me #TeamAmanda one minute and #TeamMae the next. I like digging deep into a character’s life, and this one did so in a way that made me sympathetic to both sisters, rooting for their reunion until the very end.

I’m trying my best not to give away the ending…suffice it to say; it helped me reframe my thinking around getting to the heart of a long feud that started before you even got here.

This little book makes the questions around corporate governance in the family firm come alive with examples, people, and, even, feelings. Too often, corporate governance is considered unnecessary where family ties are supposed to make up for missing structure. Aronoff and Ward show how family ties can get in the way of sound business practices and make a very strong case for prioritizing governance in the family business. Governance in the family business, unlike governance in the listed company, needs to be precisely tailored to the situation, and this book provides a blueprint for starting the process.

There simply aren’t enough romances that focus on older main characters, so I particularly loved that this funny, Shakespeare-inspired love story had a 60-year-old divorced heroine and an equally mature widower hero. The protagonists are rival florists in Boston, and their families have been embroiled in a feud that has spanned several generations. Watching the way this novel played out—especially with so many meddling family members!—was great fun. And if, like me, you always wished the original Romeo and Juliet could have, maybe, been transformed into a comedy with a happier ending, Jeanne Ray’s light, modern romance just might be for you.

The Chronicles of Ghadid follows a family of assassins in a fantastical desert world—but rather than play it safe by following stealthy assassination quests, Doore throws her assassins into the fray against undead armies and unkillable spirits. The result is a truly unique setting with haunting action sequences, bound together by the close ties of family and budding romances. Also, necromancers and undead camels, how could you go wrong?

This book is a more recent addition to the oeuvre of grief tragicomedy. In the novel, a third-generation taxidermist deals with the aftermath of her father’s suicide. The details are hilarious—lots of minutia about the family business—but the book is also heartbreaking, as Jessa tries to hold herself and her family together in the wake of her father’s sudden demise.  The novel, both morbid and irreverent, tackles themes of death, preservation, and how we honor those who have passed.