Fans pick 100 books like An Unofficial Marriage

First published in 1864, Queens of Song is one of the earliest group biographies of famous divas of the operatic stage. Beginning with chapters on prima donnas who lived during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Creathorne Clayton moves quickly to the nineteenth century, focusing on powerful divas like Giuditta Pasta, Henrietta Sontag, and Giulia Grisi. Renowned for their talents and beloved by audiences worldwide, these divas often wielded outsized influence on the composers who wrote music for them and the impresarios who hired them. The individual chapters are short, but they are each surprisingly comprehensive, providing a full and vivid picture of the lives and accomplishments of these memorable, and often very demanding, artists. 

Few nineteenth-century celebrities were as fascinating as Maria Malibran (1808-1836). She made her debut at London’s King’s Theatre at the ripe age of seventeen, and then blazed a trail across Europe and New York City, becoming one of the most in-demand and beloved prima donnas of her day. But, as April FitzLyon compellingly illustrates, Malibran’s life was anything but perfect. Her father, the famous tenor Manuel Garcia, may have abused her as a child, and her first husband, Eugene Malibran, went bankrupt shortly following their wedding. Most disturbing was her premature death at the age of 28, the result of overwork and a gory horse-riding accident. This biography presents a devastating account of the pressures, pains, and glories inherent in leading the life of a superstar during the first half of the nineteenth century.

Through a dazzling collection of sources that include letters, contracts, memoirs, biographies, newspaper reviews, and fictional stories about the figure of the cantatrice, Kimberly White’s French Singers on the French Stage is a brilliant account of the various stages of singers’ lives in nineteenth-century France, beginning with their births and following them up to and past their retirements. In between, she describes their training at the Paris Conservatoire, debuts, marriages, benefits, and scores of other important issues that they grappled with throughout their careers. I do not know of any other work in the field of prima donna or opera studies that is at once as thorough and as lucidly written—it is a page-turner from beginning to end.

To portray the title character in Bizet’s Carmen is only one of the many transformations American orphan Lilliet Berne’s life requires, both on and offstage, as she ascends to opera stardom in late 19th century Paris. In this immersive novel, the clothes are as richly described as the music, and the music is described with not only sincere emotion but attention to realities and absurdities: Bizet’s early death leads to greatly improved ticket sales, for example. In Chee’s haunting first novel Edinburgh, he made choral music shimmer with both beauty and horror. The Queen of the Night is very different in setting, time, and sweeping sense of adventure, but shares Chee’s ability to movingly explore acts of survival and reinvention.

This was my first steamy romance read, the one that got me hooked on erotic romance and still one of my favorites. From the moment Bennett’s hand landed on Chloe’s thigh in the boardroom my pulse spiked and didn’t stop racing until the last page. Bennett and Chloe’s chemistry is a masterclass, enemies to lovers hot.  

This book brings to light the intimate relationships of ordinary young men and women as opposed to those of powerful, public women. While royal women endured contemporary surveillance of their sexuality, pregnancies, and childbirths, the intimate lives of ordinary women must be wrested from archival records. Harwick’s exploration of legal records concerning unmarried pregnant women reveals the various range of strategies they adopted as well as the extensive support, both emotional and financial, they received from their community—clergy, lawyers, midwives, parents, etc.—to the benefit of both mother and child. Such support may well have reduced child abandonment and infanticide.

Hardwick not only challenges the standard notion of a sexual double standard applied to the detriment of women but also documents the mobilization of an early modern city not to punish unmarried women who faced expected pregnancies but to offer sympathetic aid.

A brilliant, shocking read but one I’ve read several times, and each time I read it the claustrophobic feeling of being trapped underground leaves me feeling breathless.

Although graphic in places, this is a beautifully written novel that I know I’ll return to time and again. As an author of World War One fiction, I aim to bring a sense of how it felt to be my characters and this book achieves that perfectly as far as I’m concerned.

I probably read this Beauty and the Beast retelling nearly ten times when I was a teenager—McKinley takes a well-known classic and puts her own twist on the tale. Beauty is not beautiful in this version, but that only makes the rest of the story more brilliant.

I loved exploring the Beast’s enchanted castle and watching their love story unfold as if for the first time. Of course, the magical house only makes it more of a joy to read.

The title says it all—Paris is always a good idea! My now-husband romantically invited me to meet him in Paris, way back when, so it’s a special place for me. So is this book, which is a fun, emotional story about love, wanderlust, and finding one’s self.

Chelsea Martin threw herself into work to cope with her mother’s death. Seven years later, her father announces he’ll remarry, prompting Chelsea to examine her own life. She plans a trip to Europe to retrace the last time she remembers being happy.

I adore Chelsea for her bravery and this book for transporting me to gorgeous places, from Paris to Ireland and a vineyard in Italy. 

Set during World War I and inspired by letters of the author’s grandparents, this delightful novel is filled with a fetching cast of characters and borne along by the author’s entertaining sense of humor. The narration reminds us that many folks were suspicious of people with German ancestry during the war, even though they were American citizens and even using the common term “gesundheit,” and that children of German immigrants were drafted to fight against their parents’ former countrymen.

Young Iowa men were trained into soldiering, where there were still rivalries—some about girls back home, some about German sympathies—and sent across to fight the Kaiser’s troops in France. Some didn’t return home, some came back with broken bodies. There is a compelling scene with wounded veterans in a local hospital, at least one scarred on the inside and fighting his own private battle.

This winsome story also carries themes of… show more.