Fans pick 72 books like Fifth Avenue Glamour Girl

For me, this is another masterful interweaving of historical fact and wildly creative imagination. It’s a prime example of in-depth research wielded to tangibly ground the reader in the book’s world; you learn about everything from 19th-century psychological theory and forensics to quilt-making and housecleaning techniques.

Part of what I really love about the novel, though, is that unlike in The Handmaid’s Tale, here Atwood deliberately blurs the lines between “good” and “evil” and “victim” and “villain.” Grace isn’t entirely likable, and she’s pretty much entirely unreliable. So, embodying her perspective as a reader is a continual guessing game of whether or not she’s telling the truth about her role in the murders at the book’s center. At the same time, it’s also a kind of ethical guessing game, for even if Grace is guilty, Atwood makes the role society and class play in her downfall so painfully clear… show more.

I’ve only been to Paris one time, but I feel as if I’ve been many times because I toured this city with Paula McLain and the story of Hadley Hemingway, Ernest’s first and most beloved wife. From the cafes to the cobbled streets to the parlors and apartments, I was engrossed. 

This is the wild story of Ernest Hemingway’s first wife. Hadley was a quiet twenty-eight-year-old woman who had given up on love until she met Ernest. Their whirlwind romance was ill-prepared for the fast living of Jazz Age Paris. It is a beautiful portrayal of love and loyalty, of art and heartbreak. 

The Marriage Portrait is a revisionist story of Lucrezia de Medici, the daughter of a 16th century Florentine duke who marries her off to the ruthless ruler of another region in northern Italy. Lucrezia’s husband is infertile but of course she is blamed for not being able to conceive. She overhears a plot to do away with her, so her husband can try to beget an heir on someone else. Lucrezia, who can get no help from her parents, has to figure out how to outwit her husband and escape. I’ll let you read this suspenseful and richly layered novel to find out if she manages to survive.

In seventeenth-century Rome, a talented young woman artist, Artemesia Gentileschi, is put on trial for accusing her painting instructor of rape. Unwilling to bow to convention, Artemesia pours her rage into her art, inventing an aesthetic against the voyeurism and female submissiveness found in traditional artistic representations of women.

Fremantle heightens the drama and contemporary relevance of Artemisia’s life and art by telling her story in the present tense. Drawing subtle connections between women’s struggles for autonomy and dignity in the past and those in the present, this page-turner of a novel is a searing, nuanced portrait of a woman’s passion for art, determination to right being wronged, and steadfast resolve to be recognized as a great artist. 

I loved this book! It is dishy and smart and has all the glitz you would expect of the first-ever complete account of the making of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. With a cast of characters that includes Truman Capote, Edith Head, and Audrey Hepburn, it transported me to New York in the late 1950s, one of my favorite decades.

I simply had to include one of Daniel Stashower’s brilliant mysteries, as this all-too-brief series features one of the greatest and most famous illusionists of them all: Harry Houdini.

The story is narrated by Houdini’s brother, Dash, who serves as a kind of “Watson” to Houdini’s boisterous “Holmes,” and the two find themselves embroiled in numerous mysteries peppered with old-fashioned derring-do.

What I love about this book is the meticulous research that has clearly gone into it – but Stashower wears his learning lightly; this is a brisk adventure where the pace never sags.

First of all—a holiday story set in New York City? Who can resist that? Like the heroine, I am one of those people who loves immersing myself in Christmas as soon as Halloween is over. That usually means reading several holiday-set novels. With this book, I found myself turning pages faster and faster, yet never wanting the book to end.

The hero worried me. He’d faced a tragedy and shut himself off from the world. Sometimes, that can be too dark for my reading pleasure. But Sarah is a masterful storyteller. Her heroine is so empathetic and caring (possibly at the risk of breaking her own heart) that the hero is ever-so-slowly coaxed back from the brink of disaster.

Even for readers not from the Christmas tradition, the unfolding story will be satisfying. 

I can still remember so much from this book. A great stat Hawes included was that in the year 1870, 90 percent of upper-class New Yorkers lived in townhouses or other types of single-family homes. By 1930, 90 percent lived in apartment buildings or “French flats,” as they were sometimes called. Basically, almost alone among American cities, New York chose to emulate Paris in its model of urbanism rather than London.

New York developers built and sold “French flats” that were large and ostentatious, like the Ansonia and the Dakota, which are still there today. These iconic apartment buildings were built along the streetcar and subway lines. Hawes was a writer for The New Yorker, so this is very readable.

One of my favorite novels is Herman Wouk’s Marjorie Morningstar, a coming of age story of Marjorie and Mrs Morgenster, a/k/a the original helicopter mom.

This Pulitzer Prize-winning author was male but managed to get into the head of both teenage girl and indomitable mother–and the results are funny and poignant. There’s all kinds of bonus detail about 1930s-1940s NYC: college, dating, and theater scenes.

As someone who is fascinated by mom culture, I like to recommend mother-daughter stories that illustrate how parenting styles and family relationships have changed over time. While it all started with Marmee, Louisa May Alcott (Jo’s) idealized supermom, I have a fondness for the ambivalently modern struggles between Mrs. Morgenstern and Marjorie, the female leads in Herman Wouk’s classic novel, Marjorie Morningstar. 

This is a coming of age story that has it all: beautiful and ambitious heroine, handsome love interest, colorful best friend, and the… show more.

This author is a former NYC firefighter and a terrific writer. This book is well written, with plenty of action in the firefighting world in New York City and plenty of heat for the slow-burn romance.

The heartfelt emotion this author writes is so realistic that she had me laughing and crying along with her characters. Now and then, I like to read a steamy romance, and this one more than delivers on that score. I’ll read anything this author writes.