72 books like The Janissary Tree

For Istanbul the best walking guide ever. This book seamlessly conducts a visitor around the city’s sights, weaving stories from its history into street-by-street locations and managing above all else to avoid the sin of becoming boring. It makes you want to see every stretch of pavement and every building mentioned in the book. The only warning is it’s a thick paperback and you’ll want to take notes from it in advance rather than carrying it around with you.

As publishers Dorling Kindersley have invented a great format, juxtaposing pictures and information in a way nobody else has ever done. The volume on Turkey is a browser’s paradise and if it doesn’t inspire you to want to visit the country and its largest city, then there’s something wrong with you. The introduction to Turkish life and the 80 or so pages on Istanbul are superb, cramming in so much knowledge but in a way that lets you skim and peruse it at your own pace, skipping about in the text, and lost in awe over the photographs of human structures and scenery. A Turkish traveler must-have!

A big fat, fact-packed but readable history of the city as it changed from Constantinople into Byzantium and finally Istanbul. This is the book that places Viking immigrants alongside Romans, Goths, Moors, Ottomans, Venetians, and so many other races in a glorious cultural stew that makes the history of most other cities seem linear and dull by comparison. 

I confess, I like food. I’m also keen to use cafes and restaurants where the emphasis is on cheap, tasty, and nutritious fare rather than forking out for establishments where a hefty bill is occasioned as much by expenditure on the decoration, linen, and silverware as the quality of the cooking. This is not a book about the westernised hotels and restaurants but about back street locantas serving lentil soup and stewed chicken with bottles of Turkish red wine or even just Coca-Cola and selling satisfying lunches for a pittance (thanks of course in part due to the impact of Turkish inflation on the exchange rate). This book is why even if you’re on a city break in Istanbul as a family you won’t need to rely on self-catering or standardised hotel dinners. There’s a wonderful English language bookshop near the Grand Bazaar that’ll sell you a copy of this… show more.

Beautiful, intelligent, ambitious, and self-confident, headstrong Sarah sought to parlay her friendship with Princess Anne into political power when Anne became queen.  But Anne disagreed with Sarah’s strident Whiggism, and resented her attempts at manipulation.  Sarah’s persistence in pestering Anne about politics, her arrogance, and her inability to admit either another opinion than her own, or take responsibility for her mistakes, combined with her uncontrollable temper to kill the friendship and with it, Sarah’s political ambitions. 

This was one of my all-time favorite book series. The world-building is well done without pulling you out of the story for being so in-depth or long. But the characters are what really made me fall in love with this story. Kemmerer uses multiple POVs for the main characters, so we get to be inside the heads of both Tessa and Prince Corrick, two very different characters in terms of their values and actions at the start. I love seeing the motivations of each of the characters; it makes me understand and connect with them even more.

Another POV is added later in the series, which helps elevate that book even more, lending to a different side of a character I had overlooked mostly in the beginning. This is one of the reasons I love multiple POVs: the more of the story I get, the more intriguing and exciting everything… show more.

This story is set in one of the most intriguing periods of Parisian history, starting at the cusp of the French Revolution. I loved how Gita Trelease introduced magic into the court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.

Every detail, from the dresses to the pastries, is imbued with enchantments, while the darkness of the impending revolution serves as a taut backdrop.

This book was absolutely breathtaking. Even though it was twice the size of most books, I flew through it. I couldn’t put it down.

This book paints a wonderful picture of what forgiveness is all about. Lennox killed Annika’s mother. Annika struggled with what he’d done for a while but after being trapped in the cave with him, she realized how much he struggled with his sin. It was during this time, she realized she loved him.

The story was so sweet, pure, and still action-packed. It was a beautiful combination of all my favorite things.

Of all the six wives of Henry VIII, it is fair to say that Anne of Cleves is often considered the least interesting. We have Katherine – the stoical first wife; Anne Boleyn – the Mistress who lost her head; Jane Seymour – Henry probably loved her most and she died giving him his much-longed-for son; Katherine Howard – young, flighty, and careless who also lost her head; and Katherine Parr who loved another and managed to out-live Henry and her marriage to him. And then in the middle, there’s Anne of Cleves – dull (Henry thought so too), who he divorced and packed off to the country. No story there.

But in Anna of Kleves, Weir really brings her alive and gives us a living, breathing version of who she may have been. From her days before Henry, to her survival instincts both during and after her marriage, I… show more.

Weber’s biography of Marie Antoinette offers a unique take on the foreign queen’s story. Using fashion as a tool to explore her life at the tumultuous court of Versailles, Weber craftily paints a vivid picture of her flaws and her role in the tragic end of the monarchy.

Having researched Marie Antoinette for my own books, I felt that Weber’s biography did the best job of transporting me into her world. As a history buff, I was amazed at the importance of the queen’s wardrobe, hair, and accessories. It was also an introduction to her hairdresser and her milliner, two important characters who made the queen the fashion icon of Europe at the time.