10 books like The Painted Veil

This delightful novel was the first book I read after moving into a new apartment. It’s about a Russian aristocrat in the 1920s who is sentenced to live the rest of his days in a small attic room in the Hotel Metropol, and how he makes a life for himself there. Just by enjoying the story so much I actually found myself being more amused by, rather than wary of, the quirks of my own new neighbors. Gentle curiosity is a powerful weapon for surviving the unknown and this book helped sharpen mine.

In Hamnet, set in the late 16th century, I can “see” the town, the room, the farm, the children, the kittens, even the furniture. Agnes' role as a healer, a free soul, a caring mother, makes her an unforgettable heroine. The terrible transposing of the illness from one twin to the other is something O'Farrell makes one believe could happen. Add to that the desperate plight of Agnes' son in a world that, despite her reputation as a healer, has no remedy for most illnesses and especially the plague. The grief she feels enters your psyche and is made more terrible by her having to experience it alone. That Hamlet could be based on Hamnet, is Hamnet, is Shakespeare's son too, is to me entirely credible.

You don’t have to know much about the Spanish civil war to have heard of Guernica. If you’ve ever seen Picasso’s work depicting the bombing, this book creates the story of the people of the town going about their everyday lives just before the painting’s horror. As a reader, you know what is coming but are helpless to do anything but care for characters who are oblivious to the destruction coming their way. 

As an author, I found inspiration in this novel for my own portrayal of the civil war in Spain. The trick is to let ordinary people tell the story for you.

Graham Greene creates a completely convincing scene in just a few words, deftly transporting the reader into a different world. His characters are credible, and tension underlies every word he writes. The Power and the Glory is a master class in demonstrating how a writer can ‘show’ not ‘tell’ the reader what is happening in the world of the book. Although the novel doesn’t fall into the conventional crime genre, Greene writes about people’s ability to treat others with both inhumanity and humanity, exploring the depths and also the best of human potential. 

Outlander is an adventure of epic proportion, from the 1940s WWII war-torn battlefield where the story begins, to the bloodstained 18th-century Scottish battlefield of Culloden. 

Like clansman Jamie, whose red arm hairs stood on end when he made love to Claire in the grass, so did the little hairs on the back of my neck stand on end with this talented author’s vividly described scenes. Page after page aroused the adventurer in me, sending me on a wild and unimaginable journey into the unknown. My heart was synchronized with the passionate relationship between the former British combat nurse and her Scottish lover, each bound by the double-ended cord tying them to the century that threatened to keep them apart. 

It is a masterpiece of storytelling!

I am particularly drawn to stories about early adventures at sea. 

Life on a whaling ship was difficult and bred all manner of contemptible acts by the crew. When the journey was ill-fated, like the one in this book, it pointed the spotlight directly on the tainted core of ship life. 

This book introduced the greedy side of the 1800s whaling industry and told the story surrounding the doomed whaling ship and the ship’s drug-addicted surgeon. It presented the raw side of humanity and what lengths desperate men resort to in order to survive. It was shades of whaling seamen Herman Melville and John Rumell’s experiences surviving with savages. 

The story was riveting and begged the question: Who are the real savages?

Typee is Herman Melville’s account of his sojourn on the Marquesan Island of Nuku Hiva in the 1800s. It nearly replicated my distant relative’s story, making it a must-read.

Melville was a young sailor with an adventurous spirit. Disenchanted with his hard life on a whaling ship he deserted and escaped to Nuku Hiva’s Bay of Taipaivi where he was captured by a cannibal tribe. For four months, he lived and survived among savages. 

After Melville returned to civilization he later wrote Typee – the story that forever changed how I view savages. A century-plus later, I stepped freely off a boat onto Nuku Hiva’s distant shore. Visions of the impetuous and foolhardy sailor relative whose footprints I was about to trace made my scalp tighten with anticipation.  

Norwegian-born Thor Hyerdahl was disenchanted with the civilized world and desired a more primitive lifestyle. In 1938, he took a bride and set out for the wild and remote Marquesan Island of Fatu Hiva—minus all worldly possessions. 

The couple stepped headlong into the unknown—most notably the natives. But the once-hostile natives had abandoned their savage ways, allowing for a peaceful co-existence. A year later, the extreme hazards of island living won out over idealism, forcing the Hyerdahls to return to civilization.

Hyerdahl’s notion that he could shed his civilized cloak to live bare-skinned in paradise was foolhardy. Like Herman Melville, Hyerdahl survived to tell his amazing story. Other daring adventurers, like my branded relative, were less fortunate.

Johnson’s exploration of a public health crisis and science in the making was one of the references I used in writing my own book. In August 1854, hundreds of people in the impoverished Golden Square neighborhood of London fell violently ill. Many died. By mapping the movements of the victims, Dr. John Snow traced the source of the infection to the Broad Street pump, a public water source that had been contaminated with Vibrio cholerae, the bacterium that causes cholera. Johnson’s account shows how a normally benign microbe was rendered deadly in a crowded mass of people who ended up drinking their own sewage—at a time before the existence of microbes was known. 

This book is special to me as it was the first book that really fired up my desire to write! I was a little girl and the edition my parents brought me came with a cute skeleton key necklace which I still have. I like to think that my obsession with mysterious gardens, vintage things, and skeleton keys all come from having read this beautiful book.