95 books like The Unlikely Master Genius

I hated having to put this book down to sleep, go to work, go back to work, eat, or whatever. I love Heyer's humor. After reading the book many, many times for its warm, feel-good story, I still laugh at some of the predicaments Frederica's adventurous young siblings fall into. And Endymion Dauntry, her silly sister’s cork-brained beau! 

Her writing style is polished and the dialogue is witty. The love interest is believable as is not always the case with romance novels. Accuracy in detail and depiction of the period is important to me, too, and Heyer delivers it. The story is engaging and fun without being silly, and as it’s an older book, it’s free of tedious sex scenes. It’s a feel-good story.

I like books with strong and sensible female characters and male characters who are not the stereotypical “alpha male,” that’s why I’ve read this book several times.

When widowed Samantha is faced with the prospect of being forced to live with her hateful in-laws, she neither dithers nor worries about the impropriety of fleeing her home with the help of a male acquaintance. Crippled in the Napoleonic wars, he is feeling somewhat oppressed by his own relatives. 

Another “plus” for me is that they do not so much fall in love as slide into it. The tendency of romantic characters to kiss and immediately tumble into lust, if not love, strikes me as unrealistic. I also like good writing and the occasional plot twist, and Mary Balogh excels at both.

This book delighted me. I expected the usual boy meets girl, they fall in love, have a temporary setback, and then makeup. Instead, it’s much more complicated than that.

It’s not love at first sight: Evan rescues her small son but is not immediately attracted to her. Widowed Deborah is wary after a disappointing marriage and a childhood with little affection and too much fear. Evan’s loving family is of a wealthier and higher social position and is not inclined to accept her.

I very much appreciated that there were real obstacles to overcome on both sides, unlike romances in which the hero and his relations do not boggle at the heir marrying a woman of a lower class with no dowry. I insist on some realism even in romance.  

This book reminds me of my favorite Georgette Heyer romances in its depiction of the Georgian period. When I read historical fiction of any kind, I want to feel I’m in that time, not reading about modern people in costume.

The story of a blind young woman confined to a country estate because her brother feels she is unable to deal with society was compelling. I liked the characters, and the story carried me along so successfully that I regretted finishing it (after keeping me up after I should have been in bed). 

I’m a critical reader, and I couldn’t find a thing in the book to annoy me.

Written in elegant prose and with vivid visual detail, this book uncovers an exotic lost world—lost both to the author, with the death of her parents, and to all of us, with the march of history.

This is the world of a British bookshop owner and his Italian-born wife, in Cairo after World War II, in the years leading up to the 1952 revolution that marked the awakening of independent feeling in Egypt. The city Warner uncovers, on the brink of the revolution and after a devastating war, is her childhood paradise, and she is not afraid to portray it as exotic even as she understands the risk of betraying a colonial gaze.

To recreate this world, she uses not only old photographs and her own memories, but also artefacts, from furniture to clothing, shoes, most of all books (not just their content, but as objects), which she researches meticulously,… show more.

I love the way in which this fascinating group biography of the female partners of renowned male writers brings these usually ignored figures into the limelight.

Ciuraru argues that behind the careers of many acclaimed literary figures stand the important contributions of their wives. These women offered intellectual as well as practical support. 

Many of these literary wives shelved their own creative aspirations to tend to the careers of their husbands.

But after their husbands’ deaths, some of these women found they finally had space for their own literary lives to start blossoming. 

I love haunted house stories, and this one was genuinely creepy. It is a first-person account of the growing paranoia of a couple looking to escape their own demons, with both unable to communicate the weird things happening in their house.

I love how it subverted your usual ghost story elements. Instead of leaky pipes, weird spaces appear in the walls. Instead of creepy moans, bruises appear out of nowhere. Is it psychosis? Sickness? Or is something otherworldly in the house? I don’t know. The unsettling horror is ambiguity amplified by a failure of communication, and that’s why I find it so creepy.  

It’s been nearly ten years since I first read this book and I can still remember what the characters were wearing in the first chapter. Now that’s visceral storytelling! The author’s ability to capture his intense obsession with his future wife is familiar, poignant, and heart-warming. Yglesias’ portrayal of the couple’s long and, at times, bumpy marriage, makes this one of the most complex and honest portrayals of a marriage that I have ever read. That this is also a book about cancer and death does nothing to diminish the feelings of hope and gratitude embodied on every page. 

Many readers knowledgeable about the Jazz Age know about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s many novels, as well as his life.

This fictionalized account gives keen insight into his wife, Zelda. Read to discover the difficulties faced by a creative woman married to a celebrated man. In many ways, Zelda was a woman of her times, yet like so many women overshadowed by her husband.

Read about their scandalous lives—hers in some ways even more so than his.

This novel, by Meg Wolitzer, offers such a twist at the end, I’m not sure how to write about it as an example of a woman writer finding her voice without giving too much away.
The Wife is the story of a Noble Prize-winning author, Joe Castelman, and his wife, Joan, who have kept a terrible secret for all the years of their marriage. Because you know the topic of my selections here, you can surmise that Joan is also a writer, though she hides that fact. Her character tells the story, and we only slowly see the facets of their strange and deceptive marriage. It becomes clear that Joan is a very good writer indeed, and she’s tired of keeping her secret.

This clever tale will make you think about what it means to invent a life both on and off the page. And that there’s no stopping a… show more.