75 books like Vanessa and Her Sister

By Priya Parmar,

Here are 75 books that Vanessa and Her Sister fans have personally recommended if you like Vanessa and Her Sister. Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of Under the Wide and Starry Sky

Leslie Johansen Nack Author Of The Blue Butterfly: A Novel of Marion Davies

From my list on powerful women in the 1920s and 1930.

Why am I passionate about this?

First, I'm a woman and I'm inspired by women from the past who overcame the rules of the day in which they lived. It doesn’t matter where they lived, or what they tried to overcome, but to have bucked the patriarchal system and achieved some measure of success, is phenomenal. Second, I became inspired by silent film star Marion Davies, and I wrote a book about it. I never intended to write historical fiction. My first book was a memoir about sailing to Tahiti at fourteen with my father and two sisters. But life has a funny way of directing us where we need to go. Here I am: inspired by women from the past! 

Leslie's book list on powerful women in the 1920s and 1930

Leslie Johansen Nack Why did Leslie love this book?

I grew up reading Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, and found this book about the woman who changed his life riveting.

I also loved it because Stevenson sails to French Polynesia and I have sailed to French Polynesia and written a book about it. So there are many connections for me. Plus, it’s about the real life of scorned woman, Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne who flees San Francisco and her philandering husband and eventually falls in love with Stevenson.

An adventure that is history. Yes please! 

By Nancy Horan,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked Under the Wide and Starry Sky as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'FABULOUS' The Times
'FASCINATING' New York Times

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

At the age of thirty-five, Fanny van de Grift Osbourne leaves her philandering husband in San Francisco and sets sail for Belgium to study art, with her three children and nanny in tow. Not long after her arrival, however, tragedy strikes, and Fanny and her brood repair to a quiet artists' colony in France where she can recuperate. There she meets Robert Louis Stevenson, ten years her junior, who is instantly smitten with the earthy, independent, and opinionated belle Americaine.

A woman ahead of her time, Fanny does…


Book cover of The Dream Lover

Shannon McKenna Schmidt Author Of Novel Destinations: A Travel Guide to Literary Landmarks from Jane Austen's Bath to Ernest Hemingway's Key West

From my list on classic writers as characters.

Why am I passionate about this?

Visiting author houses and museums has always been a favored pastime of mine and was the inspiration to write the travel guide Novel Destinations. Complementary to writing nonfiction about classic writers, I love reading novels featuring them as characters. Fiction authors adhere to biographical details as well, but they have a freer hand with the narrative to color outside the lines and to color in details and explore feelings and motivations. Through their narratives they turn these literary figures into flesh-and-blood characters and allow the reader to step into their storied lives. 

Shannon's book list on classic writers as characters

Shannon McKenna Schmidt Why did Shannon love this book?

Elizabeth Berg wanted to read a novel about George Sand but couldn’t find one…and so she wrote it herself. In The Dream Lover, Berg unfolds the story of Aurore Dupin, who boldly left a loveless aristocratic marriage to make her own way in 19th-century Paris. She adopts the pen name George Sand and becomes France’s bestselling female novelist, living a bohemian lifestyle and scandalizing society by having high-profile love affairs and, even more outrageously, by dressing in men’s clothing. I love stories about trailblazing women, and Berg compellingly conveys how risky and courageous Sand’s actions were at a time when women had few rights.

By Elizabeth Berg,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked The Dream Lover as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY USA TODAY • Elizabeth Berg has written a lush historical novel based on the sensuous Parisian life of the nineteenth-century writer George Sand—which is perfect for readers of Nancy Horan and Elizabeth Gilbert.

At the beginning of this powerful novel, we meet Aurore Dupin as she is leaving her estranged husband, a loveless marriage, and her family’s estate in the French countryside to start a new life in Paris. There, she gives herself a new name—George Sand—and pursues her dream of becoming a writer,…


Book cover of The Mystery of Mrs. Christie

Shannon McKenna Schmidt Author Of Novel Destinations: A Travel Guide to Literary Landmarks from Jane Austen's Bath to Ernest Hemingway's Key West

From my list on classic writers as characters.

Why am I passionate about this?

Visiting author houses and museums has always been a favored pastime of mine and was the inspiration to write the travel guide Novel Destinations. Complementary to writing nonfiction about classic writers, I love reading novels featuring them as characters. Fiction authors adhere to biographical details as well, but they have a freer hand with the narrative to color outside the lines and to color in details and explore feelings and motivations. Through their narratives they turn these literary figures into flesh-and-blood characters and allow the reader to step into their storied lives. 

Shannon's book list on classic writers as characters

Shannon McKenna Schmidt Why did Shannon love this book?

I deliberately read The Mystery of Mrs. Christie slowly so that I could savor the story longer. The novel alternates chapters between present-day 1926, after famous novelist Agatha Christie has disappeared and sparked a headline-making manhunt in England, and the decade or so leading up to it. The story of her disappearance and the possible reasons behind it is intriguing, but I especially enjoyed the chapters set in the past and getting to know Agatha as a young woman and an aspiring writer.

By Marie Benedict,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked The Mystery of Mrs. Christie as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES AND USA TODAY BESTSELLER!

AN AMAZON BEST BOOK OF 2021!

"A stunning story... The ending is ingenious, and it's possible that Benedict has brought to life the most plausible explanation for why Christie disappeared for 11 days in 1926."―The Washington Post

The New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of The Only Woman in the Room returns with a thrilling reconstruction of one of the most notorious events in literary history: Agatha Christie's mysterious 11-day disappearance in 1926.

In December 1926, Agatha Christie goes missing. Investigators find her empty car on the edge of…


Book cover of Daphne

Shannon McKenna Schmidt Author Of Novel Destinations: A Travel Guide to Literary Landmarks from Jane Austen's Bath to Ernest Hemingway's Key West

From my list on classic writers as characters.

Why am I passionate about this?

Visiting author houses and museums has always been a favored pastime of mine and was the inspiration to write the travel guide Novel Destinations. Complementary to writing nonfiction about classic writers, I love reading novels featuring them as characters. Fiction authors adhere to biographical details as well, but they have a freer hand with the narrative to color outside the lines and to color in details and explore feelings and motivations. Through their narratives they turn these literary figures into flesh-and-blood characters and allow the reader to step into their storied lives. 

Shannon's book list on classic writers as characters

Shannon McKenna Schmidt Why did Shannon love this book?

Daphne has numerous elements that I particularly adore in a story: a classic writer as a character, an English manor house setting, and a mystery. Layer in a Brontë connection, and it’s a perfectly pleasing literary page-turner. In 1957, Daphne du Maurier is at her remote, seaside mansion in Cornwall, distracting herself from personal woes by researching a biography about Branwell Brontë, reprobate and possibly misunderstood brother of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne. Intertwined is a second storyline set in present-day London, as a lonely young woman, newly married to a mysterious older man seemingly still in thrall to his first wife, becomes caught up in a fifty-year-old mystery involving du Maurier and the Brontës. 

By Justine Picardie,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Daphne as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

It is 1957. The author Daphne du Maurier, beautiful, famous, despairing as her marriage falls apart, finds herself haunted by Rebecca, the heroine of her most famous novel, written twenty years earlier. Resolving to write herself out of her misery, Daphne becomes passionately interested in Branwell, the reprobate brother of the Bronte sisters, and begins a correspondence with the enigmatic bibliophile Alex Symington as she researches a biography. But behind Symington's respectable scholarly surface is a slippery character with much to hide, and soon truth and fiction have become indistinguishable.In present-day London, a lonely young woman, newly married after a…


Book cover of The Master

Benjamin Markovits Author Of Imposture

From my list on historical fiction about famous writers.

Why am I passionate about this?

When I was fourteen years old, my family moved from Texas to London for a year, and I started going to a little second-hand book shop around the corner. It was run by a long-haired Canadian, who always smoked a pipe. There were only three or four aisles, plus a cluttered backroom. You could pick up a 19th-century edition of the complete works of Shelley, with uncut pages, for two pounds. One volume led to another, in the same way that one friendship can lead to another, or introduce you to a new circle of people. Twenty-odd years later, I decided to write a novel about some of these writers.  

Benjamin's book list on historical fiction about famous writers

Benjamin Markovits Why did Benjamin love this book?

How much would you be willing to give up for fame and greatness?

By 1895, Henry James had written a number of all-time classics, including Daisy Miller and The Portrait of a Lady, but had never achieved the kind of commercial or popular success he thought he deserved. So in his fifties, he started writing for the theater, hoping to break through.

The Master begins with the London opening of his play Guy Domville, which turns out to be a flop, and follows James as he comes to terms with this failure, and all the other sacrifices he has to make – in his personal and sexual life, too – in order to become the writer he wants to be. 

By Colm Toίbίn,

Why should I read it?

4 authors picked The Master as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Nineteenth-century writer Henry James is heartbroken when his first play performs poorly in contrast to Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest" and struggles with subsequent doubts about his sexual identity.


Book cover of Burnt Diaries

Emily Van Duyne Author Of Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation

From my list on destroyed texts, documents, journals, and books.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have been moved by women’s stories that are buried in time (but not quite gone!) since I was a young girl. As a college student and now professor (I teach writing and gender studies), much of my work is focused on telling hidden stories for the first time and stories where the record needs correcting. This is probably to do with my childhood; I am the oldest daughter in a loving but difficult Irish-Catholic family where women were often shamed for many reasons. When I was 15, I read Sylvia Plath for the first time and knew—there was more to this story, and I meant to find it out. 

Emily's book list on destroyed texts, documents, journals, and books

Emily Van Duyne Why did Emily love this book?

Emma Tennant was one of Ted Hughes’s lovers in the 1970s, at the height of Sylvia Plath’s early fame. I arrived at her memoir as research for Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation, but I stayed because Tennant’s writing is so witty and clever, full of riotous anecdotes of her time publishing chic literary magazines in 1970s London (she tries to steal, and sell, a family snapshot of Princess Margaret, nude on a French beach, for seed money, which ends in hilarious disaster).

Tennant never descends into self-pity or high drama in describing the dark and mysterious Hughes, who believes a random fox on the road is his dead wife returning to him and tries to convince Tennant that frozen salmon at a third-rate London restaurant is fresh and delivering life force to him. Instead, she sneaks in the violence done to her by Hughes in moments drenched in myth…

By Emma Tennant,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Burnt Diaries as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Burnt Diaries is Emma Tennant's third volume of memoirs, set mostly during the 1970s, in which she lays bare the experience of her affair with Ted Hughes while she was editor of the avant-garde literary magazine, Bananas.
Tennant's insights are engaging and honest - she offers perceptions of the writers that contributed to her magazine - from Angela Carter who was commissioned to write The Company of Wolves for it, to JG Ballard who was supportive of the magazine from its inception and wrote a story for each issue. Running a new literary magazine brought Tennant into contact with a…


Book cover of The Cost of Living

Alice Robinson Author Of If You Go

From my list on women in the chaos of midlife.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have always tried to find books that explain and explore my life stage. When I was a young mother of little babies, I read many books about early motherhood. When I was studying and travelling and working as a waitress, those topics were represented in my reading too. Now that I’m a woman writer in midlife, with growing children and an art practice, I’m keen to read books by and about women writers who evoke the joys and struggles of this period: aging, the tensions between freedom and responsibility, marriage and separation, ambition and desire. 

Alice's book list on women in the chaos of midlife

Alice Robinson Why did Alice love this book?

This book is a bible for women in midlife. One of Levy’s ‘living memoirs’, it captures the author’s experience of leaving her marriage at fifty and remaking her life as a writer.

The pose is beautiful: spare and elegant. Importantly, the book explores how it is possible to create a life focused on artistic pursuit, children, and friendship, as opposed to romantic partnership, material wealth, and conservative notions of stability.

I reread it every year to remind myself of what is possible.

By Deborah Levy,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked The Cost of Living as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A GUARDIAN BEST BOOK OF THE 21ST CENTURY
WINNER OF THE PRIX FEMINA ETRANGER 2020

Following on from the critically acclaimed Things I Don't Want to Know, discover the powerful second memoir in Deborah Levy's essential three-part 'Living Autobiography'.

'I can't think of any writer aside from Virginia Woolf who writes better about what it is to be a woman' Observer
_________________________________

'Life falls apart.
We try to get a grip and hold it together.
And then we realise we don't want to hold it together . . .'

The final instalment in Deborah Levy's critically acclaimed 'Living Autobiography', Real…


Book cover of Manifesto: On Never Giving Up

Terry A. Repak Author Of Circling Home: What I Learned by Living Elsewhere

From my list on writers struggling to find their place in the world.

Why am I passionate about this?

My memoir, Circling Home: What I Learned by Living Elsewhere, details my own trajectory in trying to find my voice and métier as a writer. I’ve kept a journal since I was a teenager, trained to be a journalist in college, and worked as an investigative reporter on a newspaper column and a news show in my twenties. When my husband and I moved abroad, I got a book contract for my PhD thesis and also published my research in academic journals. I wrote travel articles and profiles of people I met while living in East and West Africa. Working with a writing group of friends, I finished two novels before embarking on my memoir.

Terry's book list on writers struggling to find their place in the world

Terry A. Repak Why did Terry love this book?

This memoir and Evaristo’s Booker Prize-winning novel, Girl, Woman, Other, opened my eyes to the struggles of writers and actors in the UK—especially women of color and immigrants—as they tried to find their voices and places and in literary circles.

Raised in a big family by a Nigerian father and British mother, Evaristo describes her upbringing and her efforts to find her voice when there were few venues for writers of color. Her theory of unstoppability is deeply inspiring for anyone who faces roadblocks in pursuing their passions, particularly writers who experienced the sting of multiple rejections before having their work accepted.

By Bernardine Evaristo,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Manifesto as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

From the bestselling and Booker Prize–winning author of Girl, Woman, Other, Bernardine Evaristo’s memoir of her own life and writing, and her manifesto on unstoppability, creativity, and activism

Bernardine Evaristo’s 2019 Booker Prize win was a historic and revolutionary occasion, with Evaristo being the first Black woman and first Black British person ever to win the prize in its fifty-year history. Girl, Woman, Other was named a favorite book of the year by President Obama and Roxane Gay, was translated into thirty-five languages, and has now reached more than a million readers.

Evaristo’s astonishing nonfiction debut, Manifesto, is a vibrant…


Book cover of Freckled

Brian Rush McDonald Author Of The Long Surrender: A Memoir about Losing My Religion

From my list on people who left life-defining ideologies.

Why am I passionate about this?

I became involved in a rigid religious movement as a teen and prepared for the ministry at a fundamentalist college and seminary. I took this ideology to its logical extreme and became a foreign missionary. I know from the inside how such an ideology takes hold of a person and how difficult it is to escape its grasp, especially when family and career are intertwined. Through my own struggle with depression and anxiety, I scoured books to help understand myself and faith development, eventually earning a Ph.D in counseling, emphasizing developmental theory. I know from personal experience what it means to walk away from a way of thinking that has defined much of your life.

Brian's book list on people who left life-defining ideologies

Brian Rush McDonald Why did Brian love this book?

T.W. Neal grows up with parents who opt to live on a sparsely populated Hawaiian island, not wearing clothes, surfing, smoking Marijuana, and eating magic mushrooms. The family lives in a van or in housing with few modern amenities and the author attends school on the island only sporadically. Due to her mother’s mental illness and her father’s alcohol abuse, she at times, has to run the household. With difficulty she connects with relatives and a few teachers and begins to reach for a lifeline to break free from the life her parents chose. She wants to go to college and eventually is able to leave the island and pursue a mainstream life. It is astounding that a person growing up in such circumstances would have the desire and determination to forge a different life.

By TW Neal,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Freckled as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

For fans of The Glass Castle and Educated, comes mystery author Toby Neal’s personal story of surviving a wild childhood in paradise. We never call it homeless. We're just "camping" in the jungle on Kauai...

We live in a place everyone calls paradise. Sure, Kauai’s beautiful, with empty beaches, drip-castle mountains, and perfect surf...but we’ve been "camping" for six months, eating boiled chicken feed for breakfast, and wearing camouflage clothes so no one sees us trespassing in our jungle hideout. The cockroaches leave rainbow colors all over everything from eating the crayons we left outside the tent, and now a…


Book cover of Journeys Without a Map: A Writer's Life

Caroline Studdert Author Of Hellcat of The Hague: The Nel Slis Story

From my list on about and by madly inspiring women.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve always adored stories of courageous, sometimes outrageous women who forge ahead into the unknown, survive in strange lands in troubled times, pursue their career dreams. Like my favourite picks, I’ve relished my own adventures in distant countries (Libya, Czechia, Kyrgystan, Mongolia…), while always earning my crust from writing. From motivational research in Dublin and London, I switched to financial journalism in Holland, where I met and was inspired by ground-breaking journalist Nel Slis whose story I’ve told in my book Hellcat of the Hague. Now I’m settled in London to concentrate on my novels and short stories and be near my family, I hope you love these books too.

Caroline's book list on about and by madly inspiring women

Caroline Studdert Why did Caroline love this book?

Award-winning novelist Molteno takes us on a mesmerising journey of discovery, tracing the origins of her fictional worlds. From the mountains of Tajikistan to remote parts of Africa, in small English towns or huge Indian literary festivals, she engages with people she meets and is inspired by them. Through these vignettes she threads reflections on the creative process—why we write, and what fiction does for us. Through Marion’s clear and involving writing, we encounter not one but several truly remarkable women, as she weaves the emergence of her writing life into her own much-travelled and absorbing story.

By Marion Molteno,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Journeys Without a Map as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Award-winning author Marion Molteno takes us on a magical journey of discovery into the life of a writer and her readers.
From book events in small English towns to huge literary festivals in India and Pakistan, from the mountains of Tajikistan to remote parts of Africa, she traces the roots of the fictional worlds she has so brilliantly created in her novels.
Weaving through these vignettes are reflections on the creative process, her own and anyone's - her own journey as a writer, what fiction does for us, and the vital relationship between writers and readers.
With an ability to…


Book cover of Under the Wide and Starry Sky
Book cover of The Dream Lover
Book cover of The Mystery of Mrs. Christie

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