Book picks similar to
An Approach to Black by Emily Jeremiah
contemporary
art
novella
women-s-literature
Mrs. O'Malley's Midnight Mystery
M. Louisa Locke - 2020
O’Malley, especially when you have seven children and are forced to live in one of the crowded neighborhoods South of Market. Late one night, as she sat at the window of her crowded flat, sewing and worrying, she noticed something strange going on across the street. Her decision to investigate will have unexpected consequences. Mrs. O’Malley’s Midnight Mystery is a short story in the Victorian San Francisco Mystery series, and it comes right after the short story, Dandy’s Discovery, and before Lethal Remedies, the seventh novel in the series.
Suspicion on Sugar Creek
Susannah B. Lewis - 2016
She hoped to work on her novel, play Rook with the old lady next door and spend some lazy time with her husband and daughters. But when a new neighbor winds up dead, Tessa and her Rook partner find themselves jumping to suspicious conclusions. Add a young hippie named Rusty to the mix, and these three seem like an unlikely trio to solve an alleged crime. When you’re not laughing at the humorous rhetoric in Suspicion on Sugar Creek, you’ll be on the edge of your seat wondering how it will all play out.
The House Girl
Tara Conklin - 2013
Seventeen-year-old Josephine Bell decides to run from the failing tobacco farm where she is a slave and nurse to her ailing mistress, the aspiring artist Lu Anne Bell. New York City, 2004. Lina Sparrow, an ambitious first-year associate in an elite law firm, is given a difficult, highly sensitive assignment that could make her career: she must find the "perfect plaintiff" to lead a historic class-action lawsuit worth trillions of dollars in reparations for descendants of American slaves. It is through her father, the renowned artist Oscar Sparrow, that Lina discovers Josephine Bell and a controversy roiling the art world: are the iconic paintings long ascribed to Lu Anne Bell really the work of her house slave, Josephine? A descendant of Josephine's would be the perfect face for the reparations lawsuit - if Lina can find one. While following the runaway girl's faint trail through old letters and plantation records, Lina finds herself questioning her own family history and the secrets that her father has never revealed: How did Lina's mother die? And why will he never speak about her? Moving between antebellum Virginia and modern-day New York, this searing, suspenseful and heartbreaking tale of art and history, love and secrets, explores what it means to repair a wrong and asks whether truth is sometimes more important than justice.
Petra
Shaena Lambert - 2020
Award-winning novelist Madeleine Thien calls
Petra
a masterpiece--a fierce, humane and powerful novel for our times.
January, 1980. At the height of the Cold War, Petra Kelly inspires hundreds of thousands to take to the streets to protest the placement of nuclear missiles on West German soil--including a NATO general named Emil Gerhardt, who shocks the establishment by converting to the cause. Petra and her general not only vault to fame as the stars of the Green Party, but they also fall in love. Then Manfred Schwartz, an ex-lover, urges Petra to draw back the curtain on Emil's war record, and they enter a world both complicated and threatening.Told by Manfred Schwartz, from his place in a present world even more beset by existential threats, Petra is an exploration of love, jealousy, and the power of social change. A woman capable of founding a new and world-changing politics and taking on two superpowers, Petra still must grapple with her own complex nature and a singular and fatal love.
Delirium of the Brave
William C. Harris Jr. - 1998
Confederate Captain Patrick Driscoll and his dear friend and manservant Shadrack "Shad" Bryan leave their tearful families to help fight for the Southern cause. They are to set up fort at Raccoon Island off Georgia's coast in a last-ditch effort to save their beloved city from Union attack. But only days into their assignment, the two men die in each other's arms in a Yankee bombardment. Though the men are gone, their legacy will live on-as will the legend of the priceless Driscoll family treasure the two men have buried on Raccoon Island.Four generations after the Civil War, many Confederate families still remain in Savannah, struggling through the twentieth-century in a South rife with hardball politics, personal vendettas and the hangover of war.John-Morgan Hartman, son of a newspaper man and great-great grandson of Captain Patrick Driscoll, goes to serve his country in Vietnam, unaware of the physical and psychological wounds that will befall him...Tony O'Boyle is an ambitious young politician who will stop at nothing and spare no one to get ahead-but his family's dark past will come back to haunt him...Lloyd Bryan, descended from slaves, is determined to succeed where his ancestors didn't. But his celebrity as a professional football player immerses him in a world of temptation that ultimately turns him toward religion...Charlotte Drayton, a successful television reporter, has always used her beauty to get her way-but the one man she can't have is the only one she wants...After many years, four friends will meet on the very island where the two confederate soldiers died in each other's arms. To find where they buried Driscoll's treasure-and to uncover the dangerous secrets of a prominent Savannah family.A gripping novel of history, intrigue, war, and love, Delirium of the Brave follows four generations of families contemplating the pain of the past and the promise of the future. Get swept away by this glorious saga rich with the sights, sounds, flavors, and people of the South's most stunning locale.
The Photograph
Penelope Lively - 2003
The photograph is in an envelope marked "DON'T OPEN - DESTROY." But Kath's husband does not heed the warning, embarking on a journey of discovery that reveals a tight web of secrets: within marriages, between sisters, and at the heart of an affair. Kath, with her mesmerizing looks and casual ways, moves like a ghost through the memories of everyone who knew her - and a portrait emerges of a woman whose life cannot be understood without plumbing the emotional depths of the people she touched.Propelled by the author's signature mastery of narrative and psychology, The Photograph is Lively at her very best, the dazzling climax to all she has written before.
Courage to be Counted
Eleri Grace - 2019
When she wins a coveted overseas post with the Red Cross, she focuses on her war service. Falling hard for a sexy pilot wasn't part of her plan. Jack Nielsen has a mission. Motivated by patriotic duty and desire to avenge the death of his best friend, Jack commands a ten-man B-17 crew. Keeping himself and his men alive in the fire-filled skies over Europe will require Jack's full focus. Romancing a headstrong Red Cross Girl is a distraction he knows he shouldn't indulge. While Vivian's work takes her across France and into the heart of Nazi Germany, mounting casualties drive Jack to confront his dwindling odds of survival. As Allied forces converge on all fronts, can Vivian and Jack's relationship withstand an excruciating battle between love and duty?Courage to be Counted is the first book in the Clubmobile Girls series of thrilling historical romances. If you like brave military heroes, trailblazing heroines, and romance under fire, then you'll love Eleri Grace's page-turning tale.
Buy Courage to be Counted and soar into this historical romance today!
The Last Painting of Sara de Vos
Dominic Smith - 2016
In his earlier, award-winning novels, Dominic Smith demonstrated a gift for coaxing the past to life. Now, in The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, he deftly bridges the historical and the contemporary, tracking a collision course between a rare landscape by a female Dutch painter of the golden age, an inheritor of the work in 1950s Manhattan, and a celebrated art historian who painted a forgery of it in her youth.In 1631, Sara de Vos is admitted as a master painter to the Guild of St. Luke's in Holland, the first woman to be so recognized. Three hundred years later, only one work attributed to de Vos is known to remain--a haunting winter scene, At the Edge of a Wood, which hangs over the bed of a wealthy descendant of the original owner. An Australian grad student, Ellie Shipley, struggling to stay afloat in New York, agrees to paint a forgery of the landscape, a decision that will haunt her. Because now, half a century later, she's curating an exhibit of female Dutch painters, and both versions threaten to arrive. As the three threads intersect, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos mesmerizes while it grapples with the demands of the artistic life, showing how the deceits of the past can forge the present.
A Murderous Valentine (Admiral Shackleford Mystery #1)
Beverley Watts - 2021
Having been instrumental in improving the lives of so many (his words - others might be inclined to call it something slightly different...), he was struggling to reignite the spark in his own love life with the feisty Mabel. Short on ideas, he decides to gatecrash his much put upon former Master At Arms and best friend Jimmy Noon's Valentine idea and ends up in the middle of a murder mystery weekend... where real murder is on someone else's script. Stranded in the middle of nowhere with a hotel full of potential murderers, the unstoppable duo embark on a series of blundering escapades in an attempt to uncover the Murderous Valentine... The Admiral and Jimmy may be more Laurel and Hardy than Holmes and Watson, but can they catch a murderer...? This humorous cozy mystery short read is the first in The Admiral Shackleford Mysteries.
Slow Burn on Riverside
Chad Lutzke - 2021
But when her teenage son shows up, things take a very dark turn.
The Swimmers
Julie Otsuka - 2022
But when a crack appears at the bottom of the pool, they are cast out into an unforgiving world without comfort or relief. One of these swimmers is Alice, who is slowly losing her memory. For Alice, the pool was a final stand against the darkness of her encroaching dementia. Without the fellowship of other swimmers and the routine of her daily laps she is plunged into dislocation and chaos, swept into memories of her childhood and the Japanese internment camp in which she spent the war. Narrated by Alice's daughter, who witnesses her stark and devastating decline, The Swimmers is a searing, intimate story of mothers and daughters, and the sorrows of implacable loss, written in spellbinding, incantatory prose. The most commanding and unforgettable work yet from a modern master.
The Hundred-Year House
Rebecca Makkai - 2014
Then there’s Violet Devohr, Zee’s great-grandmother, who they say took her own life somewhere in the vast house, and whose massive oil portrait still hangs in the dining room.The Hundred-Year House unfolds a generational saga in reverse, leading the reader back in time on a literary scavenger hunt as we seek to uncover the truth about these strange people and this mysterious house. With intelligence and humor, a daring narrative approach, and a lovingly satirical voice, Rebecca Makkai has crafted an unforgettable novel about family, fate and the incredible surprises life can offer.
The Rescue Man
Anthony Quinn - 2009
With writing that is both immediate and deeply steeped in its time, Anthony Quinn recreates wartime Liverpool.
Under a Spitfire Sky
Ellie Curzon - 2021
But Florence is nursing a broken heart and a terrible secret, which might destroy her one chance of happiness...Meanwhile, a new plane is being developed that could turn the tide of the war, but Florence fears there is traitor is in their midst, putting Siegfried - and the whole country - in terrible danger. Can Florence save her Spitfire boys, and her own heart?
Moorland Mist (Sinclair Family Saga Book 1)
Gwen Kirkwood - 2015
“I climbed into this book and lived its plot. I read it at every spare moment.” Margaret “Beautifully written and engaging.” Ratana 1895, SCOTLAND Emma Greig is almost fourteen when her father announces she will be sent to be a maid at Bonnybrae Farm. She has never left her village so she is terrified of the change, especially when she realises she must learn to milk cows. PERFECT FOR FANS OF NADINE DORRIES, GLENDA YOUNG, DILLY COURT OR SHEILA NEWBERRY. Emma goes to work for the Sinclair family. Maggie Sinclair, the oldest of the Sinclair children, is kind and gentle. Her brothers, Jim and William, are friendly and tease Emma, but their mother offers no welcome. Mrs Sinclair is a proud woman with a secret in her past which has left her bitter and without compassion. She is angry when friendship blossoms between a mere maid and her own family. As the bond between Emma and her son strengthens, she dismisses Emma without notice or a reference. And William is banished from the farm he loves and sent away to Yorkshire to make his own way in the world. WILL THIS DESTROY THEIR LIVES AND BURGEONING ROMANCE? DISCOVER A ROMANTIC AND HEART-WARMING TALE ALSO BY GWEN KIRKWOOD SINCLAIR FAMILY SAGA SERIES Book 1: Moorland Mist Book 2: Moorend Farm