77 Books Like Florence Adler Swims Forever

How would you feel to inherit your family business (the Post cereal company) but not be able to run it? I’d be infuriated.

Here is the story of one of the richest women in the country who needed to marry so her husband could have a seat on the board. But men in the early 1900s did not abide women on the Board of Directors of any corporation.

Learn how Marjorie Post navigates the world trying to find love and be true to her father’s dream. 

This one is pure fun. It’s hard to believe no one thought to make a female chemist the star of a cooking show before! The story is witty and original, artfully combining the hard truths of being a scientist and a TV personality in male-dominated fields, with femininity and motherhood.

Sexism is rampant (obviously, it’s the 1950s), and the challenges the protagonist faces often seem insurmountable. Garmus takes these difficult themes seriously, while delivering them with humor and a lightheartedness that makes for a refreshing read.

I have long been a fan of Jennifer Weiner and expected another charming, funny (and modern) read when I picked up Mrs. Everything. But this book far surpassed my expectations. It was far more serious, ambitious, and sweeping than her other books. The story centers on two sisters growing up in 1950s Detroit, taking me back to an era where women were raised to be housewives alone, and follows them through the tumultuous sixties and beyond. Weiner’s writing and research are so strong, I felt like I experienced the historical milestones along with the characters. 

I truly believe that video games are the art form that defines our present and, at least, our near-ish future. So, it was a great pleasure to encounter Zevin’s novel about the relationships behind a video game studio’s origins, which both elevates and scrutinizes the medium’s potential to revolutionize narrative storytelling.

Zevin deftly translates gaming's embodied perspective, including one stand-out moment in the back half that is perhaps the book’s defining triumph. Through her expansive prose, Sam, Sadie, and Marx play out their lives: their moments of intense and sometimes myopic creativity, their intricate interpersonal joys and devastations, and the fantastically rendered worlds, some built from reality and others from pixels which bring them together, push them apart, and might just bring them together again.

Nino Latino is the nephew of Fra Filippo Lippi, one of the greatest Florentine painters. For Nino, every taste brings a heightened connection to the people and places around him. He rises to culinary acclaim but it’s the forbidden hand of a woman that threatens to undo him. Appetite is a book to relish and devour.

Most art in the Renaissance was commissioned by specific patrons and this book superbly illustrates the complex interaction among patron, artist, and society by focusing on the greatest patron of art and architecture in fifteenth-century Florence. Cosimo de’ Medici was the most powerful figure in the city’s political and economic life, a fabulously wealthy banker, a devout Christian, but he had also an impeccable nose for great art. With the help of about 200 images, the book examines the religious, personal, and dynastic motivations behind Cosimo’s artistic patronage, both his direct commissions for the Medici palaces, villas, and chapels as well as his active involvement in the works officially commissioned by the republic. What you’ll get out of this book is a profound understanding of how art was commissioned, created, and viewed in Renaissance Florence.

Nabb’s Marshal Guarnaccia, unflamboyant and patient, is an unspectacular thinker but a brilliant listener with a real, if unsentimental sympathy for the people he deals with on both sides of the law. Without fancy vices or personal charisma, Guarnaccia’s fundamental decency is nowhere on better display than in The Marshal’s Own Case, set among the desperate young transgender prostitutes of the Florentine sex trade, a culture quite different from the Marshal’s own secure family life.

It’s impossible to understand the turbulence that frequently swept over Florence in those years without some sense of what the magnate class was all about: its pride and its violence, its lawlessness, its emphasis on knighthood, and its private military forces. Lansing shows how the magnate class evolved as a distinctive culture, becoming powerful and disruptive to the city’s peace well beyond even what its considerable economic clout would suggest. She places a lot of emphasis on the role of women among the magnates, even though women could never be full members of the lineage, since they married into other lineages. Lively and readable, with lots of stories of interesting individuals.

This concise history of Florence is a great starting point. It traces the evolution of the city from a medieval commune to a republic, covering intellectual, political, cultural, religious, and economic trends and developments over the centuries. Its scope is broad, and one of its strengths is its continuity, as it follows various threads through time. Najemy is a well-known historian of Florence, and this popular history is an excellent resource.

There are millions of great guidebooks on Florence, but none is more entertaining, informative, and lively than Eve Borsook’s. An American art historian who lived in the city for most of her life, she unravels Florence's history, art, and politics with verve, knowledge, and insight. As one would expect in a guide, she describes systematically the city, a chapter for each neighborhood, each chapter starting with detailed descriptions of its most interesting streets, squares, buildings, and works of art. But what makes this guide invaluable are Borsook’s commentaries that follow her informative descriptions. I suggest you read this book before you go to Florence, plan your visit according to her chapters, and then, once in Florence, after you have seen the works she describes, read again the chapter on the neighborhood you visited that day. Renaissance Florence and the people who lived in it will come to life for you… show more.