66 Books Like The Illuminator

Every Renaissance fan loves a bit of Leonardo, don’t they? And I was intrigued by the relationship between the older, established artist Leonardo and the hot-headed Michelangelo.

This is a brilliantly written book with lots of glorious details about art and painting. These are two giants of their time, and it was a brave subject to tackle–Storey manages to convey their intellect as well as their art.

Reading about the sheer labour involved in carving a block of stone into something human was really awe-inspiring, and Stephanie Storey does a great job of getting inside the heads of these two men.

I loved the detail of the craft of gilding in this book, a craft that is little known today. I was interested, too, in the effect that the plague had on the city of Venice. Another plus for me was that Maria’s love interest was a Moor, Cristiano, and this added to the slow-burn tension of the relationship.

For me, this was the sort of historical fiction I don’t read often–immaculately researched with plenty of insider details that could only be known by an expert. Though the story doesn’t move particularly fast, it did make me think and immersed me in the period. 

I loved the descriptions of the craft of glassmaking, especially the fact that something so hard could be made out of something so hot and molten. A big part of my enjoyment of this book rested on the descriptions of glittering glass, which seemed to mirror the Venetian Lagoon.

Another thing I loved was the fact I felt a connection to Nora, who was transported from her ordinary life to a life in Venice where everything was shifting because of its watery nature. There was great attention to detail in the writing that brought the seventeenth-century past to life on the island of Murano, a closed world where no one could leave.

I used to work as a costume designer, so I admit I have a bit of a thing for old textiles. I couldn’t resist this book, which features the silk trade and has a mystery at its heart.

The three women whose fates are linked by the Silk House in a quiet market town are all interesting characters, and their lives are linked together well by the author over the span of the 17th to 21st centuries.

The book contains two of my favourite interests, the historical silk trade and the ancient healing powers of herbal medicine. It also rattles along at a good pace and has a lovely surprise of an ending. 

Technically, Stephanie Plum isn’t an amateur sleuth because she works as a bounty hunter, but since she was never trained and tends to succeed despite her bungling and ineptitude, I consider her an amateur sleuth. Besides, when you’re sorely in need of a good laugh to release some endorphins, you can’t go wrong spending a few hours with Stephanie and her colorful cohorts. This twenty-seventh outing in the long-running series is one of the best when it comes not only to the humor, but it offers up a well-plotted story, and lots of red herrings. Plus, there’s plenty of Grandma Masur in this one. What more could you ask for?

A widow with a new lease on life thanks to her secretly wealthy aunt becomes involved in a murder.

Multigenerational, with the Italian grandma, her newbie journalist granddaughter, plus an ex-nun sister and an ex-sister-in-law.

This story involves food, jokes, and family love, albeit with much more brashness and outspokenness than any of the other books I listed, and also a lot more Italian, though the book is set in New Jersey.

With this piece of historical fiction, we are back to “Who is Shakespeare,” and did he write all those plays? We are asked to consider parts of Shakespeare’s life where there is no historical record at all. In this novel, he did pen his plays and poems, but he had a lot of help from a smart, learned woman. Yes, another great woman behind the man story. And yet, we are allowed into not only Will’s and Katherine’s collaborative writing process but into their love story. Thus we end this list as we started with Shakespeare in love.

I love the central female character in this book, Cora Seaborne, who can swing between admirable and ridiculous over the course of a page. I love the dark atmosphere created by the marshes of the Blackwater, where Cora is determined to find evidence of a mysterious creature presumed by locals to be malevolent.

The estuary is a menacing presence in reality (people and animals are sucked in and lost in times of bad weather) and in the imaginations of the villagers. I also love the way that this provides a backdrop for various tumults of the soul experienced by the characters as Cora crashes into the settled lives of a local minister and his family, wreaking accidental havoc.

I love the way this book moves between Scotland and Sudan, as told from the perspective of a devout Muslim woman working as a translator for a Scottish academic at Aberdeen University. The story itself is a work of translation and a highly original rewriting of the encounter between East and West, Islam and Christianity, English and Arabic.

All those binaries break down: the English, for example, is Scottish, and the way to pronounce Arabic turns on a difference between Arab-speaking regions so that in both speech and writing, the reader encounters subtleties of translation usually overlooked in the tiresome cliches about “West” and “East.”

I love teaching it to learn with my students the politics of translation. The book has my favorite rewriting of that famous map-pointing scene at the beginning of Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”—Aboulela restores as Arabic names the blank spaces on the map of… show more.

After a lifetime of dutiful marriage, the newly widowed Lady Slane shocks her family by striking out on her own, moving from London to a suburban cottage where she will live alone and please herself (for once!). Her decision rumbles through her grown children’s lives and inspires one of her great-granddaughters to pursue an independent life herself.

I love that this book focuses on an older woman (Lady Slane is 88 years old), proving that it’s never too late to live life on your own terms. And in Deborah, her great-granddaughter, we get a glimpse of the new sort of woman who was really making her presence felt in this period: young women exploring their independence and living very different lives from their parents and grandparents.