Here are 100 books that The Wedding Veil fans have personally recommended if you like
The Wedding Veil.
Book DNA is a community of 13,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
While I write Appalachian historical fiction, I’ve spent my non-writing career in marketing and fundraising. That includes a dream job in the public relations department at Biltmore Estate from 2000-2006. It was a thrill for me to spend time in America’s largest privately owned home, learning about and sharing the estate’s amazing history. And while you just can’t beat the actual history, who wouldn’t have fun building a story around a French chateau in the Appalachian mountains? In writing my own Biltmore novel, I read others set there as well and found some true gems!
I love a good dual timeline novel, and Pepper Basham has the perfect touch.
Now throw in a bookstore that may have to close, a lost now found love letter, and a trip to England, and I’m absolutely hooked! Oh, and did I mention that the 1915 timeline characters flirt via notes left in books in the library at Biltmore House? Swoon.
Uncover the Story Behind a One-Hundred-Year-Old Love Letter
Walk through Doors to the Past via a new series of historical stories of romance and adventure. Clara Blackwell helps her mother manage a struggling one-hundred-year old family bookshop in Asheville, North Carolina, but the discovery of a forgotten letter opens a mystery of a long-lost romance and undiscovered inheritance which could save its future. Forced to step outside of her predictable world, Clara embarks on an adventure with only the name Oliver as a hint of the man's identity in her great-great-grandmother's letter. From the nearby grand estate of the Vanderbilts,…
Tina Edwards loved her childhood and creating fairy houses, a passion shared with her father, a world-renowned architect. But at nine years old, she found him dead at his desk and is haunted by this memory. Tina's mother abruptly moved away, leaving Tina with feelings of abandonment and suspicion.
While I write Appalachian historical fiction, I’ve spent my non-writing career in marketing and fundraising. That includes a dream job in the public relations department at Biltmore Estate from 2000-2006. It was a thrill for me to spend time in America’s largest privately owned home, learning about and sharing the estate’s amazing history. And while you just can’t beat the actual history, who wouldn’t have fun building a story around a French chateau in the Appalachian mountains? In writing my own Biltmore novel, I read others set there as well and found some true gems!
Reading this book is like going on a guided, behind-the-scenes tour of Biltmore—led by an actual member of the staff!
I so enjoyed this authentic look at the “downstairs” side of Biltmore House. It’s a fun, light romance with just enough twists and turns to keep me turning pages even though I was reasonably certain it was all going to work out in the end ;)
While I write Appalachian historical fiction, I’ve spent my non-writing career in marketing and fundraising. That includes a dream job in the public relations department at Biltmore Estate from 2000-2006. It was a thrill for me to spend time in America’s largest privately owned home, learning about and sharing the estate’s amazing history. And while you just can’t beat the actual history, who wouldn’t have fun building a story around a French chateau in the Appalachian mountains? In writing my own Biltmore novel, I read others set there as well and found some true gems!
When I worked at Biltmore, I was intrigued by a photograph showing the chateau under construction with a ramshackle house still standing in the foreground.
Who lived in that house? Were they still there? How did George Vanderbilt go about acquiring that property? Joy Jordan-Lake digs into a variation on that theme with this story of a young woman called home to Appalachia from the big city to help her family—one of the last hold-outs as Vanderbilt scoops up land.
I found Jordan-Lake’s exploration of the people around the construction of Biltmore fascinating and engaging.
"Crawdads meets the Crawleys...Threaded through with a meticulously researched, well-crafted mystery, this is historical fiction at its best." -Fiona Davis, nationally bestselling author of The Lions of Fifth Avenue
From the bestselling author of A Tangled Mercy comes an enthralling novel of secrets, a tumultuous war of ideas, and murder as classes collide in the shadow of Biltmore House.
Biltmore House, a palatial mansion being built by the Vanderbilts, American "royalty," is in its final stages of construction in North Carolina. The country's grandest example of privilege, it symbolizes the aspirations of its owner and the dreams of a girl,…
Seven years ago, a hidden betrayal scattered three friends living in the shadow of Biltmore Estate. Now, when Biltmore Industries master weaver Lorna Blankenship is commissioned to create an original design for Cornelia Vanderbilt's 1924 wedding, she panics knowing she doesn't have the creativity needed. But there's an elusive artisan…
While I write Appalachian historical fiction, I’ve spent my non-writing career in marketing and fundraising. That includes a dream job in the public relations department at Biltmore Estate from 2000-2006. It was a thrill for me to spend time in America’s largest privately owned home, learning about and sharing the estate’s amazing history. And while you just can’t beat the actual history, who wouldn’t have fun building a story around a French chateau in the Appalachian mountains? In writing my own Biltmore novel, I read others set there as well and found some true gems!
This is the story behind the story of Biltmore Estate.
I was so impressed with Denise Kiernan’s research and her engaging way of presenting the facts. While this isn’t a novel, I found it read like one, offering deep insight into the people and circumstances that helped shape America’s largest privately owned home.
A New York Times bestseller with an “engaging narrative and array of detail” (The Wall Street Journal), the “intimate and sweeping” (Raleigh News & Observer) untold true story of the Biltmore Estate—the largest private home in America—and the remarkable woman who helped ensure its survival.
The story of Biltmore spans World Wars, the Jazz Age, the Depression, and generations of the famous Vanderbilt family, and features a captivating cast of real-life characters including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, Teddy Roosevelt, John Singer Sargent, James Whistler, Henry James, and Edith Wharton.
Orphaned at a young age, Edith Stuyvesant Dresser claimed…
Ever since my father introduced me to the Greeks, I’ve been passionate about the ancient world and bringing it alive. I read Classics at university and taught for eleven years, during which time I founded the award-winning theatre company, Actors of Dionysus, dedicated to performing Greek drama in translation. A highlight was staging my adaptation of Trojan Women not justin Ephesus Theatre but besides the walls of Troy. From 2010, I’ve divided my time between writing books and articles on wide-ranging classical subjects, editing Bloomsbury Academic Press’ ‘Looking at…’ series on Greek drama (which include my translations), book-reviewing, lecturing, and directing theatrical performances (most recently with Dame Sian Phillips).
Fifth-century BCAthenian society was male-dominated, so most of our evidence comes from – and is about – men. Elegantly written, immaculately researched, and pleasingly illustrated, Aphrodite’s Tortoise goes a long way towards restoring the gender balance, uncovering the complex role that women played in Greek society, whether as wives, priestesses or slaves. At the heart of the book is the use of the veil, which not only protected women from the male gaze as they ventured outside (hence the title) but could convey a variety of visual signals depending on how it was worn. It’s a really stimulating book, the kind that makes you sit up and think about not just the ancient world but our own.
Greek women routinely wore the veil. That is the unexpected finding of this major study. The Greeks, rightly credited with the invention of civic openness, are revealed as also part of a more eastern tradition of seclusion. From the iconography as well as the literature of Greece, Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones shows that fully veiling of face and head was commonplace. He analyses the elaborate Greek vocabulary for veiling, and explores what the veil was meant to achieve. He also uses Greek and more recent - mainly Islamic - evidence to show how women could exploit and subvert the veil to achieve…
I’m a Sydney, Australia born sociologist and writer and back in 1990 I hitchhiked through the UK, travelled in Europe and arrived in Turkey just as the Gulf War was starting. After three months in the country I was hooked. I now live in Istanbul and write about the people, culture, and history. Using my less than perfect Turkish language skills I uncover the everyday extraordinary of life in modern Istanbul and throughout the country, even though it means I’ve accidentally asked a random stranger to give me a hug and left a butcher convinced I think Turkish sheep are born with their heads on upside down.
One of the first things people still ask me about living in Turkey is, do you have to wear a headscarf? Whether a woman covers or not and the manner in which she wears her scarf reflects much more than differing levels of religious conviction. Göle explores the extremely nuanced and conflicting relationships around the subject, combining sociological research with historical analysis and in-depth interviews. She examines the ways young women form their identities in relation to the issue of covering, how they adapt fundamental religious tenets in response to the pressures of modernity, what covering contributes to debates about politics, nationalism, and other issues. Anyone wanting to know more about the practice of veiling beyond the standard modern/backward, secular/religious divides should read The Forbidden Modern. By the way, if you’re still wondering, the answer is no.
This book by prominent Turkish scholar Nilufer Goele examines the complex relationships among modernity, religion, and gender relations in the Middle East. Her focus is on the factors that influence young women pursuing university educations in Turkey to adopt seemingly fundamentalist Islamist traditions, such as veiling, and the complex web of meanings attributed to these gender-separating practices. Veiling, a politicized practice that conceptually forces people to choose between the "modern" and the "backward," provides an insightful way of looking at the contemporary Islam-West conflict, shedding light on the recent rise of Islamist fundamentalism in many countries and providing insight into…
In college, I studied Literature with a capital L: those timeless classics the professors worship and revere. Then a woman in a used book store in Seattle handed me a copy of Jim Thompson's Pop. 1280 and said, "Read this." I was hooked. The pulp fiction of the 1950s is visceral and raw. Like Greek tragedy, it examines the darker drives of human nature--greed, lust, loneliness, anger--and their consequences. Pulp writers were paid by the word to crank out lurid thrills. But like Shakespeare writing for the groundlings, some of them just couldn't help going above and beyond. Their work remains in print because it hits on universal truths that still resonate today.
When news editor Earl Janoth murders his mistress, there's only one witness who can tie him to the crime scene. Janoth doesn't know who the witness is, but he knows everywhere the man went in the 24 hours before the murder, because the murder victim told him before he killed her.
Janoth is determined to find and silence him. He assigns reporter George Stroud to track the man down, not knowing that Stroud himself is the man he's looking for. Stroud is forced to assemble a team to hunt himself, knowing that when he's found, he'll be killed.
This is the best-plotted book I've ever read, both in concept and execution. Little details sprinkled through early chapters of the book keep coming back to have major significance as the noose tightens around Stroud.
George Stroud, executive editor at Crimeways magazine, is involved with the wrong woman - his boss's. When Janoth, the boss, kills her in an argument, he tries to pin the crime on a man seen outside her home just before the murder. He assigns his best investigative reporter - Stroud - to find the man. Trouble is, the man was Stroud himself ...An audacious and ironic novel of terror and high tension.
I’ve always been a thinker, asking big questions and playing around with crazy ideas. That’s why I’ve been fascinated by the Bible since I was fourteen, reading it cover-to-cover multiple times and studying it academically for—approaching four decades now. It’s a classic for a reason! At first, I read it because I became a Christian, and it’s part of the package, but within a short time, I was hooked. I was especially interested in the tough parts, the bits I didn’t like or couldn’t make sense of. They were invitations to explore, think, and learn. It never ceases to surprise me with new ideas and inspirational insights.
In which I discover that St Paul’s was not a misogynist! It is easy to see why we might think otherwise. His first letter to the Corinthians has had a profound and often negative impact on the place of women in Christianity. And just when I thought there was nothing left to say about it, along comes Lucy Peppiatt, and blows my mind!
I loved the complete left-of-field interpretation she offers and the fact that she turns traditional interpretations on their head. She plausibly argues that Paul was not for forcing women to veil and be silent in church. According to Peppiatt, Paul argued against the domineering men who insisted on such things. Wowza! And, by Jove, she could well be right! Invigorating stuff! (The author’s academic version is her Worship and Women at Corinth)
Whether people realize it or not, the ideas in 1 Corinthians 11:2-16 have had a huge impact on the role of Christian women in the church through the centuries. These fifteen verses have shaped worship practices, church structures, church leadership, marriages, and even relationships between men and women in general. They have contributed to practices that have consistently placed women in a subordinate role to men, and have been used to justify the idea that a woman should not occupy a leadership or teaching position without being under the authority or "covering" of a man. It is strange, therefore, that…
Misery loves company, right? While I never wish ill on someone, I find comfort in knowing I’m not the only one going through a loss, slight, or rejection. Family dysfunction novels remind me that the petty problems I get caught up in are nothing compared to what they could be. Sure, fiction frequently elevates these troubles from drama to melodrama, but I still experience relief—even though it may only be in the smallest way—focusing on someone else’s struggles. Sometimes I even find a solution to my own paltry issues. Who wouldn’t want that? And what writer wouldn’t want to help readers in that way?
I’ve read many of this author’s works and enjoyed them all, but this one really dug in, grabbed on, and held tight.
I loved the fact that it covered generations instead of a short timeframe; it gave me more insight into the people and relationships. Transplanting a Low Country girl used to a simple life to the summer home of an upper-crust New Englander accustomed to only the finer things promises conflict, which we got in spades, starting with a mother-in-law who could barely hide her hostility.
This highly elevates the uncomfortable dynamics in extended families, and the challenges overcome—and those that aren’t—make the story incredibly satisfying.
Waiting for her granddaughter to take her home from Retreat, the Maine summer colony her family has visited for generations, Maude Chambliss looks back on her life and the experiences of her family members
I have loved the history of the West since I was a child, as my family has lived here for over a century. I devoured historical fiction about pioneer girls in grammar school (including the works of Laura Ingalls Wilder), and as I got into college, I expanded my reading universe to include books about women’s roles in the West, and the meaning of this region in overall American history. This concept is what drew me to study the cultural influence of dude ranching, where women have always been able to shine -- and where I placed the protagonist of my first novel.
Although this book is about the influential women of Arizona exclusively, they stand in for the many women who have made contributions to the history and culture of the entire West. Cleere begins with indigenous women, and moves on to both historic and modern women in medicine, the arts, business, education, and the law. The short biographies of the nearly forty women profiled here are just enough to whet the appetite for more, and are written in an engaging and accessible style.
Award-winning author Jan Cleere brings her exceptional skills in research and writing to a new book about more than 35 heroic women of Arizona. From teachers and entrepreneurs to artists and healers, Cleere provides an informative text that highlights historical Hispanic, African American, Native American, and Anglo women who made their mark in the intriguing history of our state.
