Books like The Betrothed
Two Lombardy peasants are prevented from marrying by a local tyrant and spend the novel finding each other again across plague, war, and the politics of 17th-century northern Italy.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Betrothed
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
A Dutch clerk in early 1800s Japan navigates trade, love, and betrayal on the artificial island of Dejima, where two civilisations meet and misunderstand each other.
The Charterhouse of Parma
Fabrice del Dongo, a young Italian nobleman, runs off to fight for Napoleon at Waterloo, then makes his way through the court intrigues of Parma, love affairs and a famous imprisonment.
Leo Africanus
Hasan al-Wazzan, born in Granada before its fall, tells his life: exile to Fez, travels through Africa, capture by pirates and a new life in Rome under the protection of the Pope.
The Great Divide
In 1907, as the Panama Canal is being dug, Ada Bunting, sixteen, stows away from Barbados to Panama to earn money for her sister's operation, among the thousands drawn there by the work.
Quo Vadis
In Nero's Rome, the young patrician soldier Marcus Vinicius falls for Lygia, a hostage princess who has secretly become a Christian, as the city moves toward fire and persecution.
Oscar and Lucinda
Oscar Hopkins, a nervous young Anglican priest with a gambling habit, and Lucinda Leplastrier, an Australian heiress who has bought a glassworks, meet on a ship bound for Sydney in the 1860s.
Elias Portolu
Elias Portolu comes home to his Sardinian village after prison on the mainland and falls in love with Maddalena, the girl his brother is about to marry.
War and Peace
Five aristocratic families navigate love, ambition, and survival as Napoleon's invasion of Russia reshapes the world around them.
Katherine
Katherine de Roet, a convent-raised orphan of fifteen, comes to the court of Edward III in 1366 and catches the eye of his son John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, on the eve of her arranged marriage to a knight.
Daughter of Fortune
Eliza Sommers, a foundling raised by an English brother and sister in Valparaíso, falls for a poor clerk who leaves for the California gold rush in 1849, and she stows away on a ship to follow him.
Noli Me Tángere
Crisostomo Ibarra comes home to Manila after seven years studying in Europe to find that his father has died in prison, and that the friars of his town are set against him.
The Leopard
In 1860, as Garibaldi's troops land in Sicily, Prince Fabrizio of Salina watches the aristocratic world he was born into give way to the new Italy, and arranges his nephew's marriage to the daughter of a rich upstart.