Books like The Henna Artist
In Jaipur in 1955, Lakshmi Shastri, who fled an abusive marriage at seventeen, has made herself the most sought-after henna artist among the city's wealthy women, until a younger sister she never knew she had turns up at her door.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Henna Artist
In the Time of the Butterflies
The four Mirabal sisters grow up in the Dominican Republic under Trujillo, and three of them become the Butterflies, leaders of the underground resistance.
Girl with a Pearl Earring
A young Protestant maid enters the Catholic Vermeer household in 1660s Delft and slowly, against every domestic and erotic pressure, becomes the girl in the painting.
Anita de Monte Laughs Last
In 1998 Raquel Toledo, a first-generation art history student at Yale from Brooklyn, comes across the work of Anita de Monte, a Cuban-born artist whose death in 1985 left her famous sculptor husband a widower and her own work forgotten.
The House of Eve
In 1950s Philadelphia, Ruby Pearsall, fifteen, is set to be the first in her family to go to college, while in Washington, Eleanor Quarles, a Howard University student, marries into an old, wealthy Black family who never let her forget where she came from.
The Calamity Club
In Oxford, Mississippi, in 1933, Meg, an eleven-year-old left by her mother at the county orphan asylum for girls, and Birdie, who has come to town to beg her socialite sister for money to save the family home, find their lives tangling together in the depths of the Depression.
The Other Boleyn Girl
At fourteen, Mary Boleyn catches the eye of Henry VIII and is pushed by her ambitious family into becoming his mistress, until her sister Anne sets her sights on the king and the crown itself.
The Seventh Veil of Salome
In 1950s Hollywood, Vera Larios, an unknown young Mexican actress, is cast as Salome in a lavish biblical epic, a part that Nancy Hartley, a blonde starlet who has worked for years to be noticed, wanted for herself.
The God of Small Things
In Kerala, twins Estha and Rahel are separated after one catastrophic day in 1969, shaped by caste, politics and a forbidden love, and the novel circles that day in lush, time-jumping prose.
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
In a remote county of nineteenth-century China, seven-year-old Lily is matched with Snow Flower as a laotong, an 'old same' for life, and the two girls write to each other in nu shu, a secret women's script, on a silk fan as foot-binding, marriage and upheaval shape their lives.
Breasts and Eggs
Natsuko, a writer in Tokyo, hosts her older sister Makiko, who wants breast enlargement surgery, and Makiko's silent daughter Midoriko; years later, single and childless, Natsuko considers having a child by sperm donor.
The Personal Librarian
Belle da Costa Greene becomes J. P. Morgan's personal librarian, building his collection of rare manuscripts and art into a library that makes her one of the most powerful women in New York, while hiding that she is a Black woman passing as white.
The Marriage Portrait
In 1561, Lucrezia de' Medici, the teenage wife of the Duke of Ferrara, is taken by her husband to a remote country villa and becomes certain that he intends to kill her.