Books like The Lacuna
Harrison Shepherd, born in America and raised in Mexico, works as a cook in the household of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo and then as secretary to Leon Trotsky in exile.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Lacuna
The Book of Daniel
Daniel Isaacson, the son of a couple executed for spying in the 1950s, struggles in the late 1960s with their memory, his sister's breakdown and his own anger, in Doctorow's novel based on the Rosenberg case.
When I Lived in Modern Times
In 1946 Evelyn Sert, a twenty-year-old Jewish hairdresser from Soho, sails to Palestine and is caught up in Tel Aviv and the struggle for a new state.
Advise and Consent
The President nominates a controversial man for Secretary of State, and the Senate's confirmation fight drags the secrets of everyone involved into the open.
Grand Days
Edith Campbell Berry, an idealistic young Australian, works for the League of Nations and then for the new world order after the war.
All That I Am
Ruth Becker, an old woman in Sydney, remembers her youth in Berlin among the German left in the 1930s, and the exile in London with the playwright Ernst Toller and her cousin Dora.
The Secrets We Kept
In 1956 the CIA recruits Irina, a young Russian-American typist, to work alongside Sally, an experienced agent, on a plan to smuggle Boris Pasternak's banned Doctor Zhivago into the Soviet Union.
Libra
Lee Harvey Oswald drifts from the Bronx to the Marines to Minsk to Dallas while a group of disaffected CIA men plan a staged attempt on Kennedy that is meant to miss.
The Golden Notebook
Anna Wulf, a blocked novelist in 1950s London, keeps four notebooks for the parts of her life, black for Africa, red for politics, yellow for fiction and blue for daily life, and tries to bring them together in a fifth.
In America
In 1876 Maryna Zalezowska, Poland's greatest actress, leaves the stage and sails with her husband, her son and a few friends to found a utopian farm in California.
The Fraud
The housekeeper and cousin-in-law of a fading Victorian novelist becomes obsessed with the Tichborne trial, where a butcher claims to be a lost aristocrat and a formerly enslaved man testifies for him.
Housemates
Leah, a writer, and Bernie, a photographer, meet through a Philadelphia housemate ad, and when Bernie's old professor leaves her a complicated inheritance the two set out across rural Pennsylvania to make a book of words and pictures.
Horse
The story of Lexington, the most celebrated racehorse in nineteenth-century America, and Jarret, the enslaved groom who raised him, connects to a 1950s New York art dealer and, in 2019, to a Smithsonian scientist and a Nigerian-American art historian who uncover their story.