Books like 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.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Personal Librarian
The Book of Lost Names
Eva Abrams, a semi-retired Florida librarian, sees a newspaper photograph of a book stolen by the Nazis that she has not seen in sixty years, the book that holds the key to the papers she and a forger named Rémy made for Jewish children in occupied France.
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.
The Lions of Fifth Avenue
In 1913 Laura Lyons lives in an apartment inside the New York Public Library, where her husband is superintendent, and is drawn into a club of radical women. In 1993 her granddaughter Sadie, a curator there, faces a run of thefts of rare books.
The Giver of Stars
Alice Wright marries a handsome American to escape her stifling life in England, and in Baileyville, Kentucky, in 1937, she joins the Packhorse Library, riding into the Appalachian mountains with books under the lead of the fiercely independent Margery O'Hare.
Passing
Irene Redfield, a doctor's wife in Harlem, runs into her childhood friend Clare Kendry in a Chicago hotel and learns that Clare has been passing as white, married to a white man who knows nothing of her past.
Cane River
Drawn from the author's own family, the lives of four generations of women of colour along the Cane River in Louisiana, from Elisabeth, born into slavery, to her great-granddaughter Emily, across a century.
Ragtime
A kaleidoscopic portrait of early twentieth-century New York where a society girl, a Harlem musician, and an immigrant's family collide and reshape each other.
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.
Whistler
At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, fifty-three-year-old Daphne Fuller's husband thinks they are being followed, and the man turns out to be Eddie Triplett, her former stepfather, whom she has not seen in almost forty-five years; their reunion takes her back to the year she was nine.
Invisible Man
A nameless Black narrator, living underground in a hole lit by stolen electricity, tells how he went from a Southern college to Harlem and a political brotherhood, and came to see himself as invisible.
Memphis
In 1995 Joan, ten, flees with her mother and younger sister to her mother's family home in Memphis, where three generations of women have lived and survived.
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.