Everybody’s excited to read Sarah Waters’ latest novel.

While you’re waiting to read it – or if you just finished and loved it – try one of these older books, which also involve issues of social class and European culture in conflict:

 

Life Mask
by Emma Donoghue

A fictionalized account of the true 16-year courtship of Lord Edward Derby, the richest and ugliest man in the House of Lords, and England’s queen of comedy, Eliza Farren, and Eliza’s friendship with Anne Damer, a widow, sculptress and rumored Sapphist.

 

 

Atonement
by Ian McEwan

Imaginative thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis, misinterpreting a scene between her older sister Cecilia and Robbie Turner, the housekeeper’s son, later accuses Robbie of a crime she has no proof he committed and spends years trying to atone for her actions. Covers the period from 1935 to 1940 and goes forward to the Tallis family reunion in 1999.

 

 

Maisie Dobbs
by Jacqueline Winspear

Private detective Maisie Dobbs must investigate the reappearance of a dead man who turns up at a cooperative farm called the Retreat that caters to men who are recovering their health after World War I.

 

 

 

Tulip Fever
by Deborah Moggach

In 1630s Amsterdam, tulipomania has seized the populace. Everywhere men are seduced by the fantastic exotic flower. But for wealthy merchant Cornelis Sandvoort, it is his young and beautiful wife, Sophia, who stirs his soul. She is the prize he desires, the woman he hopes will bring him the joy that not even his considerable fortune can buy.

 

 

Aimee and Jaguar: A Love Story, Berlin 1943
by Erica Fischer

Aimee was a housewife, mother of four, married to a Nazi officer. Jaguar was a Jewish woman living underground in Berlin during World War II. Based on interviews, diary excerpts, letters, poems and the recollections of friends and family, this is Aimee’s remembrance of their unlikely romance.