What to Read When You've Finished The Seven Sisters

Wondering what to read now you’ve finished Lucinda Riley’s breath-taking Seven Sisters series? Here are some authors you might like to try – Like Lucinda Riley, they're terrific storytellers that write about family secrets, with evocative locations and journeys into the past.

Santa Montefiore writes sweeping stories where her heroines are caught up in changing times, historical events, family difficulties and secrets. On her website she says all her books are about love – love, that is, with a capital L. Most of her books are stand-alone titles, but she has also written a five-book series, The Deverill Chronicles set in Ireland from the 1900, through WWI and the decades following. The first book is Songs of Love and War and it’s stirring, escapist historical fiction at its best.

Kate Furnival’s historical novel The Italian Wife is set in 1930s Italy, as Mussolini’s regime takes hold. A witness to a terrible tragedy, Isabella finds herself digging into the secrets of her own past. A gripping story of love and danger with a vividly portrayed setting for both time and place.

There’s often something of a mystery in the historical novels of Katherine Webb. The Night Falling brings us back again to Italy, or Puglia to be precise in the year of 1921. Here Leandro returns home, having made his fortune, with a glamorous wife, but both have secrets. In the background poverty and tension threaten the peace as returned soldiers from WWI are dissatisfied with poor conditions and lack of work.

In The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton, Laurel is a successful actress, but decades before her life suddenly changed when she was sixteen and she witnessed a shocking crime on what should have been an idyllic day on her family’s farm. And what connects Dorothy, Vivien and Jimmy whose lives are thrown together in wartime London? A mystery that is also a love story, this is a gripping saga that sweeps you back to the 1930s, to the 1960s and the recent past.

The secrets continue in Amy Snow by Tracy Rees. Abandoned as a baby, young Amy has a lonely life at Hatville Court until young heiress Aurelia Vennaway takes pity on her. When Aurelia dies suddenly, she leaves Amy a mystery hidden in a bundle of letters with a coded key. Can she discover the secret that has the potential to change her life?

Soraya Lane’s new series The Lost Daughters seems to be inspired by Lucinda Riley’s The Seven Sisters series. In Lane’s books, a group of women meet at a lawyer’s office and each given a box with a different memento connected with a home for unmarried mothers. In the first book, The Italian Daughter, Lily is puzzled about two objects that are clues to her grandmother’s past: an Italian recipe and an old theatre programme. Her journey of discovery will take her to a vineyard in Italy and a story of love and loss.

Paullina Simon's novels can be addictive. Light at Lavelle brings together two characters in America just in time for the Wall Street Crash and the ensuing depression. Finn is a Boston banker with a problematic secret; Lazar is a young farmer from Ukraine who has just escaped the Terror-Famine. Both think they have lost everything, but maybe, each has more to lose.

Lesley Pearse’s popular Belle series takes Belle Reilly from growing up in a London brothel to life as a courtesan in Paris and the United States, before making a new life as a businesswoman. World War I threatens to destroy all that, but if there’s one thing we know about this heroine it is that she’s a fighter and a survivor. A gripping historical saga set against the turbulent backdrop of history.

Another epic read set during the First World War is Fiona McIntosh’s The Champagne War in which new bride Sophie sees her husband off to war, leaving her to manage the new vintages at their champagne winery. As war drags on, Sophie uses her cellars as an underground hospital, where Charles Nash, a scientist and marksman becomes a patient. A story that takes you to the battlefields of Ypres, as well as to sun-kissed vineyards of southern France, this is a compelling read. If you enjoy this one, you might also like to try The Pearl Thief, a story that takes you from 1960s London to snowy woodlands near Prague, Paris and the Yorkshire moors. Looking at the after-effects of war it asks if love and hope can conquer all.

In Rosie Thomas’s novel, The Kashmir Shawl, Mair Ellis is clearing out her father’s estate when she discovers a beautiful, antique shawl which once belonged to her grandmother along with the lock of a child’s hair. Nerys Watkins and her husband were young missionaries in the Kashmir city of Srinagar, but were soon separated by war. Mair embarks on a quest to find out the truth behind the shawl and her grandmother’s story.

The Tea Rose by Jennifer Donnelly is the first in a trilogy that begins in 1880’s East London, an area of deprivation, whereFiona Finnegan works in a tea factory. She dreams of a better life, and driven by loss and fear, makes her way to New York and eventually to the top of Manhattan’s tea trade. A story of one woman’s survival and triumph, the following two books are The Winter Rose and The Wild Rose which follows the stories of subsequent generations.

19 April 2024

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