If you are interested in reading A. S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book you might enjoy these readalikes:
The Dream of Scipio by Iain Pear
In the 400s, as the Roman Empire settles into dust, landowner-turned-bishop Manlius attempts to record the ideas of his teacher, the Neo-Platonist Sophia. In the 1300s, this treatise (“The Dream of Scipio”) is discovered by poet Olivier de Noyen, whose efforts to understand it lead him to a learned Jew and a secret love that forces upon him a momentous moral decision while the plague ravages the countryside. In the 1930s, Julien Barneuve encounters de Noyen and his references to the wondrous treatise, even as the Holocaust looms and Barneuve struggles desperately to protect the woman he loves a painter and a Jew. (Library Journal)
King in the Tree by Steven Millhauser
There is nothing lighthearted about love, implies Millhauser, in these three dark and feverishly rich novellas…[His] portrayal of fools and self-made victims is unblinking and unsentimental. He is particularly attuned to the ways that people fall out of love…at his best dramatizing these moments of ambivalent hesitation and the disastrous effect they have on the ‘fellowships of two.’ Though he covers time-honored territory, Millhauser’s precision, coupled with his brave imagination, makes these stories as smart and fresh as they are grim. (Publishers Weekly)
The Map of Love by Adhaf Soueif
Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love is a massive family saga, a story that draws its readers into two moments in the complex, troubled history of modern Egypt. The story begins in 1977 in New York. There Isabel Parkman discovers an old trunk full of documents–some in English, some in Arabic–in her dying mother’s apartment. Incapable of deciphering this stash by herself, she turns to Omar al-Ghamrawi, a man with whom she is falling in love. And Omar directs her in turn to his sister Amal in Cairo.
Together the two women begin to uncover the stories embedded in the journal of Lady Anna Winterbourne, who traveled to Egypt in 1900 and fell in love with Sharif Pasha al-Barudi, an Egyptian nationalist. To their surprise, they stumble across some unsuspected connections between their own families. Less surprising, perhaps, is the persistence of the very same issues that dogged their ancestors: colonialism, Egyptian nationalism, and the clash of cultures throughout the Middle East. (amazon.com)
The Moor’s Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie
The Moor’s Last Sigh tells the family history of Moraes Zogoiby, known as “the Moor.” He is the last survivor of a family descended from the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama (ca.1469-1524), who sailed to India in search of spice and whose offspring grew rich in shipping it to the West. Among his ancestors, Moraes also numbers Boabdil (Abu ‘Abd Allah Muhammad XI, ca. 1460-1527), the last Muslim king in Spain, forced in 1492 to surrender his city to Ferdinand and Isabella. The spot from which Boabdil gazed for the last time at Granada is today a tourist attraction, known as ‘The Last Sigh of the Moor. (bookrags.com)
Falling Angels by Tracy Chevalier
Set among the sweeping skirts and social upheavals of Edwardian London, Tracy Chevalier’s Falling Angels is a meditation on change, loss, and recovery. Her central characters are two young girls of the same age, whose family plots are situated side-by-side in a cemetery modeled on Highgate. Lavinia Waterhouse is respectably middle-class, devoted, like her conventional, doting mother, to the right way to do things, although suspiciously well- schooled in subjects like funerary sculpture and the English practices of mourning. Her friend Maude Coleman comes from a slightly more privileged and free-thinking background. In contrast with Lavinia’s mother, Maude’s mother Kitty Coleman is well-educated by the standards of the day, and it has made her restless and irritable. But neither her reading, nor her gardening, nor her affair with the somber, high-thinking governor of the cemetery is enough for Kitty. She comes alive only when she discovers the women’s suffrage movement, and her devotion to the cause takes her away from Maude in every sense. (amazon.com)