Historical romances of recent times. Love affairs from the 19th century or between wars from the 20th century. The thing is to make the love shine between drama and tragedy. Because what matters is self-improvement, resilience and a little bit of eroticism if you push me, which never hurts when you want to give your body a little pleasure.
This is what María Dueñas or Sarah Lark do. And that's how good Alyson also gains her good battalion of readers. Because enjoying love affairs, seasoned with a pinch of history, adds more substance to the plots. In the end it's about having a good time with characters squeezed by circumstances. Those characters with whom we suffer but also long for their moment of revenge with life. If revenge is possible, of course. Because the thing today is not knowing when things end well.
Predictable loves but not always predictable plots. Scenarios with a disturbing point of existential mystery, of uncertainty about the future of the characters while the world goes through very dark known moments. That's what Alyson Richman is up to, trying to help his protagonists escape what seem like doomed destinies...
Top 3 Recommended Novels by Alyson Richman
Lovers of Prague
Love is always an exceptional literary argument when it does not finish materializing in time, although it does in its essence, that which is burned into memory and ends up transforming the past into an idealized space.
And it is that sometimes love ends up being parked by other circumstances, needs, priorities ... And so many times that moment of repetition, of coincidence, can come, if there can be something of coincidence in rediscovering the look that you captivated at some point and that you rejected for other reasons ...
If love is a coincidence, it is something that is perfectly nuanced in this novel. If the decisions made by the heart are not marking a path towards reunion beyond reason. Fate can be what our hearts write behind our backs, offering us our own book later, as the best gift we can give ourselves.
At other times, love escapes forced by sad circumstances. Madness and war break it all. But even then our heart continues to take note of, when the time comes, no matter how many years have passed, to recognize that look that made him shudder the first time.
In the Prague of the XNUMXs, Josef and Lenka's dreams are shattered by the imminent Nazi invasion. Decades later, thousands of miles apart, in New York, two strangers recognize each other through a glance. Fate gives lovers a new opportunity.
From the comfort and the glamorous from bustling Prague before the occupation, to the horrors of Nazism that seemed to devour the whole of Europe, Lovers of Prague reveals the power of first love, the endurance of the human spirit, and the power of memory.
The velvet hours
A courtesan is not the same as a prostitute. The charm of a palace is not the same as the darkest fornicatio of the brothel at street level. The memories of a woman given over to worldly pleasures where the world is glory cannot be the same as those of a woman given over to frustrations where the world is underworld. In brothels women carried blame, in palaces they end up hoarding secrets.
Marthe de Florian, a famous courtesan during her youth, sought to fill her existence with art and luxuries, evading memories of a childhood overshadowed by poverty and the dark alleys of Montmartre. As war is about to break out in Europe, she uses the prized possessions she has collected over a lifetime to share her story and her most intimate secrets to her granddaughter Solange, a young woman who aspires to be writer.
Among all the wonders she keeps in her apartment, the most admirable are a dazzling pearl necklace and a magnificent portrait of Marthe painted by the Italian artist Giovanni Boldini. As Marthe's story unfolds, like velvet itself, sewn with her own light and shadow, Solange hopes to find a personal path to confront her family's secrets.
The Italian garden
Escaping from home out of necessity turns into drama and adventure. The instincts of life impose themselves on everything with the need for revenge or recomposition. Along the way, with that intensity of the soul in debt, great things can happen.
Portofino, Italy, 1943. Young Elodie gets off a boat, too terrified to avoid the control of German soldiers, until a stranger comes to her aid.
Just a few months earlier, Elodie was a promising cellist in Verona, but when Mussolini's regime murders her family, she joins the resistance, led by Luca, a passionate bookseller. Although as the occupation progresses, Elodie will be forced to flee.
In Portofino, the young doctor Angelo Rosselli, carries painful secrets and lives afflicted with guilt. But Elodie's arrival will awaken something in him that he thought he had lost forever.
Other Recommended Books by Alyson Richman
The thread collectors
Among endless cotton fields, music and idiosyncrasies were composed. In the hard work of the slave, feelings of brotherhood are awakened that no potentate or powerful could ever feel, no matter how much he wanted to buy it...
1863. The United States bleeds to death in a fratricidal war that pits the abolitionist colonies of the north against the slave-owning colonies of the south. Stella, a resourceful New Orleans slave, embroiders coded maps onto scraps of clothing to help her plantation companions escape.
For fear of the reprisals that her clandestine activities may entail, Stella keeps hidden her relationship with William, a slave who has managed to escape to join the fight. Meanwhile, in New York, Lily, wife of a Union Army soldier who is stationed in Louisiana, makes quilts and bandages for the men at the front with other women.
When she stops hearing from her husband, she decides to make a dangerous journey south to look for him. That's where Stella and Lily's paths will unexpectedly cross to discover how friendship has the power to save us.
