Stephanie Cowell

Stephanie Cowell- a former opera singer, balladeer and writer. And on top of that, a mother of two sons and three stepsons. Stephanie, who resides in New York City with her husband, Russell Clay (a poet), and children, also writes historical and literary articles and reviews for magazines.

Genres: Historical, Historical Romance

New and upcoming books

September 2025

The Man in the Stone Cottage

Series

Nicholas Cooke
1. Nicholas Cooke (1993)
2. The Physician of London (1995)

Novels

   The Players (1997)
   Marrying Mozart (2004)
   Claude & Camille (2010)
   The Boy in the Rain (2023)
   The Man in the Stone Cottage (2025)

Stephanie Cowell recommends

The Queen's Musician (2025)
Martha Jean Johnson
"A gripping, unforgettable story of the gentle Tudor musician Mark Smeaton . . . Beautifully written and impossible to put down. I had tears in my eyes."

The Proprietor's Song (2023)
Janet Goldberg
"Janet Goldberg writes so powerfully of loss and grief. We follow the crooked paths of people left stumbling behind those who have gone on (a son, a sister) until we recognize our own intimate irresolvable journey in theirs. The author manages to say the unsayable. A truly original and effervescent writer."

The Portraitist (2022)
Susanne Dunlap
"Written with breathless drama, The Portraitist follows the rise of the gifted portraitist Adelaide Labille-Guiard in Paris during the last years of the late eighteenth century. The novel is a luminous depiction of Paris and those terrible times seen through the astute, compassionate eyes of a woman who had to paint. Every bit of lace or royal carriage or bloody cobblestone is alive in the writing. The rain drumming on the skylight and a misbuttoned coat speak. Go to those streets with this book in your hand to follow her footsteps and those long-gone, turbulent times will come alive to you as if they were yesterday."

Even So (2021)
Lauren B Davis
"No one can express the contradictions of the human spirit as well as Lauren B. Davis. We swim in the wisdom of the language and the complexity of emotions. Even So is one woman's spiritual growth from selfishness to compassion to redemption. It is a totally gripping book by a master author."

Rhapsody (2021)
Mitchell James Kaplan
"Mitchell James Kaplan has captured a whole world in his luminous journey through the jazz age in fast-paced New York City with this love story of composer Kay Swift and the brilliant but elusive George Gershwin. Kay first heard him playing his Rhapsody in Blue, but she was married to a wealthy man and Gershwin could be faithful only to his own genius. Through Broadway theaters and concerts, he was rising so fast that neither the Great Depression, nor the darkening rise of Hitler across the sea, nor the impossible difficulties of writing the first black folk-opera Porgy and Bess could stop him. Through their love affair, Gershwin and Kay gave fire to each other's music until nothing could derail his meteoric success but time."

The Woman in the Moonlight (2020)
Patricia Morrisroe
"I was utterly absorbed in this beautiful novel of the brilliant, impossible Beethoven and the lovely countess who inspired one of his greatest sonatas. The story is so moving I was sorry to come to the last pages. I read them with tears in my eyes."

Beyond the Ghetto Gates (2020)
Michelle Cameron
"I devoured this engrossing, passionate story of a young Jewish woman in 1796 who wants only to work with her beloved father in his workshop. But even after Napoleon invades Italy, liberates her city, and breaks down the ghetto gates, customs still enclose Mirelle both as a Jew and a woman. And outside the gates are waiting the riots of anti-Semitism, tragic loss, and a difficult love. These pages are splashed with brilliant colors between the dark corners of this lost world where ghetto buildings are built so close and high that people cannot see the stars. You will live and breathe this young woman’s struggles to have what she wants and still honor her family until the unexpected last paragraphs - and then for a long time after."

The Island of Doves (2014)
Kelly O'Connor McNees
"McNees writes with warmth, drama, humor, and tenderness."

Mozart's Blood (2010)
Louise Marley
"Eerie, beautiful... has a poetic, haunting sense of time and place."

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