18 books like The Painted Veil
The Good Soldier
This is the saddest story I have ever heard. We had known the Ashburnhams for nine seasons of the town of Nauheim with an extreme intimacy - or, rather with an acquaintanceship as loose and easy and yet as close as a good glove's with your hand. My wife and I knew Captain and Mrs Ashburnham as well as it was possible to know anybody, and yet, in another sense, we knew nothing at all about…
Shares Adultery, Married people, British, British and irish fiction
He knew he was right
Widely regarded as one of Trollope's most successful later novels,He Knew He Was Right is a study of marriage and of sexual relationships cast against a background of agitation for women's rights.
Shares Married people, Psychological fiction, Domestic fiction, British and irish fiction
A Handful of Dust
A Handful of Dust
Tony Last is an aristocrat whose attachment to an ideal feudal past is so profound that he is blind to his wife Brenda's boredom with the stately rhythms of country life. She sets herself up in a London flat and pursues an affair with the social-climbing idler John Beaver. Tragedy forces the collapse of their relationship to accelerate, and Tony seeks solace in a foolhardy search for El Dorado.
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The Sacred and Profane Love Machine
This is a story of different loves; and of how a man may need two women in such a way that he can be happy with neither. Sacred and profane love are related opposites; the one enjoyed renders the other necessary, so that the ever unsatisfied heart swings constantly to and fro.
Shares Married people, Domestic fiction
Heartburn
Is it possible to write a sidesplitting novel about the breakup of the perfect marriage? If the writer is Nora Ephron, the answer is a resounding yes. For in this inspired confection of adultery, revenge, group therapy, and pot roast, the creator of *Sleepless in Seattle* reminds us that comedy depends on anguish as surely as a proper gravy depends on flour and butter.
Seven months into her…
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Amelia
Against her mother's wishes, Amelia marries Captain William Booth, a young army officer, and runs away to London. William is unjustly imprisoned in Newgate, and is subsequently seduced by Miss Matthews. Amelia stays faithful to her husband and forgives his transgression, but William soon draws them into trouble again as he accrues gambling debts trying to lift the couple out of poverty.
Shares Married people, Domestic fiction, British and irish fiction
Tomorrow
In his first novel since "The Light of Day," the Booker Prize-winning author brilliantly distills 50 years into one suspenseful night, in an exploration of couples, parenthood, and a unique meditation on the mystery of happiness.
Shares Married people, Psychological fiction, Domestic fiction, New York Times reviewed
The silver spoon
Shares Domestic fiction, British and irish fiction with this book.
Vanity Fair
No one is better equipped in the struggle for wealth and worldly success than the alluring and ruthless Becky Sharp, who defies her impoverished background to clamber up the class ladder. Her sentimental companion Amelia, however, longs only for caddish soldier George. As the two heroines make their way through the tawdry glamour of Regency society, battles - military and domestic - are fought,…
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The two destinies
One of Wilkie Collins's 'sensation' novels of two lovers who face a life of accidents and vicissitudes when they are parted cruelly as children. Unknown to each other as the children they once were, they meet again and again in their adult lives, only to be separated. Wilkie brings in in his favourite tricks - bigamy, embezzlement, desertion, disfigurement, love that cannot be undone even in the…
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The Newcomes
The Newcomes is Thackeray's most essentially 'Victorian' novel, generous in its proportions, sharp in its criticism of the moral convolutions of the age, and encyclopaedic in its reference. Set in the 1830s and 1840s, a period of rapid change and of political and economic development, the novel considers the fortunes and misfortunes of a 'most respectable' extended middle-class family. The action…
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The Queen of Hearts
The elderly Brothers Owen, Morgan and Griffith live a quiet, retired life in the countryside, which is turned upside-down by Griffith's ward, the young Jessie Yelverton. Originally, her visit to them was to last only six weeks, but for a very certain reason, the gentlemen must find a way to prolong her visit and get Jessie to stay for ten more days. To make her stay, they promise to tell her an…
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My Lady's Money
Old Lady Lydiard sat meditating by the fireside, with three letters lying open on her lap.
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American Icon
American Icon
At the end of 2008, Ford Motor Company was just months away from running out of cash. With the auto industry careening toward ruin, Congress offered all three Detroit automakers a bailout. General Motors and Chrysler grabbed the lifeline, but Ford decided to save itself. Under the leadership of charismatic CEO Alan Mulally, the man who had saved Boeing, Ford had put together a bold plan to unify…
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Stoner
William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family…
Shares Adultery, Psychological fiction, Domestic fiction
Parlour games
Shares Adultery, Married people with this book.
Doctor Thorne
Doctor Thorne (1858) by Anthony Trollope is one of the charming series of loosely connected novels set in Barsetshire. While the good Dr. Thomas Thorne is at the heart of the novel, it is the romantic story of his niece Mary Thorne and Frank Gresham -- a story with the playful sensibility of Jane Austen and the heartwarming cheer of Dickens.
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Three Men on the Bummel
It is a collection on humorous ramblings and insights on German society held together with a thread of a story. It has the same charters as “Three Men in a Boat”. A Bummel is a German word and it signifies a journey or just a stroll. Along with humour it also provides an insight in Germany and it's people at the end of the 19th century.
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