18 books like The Scarlet Letter
Solitaire
'I don't ever remember not being serious. As far as I'm concerned, I came out of the womb spouting cynicism and wishing for rain.'
My name is Tori Spring. I like the sleep and I like to blog. Last year I had friends.
Things were very different, I guess, but that's all over now.
Now there's Solitaire. And Michael Holden.
I don't know what Solitaire are trying to do.
And I don't care about…
Shares: Young Adult
The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne's powerful tale of forbidden love, shame and revenge comes to life in this manga presentation of the classic story. When Hester Prynne bears an illegitimate child, she is introduced to the ugliness, complexity, and ultimately the strength of the human spirit. Though set in a Puritan community during the Colonial American period, the moral dilemmas of personal responsibility…
Shares: Illegitimate children, Puritans, Adultery, Triangles
Adam Bede
Adam Bede is a hardy young carpenter who cares for his aging mother. His one weakness is the woman he loves blindly: the trifling town beauty, Hetty Sorrel, whose only delights are her baubles-and the delusion that the careless Captain Donnithorne may ask for her hand. Betrayed by their innocence, both Adam and Hetty allow their foolish hearts to trap them in a triangle of seduction, murder, and…
Shares: Illegitimate children in fiction, Illegitimate children, Triangles, Drama
The Postman Always Rings Twice
Frank Chambers, un trotamundos sin empleo, narra en primera persona la atracción que siente por Cora Papadakis, la esposa de un emigrante de origen griego propietario de una taberna en California, y cómo se vuelven amantes unidos por el ardor y la ambición. Pero no será tan fácil librarse del viejo marido. Y habrá que contar, además, con el inescrutable destino: ese cartero que siempre llama dos…
Shares: Adultery in fiction, Adultery, Triangles, Drama
Jude the Obscure
Hardy's last work of fiction, Jude the Obscure is also one of his most gloomily fatalistic, depicting the lives of individuals who are trapped by forces beyond their control. Jude Fawley, a poor villager, wants to enter the divinity school at Christminster. Sidetracked by Arabella Donn, an earthy country girl who pretends to be pregnant by him, Jude marries her and is then deserted. He earns a…
Shares: Illegitimate children, Adultery, History
The dead secret
The Dead Secret is a novel published by Wilkie Collins, first in 1857 as a series in Charles Dickens Household Words weekly magazine and later the same year as a book. Much like his later novel The Woman in White (1860), it can be considered one of the earliest example of a sensation novel, as it contains themes of illegitimacy, blackmail, and false identity.
Shares: Illegitimate children in fiction, Illegitimate children, History
Lancelot
"A modern knight-errant on a quest after evil; grotesque, convincing and chilling." —The New York Times Book Review
Fed up with the excesses of the 1970s, Lancelot Andrews Lamar, a liberal lawyer and distinguished member of the New Orleans gentry, is determined to stop the modern world's ethical collapse. His quest begins with his wife—an actress who he suspects has been cheating on him for…
Shares: Adultery in fiction, Adultery
The Quickie
Lauren Stillwell is not your average damsel in distress. When the NYPD cop discovers her husband leaving a hotel with another woman, she decides to beat him at his own game. But her revenge goes dangerously awry, and she finds her world spiraling into a hell that becomes more terrifying by the hour.In a further twist of fate, Lauren must take on a job that threatens everything she stands for.…
Shares: Adultery in fiction, Adultery
Therese Raquin
Thérèse Raquin [teʁɛz ʁakɛ̃] is an 1868 novel by French writer Émile Zola, first published in serial form in the literary magazine L'Artiste in 1867. It was Zola's third novel, though the first to earn wide fame. The novel's adultery and murder were considered scandalous and famously described as "putrid" in a review in the newspaper Le Figaro.
Thérèse Raquin tells the story of a young woman,…
Shares: Adultery in fiction, Adultery
Effi Briest
Unworldly young Effi Briest is married off to Baron von Innstetten, an austere and ambitious civil servant twice her age, who has little time for his new wife. Isolated and bored, Effi finds comfort and distraction in a brief liaison with Major Crampas, a married man with a dangerous reputation. But years later, when Effi has almost forgotten her affair, the secret returns to haunt her - with…
Shares: Adultery in fiction, Adultery
Анна Каренина
Described by William Faulkner as the best novel ever written and by Fyodor Dostoevsky as “flawless,” Anna Karenina tells of the doomed love affair between the sensuous and rebellious Anna and the dashing officer, Count Vronsky. Tragedy unfolds as Anna rejects her passionless marriage and thereby exposes herself to the hypocrisies of society. Set against a vast and richly textured canvas of…
Shares: Adultery, Classics, Drama, History
The day boy and the night girl
A curse from a witch decrees that a boy will never wake at night nor sleep during the day; while a girl is doomed never to sleep at night nor wake during the day, until a twist of fate brings them together.
Shares: Classics, Religion
The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton's most famous novel, written immediately after the end of the First World War, is a brilliantly realized anatomy of New York society in the 1870s, the world in which she grew up, and from which she spent her life escaping. Newland Archer, Wharton's protagonist, charming, tactful, enlightened, is a thorough product of this society; he accepts its standards and abides by its rules but…
Shares: Triangles, Drama, Historical Fiction
Pan Michael An historical novel
The third and final book of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Trilogy takes a closer and more intimate look at one of the series’ protagonists: Pan Michael Volodyovski. The Polish Commonwealth has been through intense periods of war, and the peace that follows leaves one of its greatest heroes, Pan Michael, finally free to marry his beloved Panna Anusia. But in a twist of fate, she falls ill and dies, leaving…
Shares: Historical Fiction, History
St. George and St. Michael
It was the middle of autumn, and had rained all day. Through the lozenge-panes of the wide oriel window the world appeared in the slowly gathering dusk not a little dismal. The drops that clung trickling to the dim glass added rain and gloom to the landscape beyond, whither the eye passed, as if vaguely seeking that help in the distance, which the dripping hollyhocks and sodden sunflowers…
Shares: Historical Fiction, History
East of Eden
Set in the rich farmland of the Salinas Valley, California, this powerful, often brutal novel, follows the interwined destinies of two families - the Trasks and the Hamiltons - whose generations hopelessly re-enact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel. Here Steinbeck created some of his most memorable characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of…
Shares: Classics
Lord of the Flies
Lord of the Flies is the 1954 debut novel of British author William Golding. The plot concerns a group of prepubescent British boys who are stranded on an uninhabited island and their disastrous attempts to govern themselves that lead to a descent into savagery. The novels themes include morality, leadership, and the tension between civility and chaos.
Shares: Classics
The Count of Monte Cristo
Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantès is confined to the grim fortress of If. There he learns of a great hoard of treasure hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo and he becomes determined not only to escape, but also to use the treasure to plot the destruction of the three men responsible for his incarceration.
Shares: Classics