18 books like The Wings of the Dove
Daisy Miller
A beautiful American girl, Daisy Miller, is pursued by the sophisticated Winterbourne, who moves in fairly conservative circles. Their courtship is frowned upon by the other Americans they meet in Switzerland and Italy because Daisy is too vivacious and flirtatious and neither belongs to, nor follows the rules of, their society. The novella is a comment on American and European attitudes towards…
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The hours
A daring, deeply affecting third novel by the author of A Home at the End of the World and Flesh and Blood. In The Hours, Michael Cunningham, widely praised as one of the most gifted writers of his generation, draws inventively on the life and work of Virginia Woolf to tell the story of a group of contemporary characters struggling with the conflicting claims of love and inheritance, hope and…
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The nigger of the "Narcissus"
“My task... is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel - it is, before all, to make you see. That - and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there, according to your deserts, encouragement, consolation, fear, charm, all you demand - and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask” Conrad, from the preface to "The…
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The Headsman: Or, The Abbaye Des Vignerons. A Tale
Early in October 1832, a travelling-carriage stopped on the summit of that long descent where the road pitches from the elevated plain of Moudon in Switzerland to the level of the lake of Geneva, immediately above the little city of Vevey. The postilion had dismounted to chain a wheel, and the halt enabled those he conducted to catch a glimpse of the lovely scenery of that remarkable view.
Shares: Americans, Historical Fiction, Classic Literature
A Room with a View
Lucy has her rigid, middle-class life mapped out for her, until she visits Florence with her uptight cousin Charlotte, and finds her neatly ordered existence thrown off balance. Her eyes are opened by the unconventional characters she meets at the Pension Bertolini: flamboyant romantic novelist Eleanor Lavish, the Cockney Signora, curious Mr Emerson and, most of all, his passionate son…
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Circle of Friends
It began with Benny Hogan and Eve Malone, growing up, inseparable, in the village of Knockglen. Benny--the only child, yearning to break free from her adoring parents...Eve--the orphaned offspring of a convent handyman and a rebellious blueblood, abandoned by her mother's wealthy family to be raised by nuns. Eve and Benny--they knew the sins and secrets behind every villager's lace…
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Une page d'amour
Je me decide a joindre a ce volume l'arbre genealogique des Rougon-Macquart. Deux raisons me determinent. La premiere est que beaucoup de personnes m'ont demande cet arbre. Il doit, en effet, aider les lecteurs a se retrouver, parmi les membres assez nombreux de la famille dont je me suis fait l'historien. La seconde raison est plus compliquee. Je regrette de n'avoir pas publie l'arbre dans le…
Shares: Women, Social life and customs, Classic Literature
The Bostonians
First published in 1886, The Bostonians is one of James' wittiest social satires. It begins with the arrival in Boston of Basil Ransom, in search of a career. The book turns on the relationship between Ransom, a conservative civil war veteran, his feminist cousin Olive Chancellor, and Verena Tarrant, a newcomer to their circle whose affections are sought by both Olive and Basil.James' ambivalence…
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Five Days in Paris
Peter Haskell has everything.. power, position, a career and a family that mean everything to him and for which he has sacrificed a great deal. Compromise has been key, and integrity is the base on which he lives. Olivia Thatcher, the wife of a famous senator, is trapped in a web of duty and obligation, married to a man she once loved and no longer even knows. Peter and Olivia meet in Paris,…
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The Bean Trees Anniversary Edition
Taylor, a poor Kentuckian making her way west with an abandoned baby girl, stops in Tucson where she finds friends and discovers resources in apparently empty places.
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The Nonesuch
At the age of five-and-thirty, Sir Waldo Hawkridge, wealthy, handsome, eligible, illustrious, and known as the nonesuch for his athletic prowess, and when he comes north to inspect his unusual inheritance at Broom hall in the West Riding, his arrival leads to the most entertaining of ramifications. When they learned that Sir Waldo Hawkridge was coming, the village gentry were thrown into a…
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Das Ende einer Affäre
"This is a record of hate far more than of love," writes Maurice Bendrix in the opening passages of The End of the Affair, of which he is the narrator. And it is a strange hate indeed that compels him to set down the retrospective account of his adulterous love affair with Sarah Miles - a hate bred of a passion that ultimately lost out to God. Now, a year after Sarah's death, Bendrix seeks to…
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The Portrait of a Lady
Young American Isabel Archer charms European society, but falls prey to the machinations of a calculating older woman.
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Tales of
The last of the Valerii.--The real thing.--The lesson of the master.--Daisy Miller.
Shares: Americans in fiction, Americans, Travel, Social life and customs
Our Old Home
Our Old Home, a series of English sketches by Nathaniel Hawthorne. This volume of charming sketches was published in 1863, and (in the words of the author) presents “a few of the external aspects of English scenery and life, especially those that are touched with the antique charm to which our countrymen are more susceptible than are the people among whom it is of native growth.”
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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…
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The Agony Column
London that historic summer was almost unbearably hot. It seems, looking back, as though the big baking city in those days was meant to serve as an anteroom of torture—an inadequate bit of preparation for the hell that was soon to break in the guise of the Great War. About the soda-water bar in the drug store near the Hotel Cecil many American tourists found solace in the sirups and creams of…
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El Honor del Silencio
The drama of a young Japanese woman, Hiroko, who comes to the U.S. to attend college and falls in love with a white American, Peter. Their romance is shattered by Pearl Harbor. He goes off to war, she to a concentration camp. Life will reunite them, but will it be the same?
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