18 books like Waiting
Misery
Novelist Paul Sheldon has plans to make the difficult transition from writing historical romances featuring heroine Misery Chastain to publishing literary fiction. Annie Wilkes, Sheldon's number one fan, rescues the author from the scene of a car accident. The former nurse takes care of him in her remote house, but becomes irate when she discovers that the author has killed Misery off in his…
Shares: Community pick
China Road
Route 312 is the Chinese Route 66. It flows three thousand miles from east to west, passing through the factory towns of the coastal areas, through the rural heart of China, then up into the Gobi Desert, where it merges with the Old Silk Road. The highway witnesses every part of the social and economic revolution that is turning China upside down.In this utterly surprising and deeply personal…
Shares: China, Manners and customs, Social life and customs
Pavilion of Women
A los cuarenta años, Madame Wu, esposa de un miembro de una de las dinastías de terratenientes más consideradas de China, abandona voluntariamente la vida matrimonial y busca una concubina para su marido. Su decisión cambia la vida de todos los que la rodean... A las puertas de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, la familia se enfrenta a la encrucijada entre tradición, comunismo y pensamiento occidental,…
Shares: China, Married people, Romance & Relationships
The Portrait of a Lady
Young American Isabel Archer charms European society, but falls prey to the machinations of a calculating older woman.
Shares: Triangles, Married people, Manners and customs, Romance & Relationships
The troll garden
"This collection of Willa Cather stories - her first book of fiction and the capstone of her early career - is as relevant today as at the time of its initial publication. As different and individually distinguished as the seven stories may be, they share as their subject the role and status of the artist in American society.
The passions, ambitions, and pretensions, the cant and the pathos of…
Shares: Manners and customs, Romance & Relationships, Social life and customs
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, Married people, Social life and customs, Romance
The smoke jumper
A woman must choose between two men, best friends, who both love her, in a story of love, loyalty, honor, and guilt set against the perilous backdrop of wilderness firefighting.
Shares: Triangles, Psychological fiction, Romance & Relationships, Romance
On a Chinese screen
On a Chinese Screen was first published in 1922 by Heinemann Publishers, London. Its 58 short vignettes are based on Maugham’s travels along the Yangtze River from 1919 to 1920. Although later editions of the book added the subtitle “Sketches of Life in China,” there are actually only a few descriptions of the places he visited and the local Chinese people he met; rather, Maugham focuses on…
Shares: China, Manners and customs, Social life and customs
The Hand Of Justice
For the twentieth anniversary of the start of the Matthew Bartholomew series, Sphere is delighted to reissue all of the medieval monk's cases with beautiful new series-style covers.------------------------------------The winter of 1353 has been appallingly wet, there is a fever outbreak amongst the poorer townspeople and the country is not yet fully recovered from the aftermath of the plague. The…
Shares: Physicians, History
Far from the Madding Crowd
Independent and spirited Bathsheba Everdene has come to Weatherbury to take up her position as a farmer on the largest estate in the area. Her bold presence draws three very different suitors: the gentleman-farmer Boldwood, soldier-seducer Sergeant Troy and the devoted shepherd Gabriel Oak. Each, in contrasting ways, unsettles her decisions and complicates her life, and tragedy ensues,…
Shares: Triangles, Manners and customs, Social life and customs, Romance
Sons of Heaven
"Sons of Heaven is an epic novel set against the backdrop of one of modern history's most haunting events: the Tiananmen Square massacre. In June 1989, the world watched in horror as China's military was mobilized to suppress a student movement that stood for peaceful democracy. Hundreds were killed; some say thousands. No one knows for sure.".
"But the image that remains most powerful is that…
Shares: China, History
Middlemarch
Eliot’s epic of 19th century provincial social life, set in a fictitious Midlands town in the years 1830-32, has several interlocking storylines blended effortlessly together to form a fully coherent narrative. Its main themes are the status of women, social expectations and hypocrisy, religion, political reform and education. It has often been called the greatest novel in the English language.
Shares: Triangles, Married people, Social life and customs, Romance
The bride bargain
When dropped from the wagon train along the Platte River for not pulling their load, Clara Fields is determined to find a way to provide for her newly-widowed aunt. So she strikes a bargain with an aging storekeeper that in exchange for finding a bride for his son Clara can have his house to run a boardinghouse. But Dr. Saul Reed is not interested in getting tied down to Buttonwood in the middle…
Shares: Physicians, Romance & Relationships, History
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, Manners and customs, Social life and customs
Cristo si è fermato a Eboli
It was to Lucania, a desolate land in southern Italy, that Carlo Levi?a doctor, painter, philosopher, and man of letters?was confined as a political prisoner because of his opposition to Italy?s Fascist government at the start of the Ethiopian war in 1935. While there, Levi reflected on the harsh landscape and its inhabitants, peasants who lived the same lives their ancestors had, constantly…
Shares: Physicians, Manners and customs, Social life and customs
The complete works of O. Henry [pseud.]
The FICTION & PROSE LITERATURE collection includes books from the British Library digitised by Microsoft. The collection provides readers with a perspective of the world from some of the 18th and 19th century’s most talented writers. Written for a range of audiences, these works are a treasure for any curious reader looking to see the world through the eyes of ages past. Beyond the main body of…
Shares: Manners and customs, Social life and customs
Parlour games
A game of "Questions and Commands" depicted by [[James Gillray, 1788]]
Shares: Married people, Manners and customs, Social life and customs
The Painted Veil
A story of the beautiful but love-starve Kitty Fane who is forced to accompany her husband to the heart of a cholera epidemic. She is compelled by her awakening conscience to reassess her life and learn how to love.
Shares: Married people, Psychological fiction