Books like Half a Lifelong Romance
Shen Shijun, a young engineer in 1930s Shanghai, falls for Gu Manzhen, a colleague, and over the years their love is pulled apart by family and circumstance.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Half a Lifelong Romance
Madonna in a Fur Coat
Raif Efendi, a meek clerk in Ankara, leaves behind a notebook that tells of his youth in Berlin in the 1920s and his love for Maria Puder, a painter.
Love in a Fallen City
Stories of love and money in Shanghai and Hong Kong in the 1940s; in the title novella, a divorced woman goes to Hong Kong to win a rich playboy, and the Japanese attack.
Victoria
Johannes, the miller's son, has loved Victoria, the daughter of the manor, since childhood, and when he comes back a famous poet the gulf of class is still between them.
Lust, Caution
In occupied Shanghai, Wong Chia-chi, a young student actress, is drawn into a plot to seduce and assassinate Mr Yee, a collaborator in the puppet government.
The Bad Girl
Ricardo, a Peruvian who wants nothing more than to live in Paris, falls for a girl he meets as a teenager in 1950s Lima, and she comes back into his life over four decades under different names.
Waiting
Lin Kong, an army doctor in China, goes home every summer to ask his peasant wife from an arranged marriage for a divorce so he can marry a nurse, and every year she agrees and then changes her mind in court.
Swords and Crowns and Rings
Jackie Hanna, a boy who stops growing, and Cushie Moore, the girl he loves, grow up together in a small New South Wales town before the Depression drives them apart.
South of the Border, West of the Sun
A Tokyo bar owner recalls a lost love from his youth, caught between the pull of what might have been and the quiet resignation of what is.
Chéri
Léa de Lonval, a celebrated courtesan nearing fifty, has kept Chéri, the beautiful son of an old friend, as her lover for six years, and his mother has arranged for him to marry a young heiress.
Dark Avenues
Bunin's late stories of love, almost all of it brief, secret or ruined, set in the Russia of country estates, inns and railway stations he had lost.
The Museum of Innocence
In 1975 Kemal, the son of a rich Istanbul family, about to become engaged to a suitable girl, begins an affair with Füsun, a poor distant cousin who works in a boutique.
L'Arrabbiata
On the coast near Sorrento, Laurella, a proud young woman who has sworn never to marry, is rowed across to Capri by Antonino, a boatman who has loved her from afar.