Books like Pavilion of Women
On her fortieth birthday, Madame Wu, the serene mistress of a great Chinese household, announces she will choose a concubine for her husband so that she can at last live for herself.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Pavilion of Women
East Wind: West Wind
Kwei-lan, raised in the old ways to be a perfect Chinese wife, tells a foreign friend of her marriage to a doctor trained in the West who wants her to unbind her feet.
The Good Earth
A Chinese peasant marries an unloved kitchen slave, and across forty years of drought, revolution, and unexpected wealth they rise and the land goes on telling them what they are.
Dream of the Red Chamber
Jia Baoyu, the sensitive heir of a great aristocratic family in eighteenth-century China, grows up among his cousins in a vast garden, as love, ambition and debt bring the household down.
His Only Wife
Afi Tekple, a young seamstress in a small Ghanaian town, is married to Elikem, a wealthy man she barely knows, who misses the wedding, and moves to Accra, where she learns that his family married her to him to draw him away from another woman.
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
In a remote county of nineteenth-century China, seven-year-old Lily is matched with Snow Flower as a laotong, an 'old same' for life, and the two girls write to each other in nu shu, a secret women's script, on a silk fan as foot-binding, marriage and upheaval shape their lives.
So Long a Letter
After her husband's death, a Senegalese schoolteacher writes to her oldest friend about the day he took a second wife and the life she rebuilt afterward.
Real Americans
In New York in 1999 Lily Chen, twenty-two and the daughter of Chinese immigrants, is scraping by on an unpaid internship when she falls for Matthew, the son of an enormously rich family. In 2021 their teenage son, Nick, who knows little of where he comes from, goes looking for his father.
Rosshalde
On the estate of Rosshalde, the celebrated painter Johann Veraguth lives estranged from his wife, his one joy their small son Pierre, as a friend urges him to leave for India.
The Awakening
A married woman in turn-of-the-century Louisiana begins to awaken to her own desires, and the freedom she discovers is incompatible with the world she lives in.
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.
Kristin Lavransdatter
In fourteenth-century Norway, a farmer's daughter defies her father to marry the charming, reckless knight she loves and lives out the long consequences of that choice.
The Forsyte Saga
Three novels following the Forsytes, a wealthy London family of the late Victorian age, beginning with Soames, a solicitor who treats his beautiful wife Irene as one more of his possessions.