Books like Strait Is the Gate
Jérôme loves his cousin Alissa from childhood, and she loves him, but her piety and her conviction that love must reach for something higher keep pushing him away.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Strait Is the Gate
The Pastoral Symphony
A Protestant pastor in the Swiss Jura takes in Gertrude, a blind, abandoned orphan girl, and in his journal tells how he taught her to see the world, and how he came to love her.
The Heretic of Soana
A young priest in the mountains above Lake Lugano is sent to deal with a family of outcasts living in sin on the slopes of Monte Generoso, and is undone by the eldest daughter.
The Immoralist
Michel, a young scholar who married without love, nearly dies of tuberculosis on his honeymoon in North Africa, and recovers with a fierce new hunger for life and for the boys around him.
Elias Portolu
Elias Portolu comes home to his Sardinian village after prison on the mainland and falls in love with Maddalena, the girl his brother is about to marry.
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.
Pierre and Luce
In Paris in early 1918, under German shelling, Pierre, an eighteen-year-old about to be called up, meets Luce, a poor young artist, in the Métro during an air raid.
The Mother
In a remote Sardinian mountain village, the mother of the young parish priest learns that her son, for whom she gave up everything, is visiting a lonely woman at night.
The Idiot
Prince Myshkin, a gentle epileptic returning to St Petersburg from a Swiss sanatorium, is drawn into the passions of a society he cannot read, caught between the beautiful, damaged Nastasya Filippovna and the proud Aglaya Yepanchin.
The Slave
After the Cossack massacres of 1648, Jacob, a learned young Jew, is sold as a slave to a peasant in a Polish mountain village and falls in love with his master's daughter, Wanda.
The Desert of Love
In a Paris bar, Raymond Courrèges, now in his thirties, sees again Maria Cross, the kept woman both he and his father, a Bordeaux doctor, fell for years before.
Synnøve Solbakken
In a Norwegian mountain valley, Thorbjørn, a quarrelsome farmer's son, loves Synnøve, the gentle girl of the neighbouring farm, but her pious parents won't hear of a match until he learns to master his temper.
Mirèio
A verse epic in Provençal: Mirèio, daughter of a rich farmer in the Crau, falls for Vincèn, a poor basket-maker's son, and her family refuses him.