Books like 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.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Awakening
Tender Is the Night
An American couple on the French Riviera watches their marriage disintegrate under the weight of alcoholism, infidelity, and the impossibility of recovering the past.
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.
Until August
Every August, on the anniversary of her mother's death, Ana Magdalena Bach takes the ferry to the island where her mother is buried, and one year she spends the night with a stranger.
New Orleans Sketches
Short prose sketches Faulkner wrote in 1925 for the Times-Picayune and The Double Dealer while living in the French Quarter, portraits of beggars, sailors, jockeys and bootleggers by a young writer finding his range.
The Beautiful and Damned
A glamorous New York couple drinks and drifts their way through the Jazz Age while waiting for a grandfather's inheritance.
Anna Karenina
A married aristocrat's affair with a dashing officer unravels her life, her family, and her sanity against the backdrop of Russian high society.
Madame Bovary
A provincial doctor's wife in mid-nineteenth-century France drowns in romantic fantasies, debt, and affairs, and her destruction exposes the poison of bourgeois aspiration.
One Part Woman
Kali and Ponna, a farming couple in Tamil Nadu, still have no child after twelve years of marriage, and their families suggest a festival night when a childless woman may lie with a stranger.
The Moviegoer
A young man in 1960s New Orleans drifts through movies, affairs, and existential malaise, searching for something real in a world of surfaces.
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.
Dept. of Speculation
A wife and mother in New York tracks her disintegrating marriage in spare, telegraphic fragments that add up to a devastating portrait of modern domestic life.
I Want To Show You More
Linked stories about faith, marriage, and desire in the American South, where Protestant conscience collides with carnal longing.