Books like The Days of Abandonment
A woman in Turin left by her husband with two small children and a dog spirals through one sweltering summer into rage, obsession, and near-total dissolution.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Days of Abandonment
My Brilliant Friend
A shoemaker's brilliant daughter in postwar Naples forms an intense friendship that spans sixty years, surviving poverty, violence, ambition, and the changing face of Italy.
After the Divorce
When Costantino is sentenced to prison for a murder he didn't commit, his wife Giovanna, under a new law allowing divorce, takes a richer husband in their Sardinian village.
Territory of Light
Separated from her husband, a young woman moves with her two-year-old daughter into a fourth-floor Tokyo apartment flooded with light, and over twelve chapters, one for each month, tries to make a life there.
Stag's Leap
Pulitzer-winning book-length account of the year her husband of thirty years left her, in poems that stay unbearably present to every small event.
Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982
A thirty-three-year-old Seoul woman begins speaking in the voices of other women, and her psychiatrist's report on her life lays out the sexism she has met at every stage.
The Left-Handed Woman
A young woman in a suburb of Paris, after a sudden illumination, asks her husband to leave and begins to live alone with her eight-year-old son.
Still Born
Two Mexico City friends make opposite choices about motherhood and find their lives entwined anyway around an ailing newborn.
Cosima
Deledda's late novel of her own girlhood in Nuoro, Sardinia, where a girl from a strict, conventional household secretly writes stories and dreams of a life in literature.
Short Letter, Long Farewell
A young Austrian writer travels across America, from Providence to California, followed, or so he believes, by his estranged wife, who has left him a note telling him not to look for her.
Boulder
A lesbian line cook named Boulder agrees to have a child with her partner and watches her desire and identity unravel into brine and rock.
Jenny
In Rome, Jenny Winge, a twenty-eight-year-old Norwegian painter, accepts a proposal from a younger admirer she doesn't love, and back home in Kristiania his father comes into her life.
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.