Books like 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.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Desert of Love
Thérèse Desqueyroux
Acquitted of trying to poison her husband, Thérèse Desqueyroux travels home through the pine forests of the Landes, rehearsing the confession she means to make to him.
The Knot of Vipers
Louis, a rich, embittered old lawyer near Bordeaux, writes a long letter to his wife, to be found after his death, explaining his hatred for the family that is waiting for his money.
The Red and the Black
Julien Sorel, the ambitious son of a carpenter in Restoration France, schemes his way from tutor in a provincial mayor's household to the seminary and the salons of Paris, seducing and calculating his way up.
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.
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.
Nausea
A philosopher in 1930s France discovers that the sheer existence of objects fills him with revulsion, and his diary charts the horror of a world without meaning.
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.
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.
Pan
Lieutenant Thomas Glahn, living alone with his dog in a forest hut in northern Norway one summer, falls for Edvarda, the moody daughter of the local trader, and the two torment each other.
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.
The End of the Affair
A man in wartime London is tormented by a love affair that he believes ended through divine intervention, and his obsessive retelling reveals a faith he can't accept.
The Thibaults
Two brothers, Antoine, a dutiful young doctor, and Jacques, a rebel who runs away from school, grow up under their overbearing Catholic father in Paris in the years before the First World War.