Books like 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.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Knot of Vipers
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 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.
Iza's Ballad
After her father's death, a well-meaning Budapest doctor brings her widowed mother to live in her modern flat and slowly dissolves the old woman's place in the world.
Père Goriot
In a shabby Paris boarding house, the ambitious young Eugène de Rastignac watches old Goriot give everything to his two daughters, who use him and leave him to die.
The Power and the Glory
A whiskey priest on the run from anti-clerical authorities in 1930s Mexico becomes an unlikely saint, too flawed and human to be a martyr but too stubborn to stop.
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.
The Counterfeiters
In Paris, schoolboy Bernard runs away after discovering he is illegitimate and becomes secretary to the novelist Édouard, who is writing a novel called The Counterfeiters about the very people around him.
Brideshead Revisited
A middle-class army captain remembers his Oxford friendship with the Catholic, doomed Sebastian Flyte and the long slow collapse of Brideshead in two wars.
Jean Barois
Told largely in dialogue and documents, the life of Jean Barois, raised a Catholic, who loses his faith to science, founds a crusading review during the Dreyfus Affair and faces death.
The Clown
Hans Schnier, a clown, comes home to his empty Bonn apartment after a bad fall on stage, his career collapsing since Marie, the Catholic woman he lived with, left him, and starts phoning everyone he knows.
The Scapegoat
An Englishman meets his French doppelgänger in a provincial railway bar, and wakes up having been forced to take over the stranger's life.
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.