Books like Waiting
Lin Kong, an army doctor in China, goes home every summer to ask his peasant wife from an arranged marriage for a divorce so he can marry a nurse, and every year she agrees and then changes her mind in court.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Waiting
Half a Lifelong Romance
Shen Shijun, a young engineer in 1930s Shanghai, falls for Gu Manzhen, a colleague, and over the years their love is pulled apart by family and circumstance.
Dodsworth
Sam Dodsworth, a newly retired Midwestern car manufacturer, sets off on a long tour of Europe with his restless wife Fran, who is determined to find the life she thinks she has missed.
South of the Border, West of the Sun
A Tokyo bar owner recalls a lost love from his youth, caught between the pull of what might have been and the quiet resignation of what is.
The Good Soldier
A naive American narrator tries to tell the 'saddest story' of his friendship with Edward Ashburnham and the four-way adultery he failed to notice until it had ended them all.
The Age of Innocence
A man in 1870s New York is torn between a conventional fiancée and a scandalous countess, and the society that constrains his choice also defines who he is.
Men Without Women
Seven stories about men who have lost the women in their lives, including an actor who hires a young woman as his driver and finds himself telling her about his late wife.
The Beggar Maid
Linked stories of Rose, from a poor childhood in Hanratty, Ontario, with her stepmother Flo, to marriage to a rich young man and a career on television.
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.
East Wind: West Wind
Kwei-lan, raised in the old ways to be a perfect Chinese wife, tells a foreign friend of her marriage to a doctor trained in the West who wants her to unbind her feet.
Hotel du Lac
Edith Hope, a writer of romance novels, is packed off by her friends to a quiet Swiss hotel out of season after an unforgivable lapse, and passes the time watching the other guests.
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.
The Stories of John Cheever
Sixty-one stories of the American suburbs and cities after the war, from The Enormous Radio to The Swimmer.