100 books like First Love

This novel is a masterclass in unreliable narration. It follows Will, a young man estranged from his family and religion, as he attends college and falls in love with Phoebe.

As Will takes over and narrates his recollections of their relationship, Phoebe’s friendship with a man named John Leal, and her inculcation into a religious cult, he becomes increasingly untrustworthy. Will rails against John Leal, his lies, and the damage he has done to Phoebe, revealing his complicity in toxic masculinity and his own harmful actions.

Kwon renders her characters as entirely believable, frightening people, in lyrical and considered prose.

When I Hit You is a shattering and visceral account of a woman’s short-lived but harrowing abusive marriage, her family’s determination that she stay in that marriage, and her family’s way of understanding her ordeal once she has escaped.

Kandasamy writes with brutal detail of the husband’s total control of the narrator, who tries again and again to understand her experiences – and escape from them – through her writing. It is a powerful novel about resilience, courage, and determination, which, despite its subject matter, avoids sensationalism.

Sometimes the most toxic relationships are born out of an all-consuming desire to become friends (or more).

So is the case for the narrator of Second Place, M, who becomes obsessed with impressing an artist, L, who stays in her home during the COVID-19 pandemic. L is an awful guest, but M is cringe-worthy in her attempts to impress him, as she begins to reflect on her relationship with her daughter, her husband, and her own body.

The novel is indebted to the Mabel Dodge Luhan’s 1932 memoir Lorenzo in Taos, about DH Lawrence’s stay at her artists’ colony in New Mexico. Lawrence threatened to ‘destroy’ his hostess, as L threatens M in this novel. With every twist and turn, Second Place becomes more surreal, horrifying, and darkly humorous.

Anya and Luke like to listen to true crime podcasts together, but they refuse to share much else: Anya tries to hide her body hair, her family, how she escaped from Sarajevo, and her concern that Luke will leave her.

Luke is stoical, difficult to read, and Anya feels isolated from his wealthy, middle-class English family. When they get engaged, it seems as though Anya might finally be able to settle, but the declaration of commitment only sets off a series of events, estrangements, and secrets that will unravel Anya’s world.

With the tension and pacing of a thriller, and the introspection of a woman who has only known precarity, Sudjic’s novel is terrifying and gripping. 

This novel, by Meg Wolitzer, offers such a twist at the end, I’m not sure how to write about it as an example of a woman writer finding her voice without giving too much away.
The Wife is the story of a Noble Prize-winning author, Joe Castelman, and his wife, Joan, who have kept a terrible secret for all the years of their marriage. Because you know the topic of my selections here, you can surmise that Joan is also a writer, though she hides that fact. Her character tells the story, and we only slowly see the facets of their strange and deceptive marriage. It becomes clear that Joan is a very good writer indeed, and she’s tired of keeping her secret.

This clever tale will make you think about what it means to invent a life both on and off the page. And that there’s no stopping a… show more.

I’ve only been to Paris one time, but I feel as if I’ve been many times because I toured this city with Paula McLain and the story of Hadley Hemingway, Ernest’s first and most beloved wife. From the cafes to the cobbled streets to the parlors and apartments, I was engrossed. 

This is the wild story of Ernest Hemingway’s first wife. Hadley was a quiet twenty-eight-year-old woman who had given up on love until she met Ernest. Their whirlwind romance was ill-prepared for the fast living of Jazz Age Paris. It is a beautiful portrayal of love and loyalty, of art and heartbreak. 

Written in elegant prose and with vivid visual detail, this book uncovers an exotic lost world—lost both to the author, with the death of her parents, and to all of us, with the march of history.

This is the world of a British bookshop owner and his Italian-born wife, in Cairo after World War II, in the years leading up to the 1952 revolution that marked the awakening of independent feeling in Egypt. The city Warner uncovers, on the brink of the revolution and after a devastating war, is her childhood paradise, and she is not afraid to portray it as exotic even as she understands the risk of betraying a colonial gaze.

To recreate this world, she uses not only old photographs and her own memories, but also artefacts, from furniture to clothing, shoes, most of all books (not just their content, but as objects), which she researches meticulously,… show more.

I love the way in which this fascinating group biography of the female partners of renowned male writers brings these usually ignored figures into the limelight.

Ciuraru argues that behind the careers of many acclaimed literary figures stand the important contributions of their wives. These women offered intellectual as well as practical support. 

Many of these literary wives shelved their own creative aspirations to tend to the careers of their husbands.

But after their husbands’ deaths, some of these women found they finally had space for their own literary lives to start blossoming. 

Dr. Emerson Eggerichs has been helping couples have happier, healthier marriages by teaching husbands how to love their wives as Ephesians 5:25 commands, and by teaching wives how to respect their husbands as Ephesians 5:33 commands.

Despite what the world says today, men and women are different and they have different, not just desires, but needs. The book also contains testimonies of transformed marriages. Husbands and wives will learn principles for talking to, thinking about, and treating each other biblically. 

Stacy Schiff is a master biographer. Any subject she chooses (Cleopatra, Benjamin Franklin, Antoine de St. Exupéry, the accused witches of Salem) is elevated by the passion and persistence she brings to research and writing. Her Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Véra Nabokov, the wife of Vladimir, is another pioneering work that proves you don’t have to be at center stage to be worthy of a book. What did Véra do for Vladimir, and he for her? This is no take-down, not the kind of exposé that reveals the great man’s wife as the true genius, exploited and forgotten. It’s a love story of equals, two against (and for) the world.