I’m a novelist, essayist, and short story writer who finds domestic life as fascinating and complex as any board room battle or historical event. I love books about marriage and family because so few people are willing to talk honestly about them. Finding a great book is like meeting a new friend who is willing to tell you their secrets and then share hard-won advice.
It’s been nearly ten years since I first read this book and I can still remember what the characters were wearing in the first chapter. Now that’s visceral storytelling! The author’s ability to capture his intense obsession with his future wife is familiar, poignant, and heart-warming. Yglesias’ portrayal of the couple’s long and, at times, bumpy marriage, makes this one of the most complex and honest portrayals of a marriage that I have ever read. That this is also a book about cancer and death does nothing to diminish the feelings of hope and gratitude embodied on every page.
A Happy Marriage is both intimate and expansive: It is the story of Enrique Sabas and his wife, Margaret, a novel that alternates between the romantic misadventures of the first weeks of their courtship and the final months of Margaret's life as she says good-bye to her family, friends, and children -- and to Enrique. Spanning thirty years, this achingly honest story is about what it means for two people to spend a lifetime together -- and what makes a happy marriage.
Yglesias's career as a novelist began in 1970 when he wrote an autobiographical novel at sixteen, hailed by…
You may have heard of the movie with Glen Close or even seen it, but trust me, the book is a thousand times better, funnier, and more biting. (I picked up the paperback while on vacation with my two toddler sons and locked myself in the bathroom at one point just to get through another chapter uninterrupted.) In short,The Wifeis the story of a marriage between a world-famous novelist, Joe Castleman, and his wife Joan, and the secret they’ve kept for decades. Wolitzer’s humor and pointed observations about gender inequality make you nod in recognition while laughing so hard your body hurts.
THE WIFE is the story of the long and stormy marriage between a world-famous novelist, Joe Castleman, and his wife Joan and the secret they've kept for decades. The novel opens just as Joe is about to receive a prestigious international award, The Helsinki Prize, to honour his career as one of America's preeminent novelists of the Mailer-Bellow-Updike school. But this isn't a book for writers; it's a book for readers, for people who are interested in questions such as: Is there a 'male' voice and a 'female' voice? Do men and women see the world differently, and how? THE…
Technically, this is not a book about marriage. It’s not even really a book about divorce, although there is one. It’s really a book about men and love and the kind of longing we carry with us from the time we first discover sex in our teens all the way through middle age and its discontents. Although the book is technically a series of essays, it is really one long extended chronology of boys met, men married, risks taken, failures unanticipated. You will laugh, cry and cringe in recognition.
The "utterly compelling, uncommonly beautiful" collection of personal essays (Newsweek) that established Jo Ann Beard as one of the leading writers of her generation.
Cousins, mothers, sisters, dolls, dogs, best friends: these are the fixed points in Jo Ann Beard's universe, the constants that remain when the boys of her youth -- and then men who replace them -- are gone. This widely praised collection of autobiographical essays summons back, with astonishing grace and power, moments of childhood epiphany as well as the cataclysms of adult life: betrayal, divorce, death. The Boys of My Youth heralded the arrival of an…
Before Tinder, before The Real Housewives franchise, before even love songs and romance novels, marriage was more deal book than love match. In this delightfully subversive novel of manners, Edith Wharton tells the story of Lily Bart, a well-born but impoverished woman on the hunt for a suitable (e.g., wealthy) mate that won’t bore her silly, control, or betray her. That Lily can’t or won’t conform to what she must do to survive is part tragedy, part triumph. You can’t help but root for Lily’s idealism even as you wish she would just save herself already. Wharton’s eye for the telling social detail makes this 100+ old book feel modern and familiar.
A bestseller when it was published nearly a century ago, this literary classic established Edith Wharton as one of the most important American writers in the twentieth century-now with a new introduction from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan.
Wharton's first literary success-a devastatingly accurate portrait of New York's aristocracy at the turn of the century-is considered by many to be her most important novel, and Lily Bart, her most unforgettable character. Impoverished but well-born, the beautiful and beguiling Lily realizes a secure future depends on her acquiring a wealthy husband. But with her romantic indiscretion, gambling debts, and a maelstrom…
Don’t worry that this novel is part of a trilogy; it can easily be enjoyed on its own. The Man in the Wooden Hat tells the story of the courtship and marriage of a man referred to as “Old Filth” (stands for “failed in London, try Hong Kong”) and his wife, Betty. Gardam’s hilarious look at ex-pat life in Hong Kong and elsewhere is wildly entertaining and her minor characters are as quirky and surprising as Betty and Old Filth. PS: The surprising reveal at the end makes this portrait all the more delicious.
Second in the Old Filth trilogy. “An astute, subtle depiction of marriage . . . absolutely wonderful” (The Washington Post).
Acclaimed as Jane Gardam’s masterpiece, Old Filth is a lyrical novel that recalls the fully lived life of Sir Edward Feathers. The Man in the Wooden Hat is the history of his marriage told from the perspective of his wife, Betty, a character as vivid and enchanting as Filth himself.
They met in Hong Kong after the war. Betty had spent the duration in a Japanese internment camp. Filth was already a successful barrister, handsome, fast becoming rich, in need…
Living in a community means going along with certain unspoken social norms. But where is the line between conformity and complicity? Good Neighbors tells the story of four families who live on a cul-de-sac and enjoy each other’s company at barbeques and dinner parties. They say they're ‘like family’ but hardly know each other. Their fragile bonds are soon tested when one of the couples, Gene and Paige Edwards, adopt a child from Russia. Questions soon emerge about the couple’s parenting and whether they're subtly abusing their newly adopted daughter. Told from the point of view of Nicole Westerhof, a woman with her own troubled family relationships,Good Neighborsforces readers to define for themselves what it means to be a good-enough parent and tolive in an engaged and caring community.
Willem and Jurriaan have a miserable childhood thanks to their cruel, controlling mother—Louisa Veldkamp, a world-renowned pianist. Dad turns a blind eye. One day, Louisa vanishes without a trace during a family vacation.
Adoptee Anneliese Bakker survives a toxic childhood and leaves home, vowing never to return. While searching for her biological mother, she meets the adult Willem, and they fall in love. Pregnant and engaged, she moves into the family mansion, wanting nothing more than to create a loving family for her child. But the Veldkamps are cold and distant. And why is Louisa a taboo subject?
An expectant mother gets more than she bargained for when she marries into a seemingly perfect family in this gripping debut novel–a must read for fans of A. J. Finn and B. A. Paris.
After surviving a nightmarish childhood, Anneliese Bakker is on the mend and searching for her birth mother. But when she meets Willem, she falls madly in love and finally finds a safe place to land. Engaged and expecting her first child, she moves into the Veldkamp mansion on a stately, tree-lined avenue in Amsterdam. And yet, nothing about Willem’s family is as it seems. Instead of…
