The most recommended marriage books

Who picked these books? Meet our 157 experts.

157 authors created a book list connected to marriage, and here are their favorite marriage books.
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Book cover of As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams: Recollections of a Woman in Eleventh-Century Japan

Jules Pretty Author Of Sea Sagas of the North

From my list on stories and place since writing began.

Why am I passionate about this?

Alienation from nature has contributed to environmental problems in today’s world. Until recently in human history, our daily lives were intertwined with living things. I've always been keenly interested in the intersection between people and nature, between ecology and society. How should we live, what have we done lately? Observation today can bring much-needed respect, and if we are lucky, we will find that animals, birds, and places intercept us in our wanderings, helping to bring forth distinctive and personal stories. There is danger, the seas are mighty, many monsters lurk in the dark. But can be silence too. Pull up a chair by the blazing fire, come listen to those voices.

Jules' book list on stories and place since writing began

Jules Pretty Why did Jules love this book?

A beautiful and touching account of the author’s travels in early 11th century Japan. Lady Sarashina is deep in sorrow from the death of her husband and searches for solace in nature and place on pilgrimage routes and at temples along the way. This is a profound weaving of mind, journey, and place, as she travels across the 72 seasons of Japan’s year. Emotions link land and mind. She is acutely attentive to cuckoo calls and cherry blossom, the rain pattering on bamboo at night, the cool water in the stone well. “Even as I wander on my journey,” she writes, “It always stays above me in the sky, this moon at dawn, this moon I gazed on in the capital.”

By Lady Sarashina, Ivan Morris (translator),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams is a unique autobiography in which the anonymous writer known as Lady Sarashina intersperses personal reflections, anecdotes and lyrical poems with accounts of her travels and evocative descriptions of the Japanese countryside. Born in AD 1008, Lady Sarashina felt an acute sense of melancholy that led her to withdraw into the more congenial realm of the imagination - this deeply introspective work presents her vision of the world. While barely alluding to certain aspects of her life such as marriage, she illuminates her pilgrimages to temples and mystical dreams in exquisite prose, describing



Book cover of A Personal Matter

Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer Author Of Wait Softly Brother

From my list on fake autobiographical fiction through the ages.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am eternally fascinated by the way in which a string of words can take on a life of its own. With a mere 26 letters, a good writer can have a reader believe anything. When realist fiction first became a category in the 18th century in England, there was a lot of handwringing over whether readers were being lied to. Of course, they were! That is the point of fiction. My own work has always played with the boundary of realist fiction, fairytale, and truth. I’m interested in the way a story can make meaning—and the more hijinks, the better!

Kathryn's book list on fake autobiographical fiction through the ages

Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer Why did Kathryn love this book?

Reading Kenzaburo OĂ« is like falling into a dreamscape. I love this book because it weaves the personal and the fictional in ways that make it impossible to distinguish them.

Is not all of life a melding of dream, reality, and the stuff we make up? Much of Oë’s writing is influenced by his son, Hikari, who was born with cognitive disabilities. This makes the story of the young man in A Personal Matter, who is struggling with the stress of his sick newborn, a fiction heavily informed by personal history.

To take one’s own story and use it to bring to life another one is the height of art-making. It felt like a healing to read.

By Kenzaburo Oe, John Nathan (translator),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked A Personal Matter as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

From the Nobel Prize–winning author: “One of the great short novels of the 20th century” (The Wall Street Journal).

Internationally acclaimed as one of the world’s most influential writers, Kenzaburƍ ƌe brings to the fore the post-WWII rage and anxiety of a decorous society in this “deathly black comedy . . . dripping with nuclear terror” (The Japan Times).

Bird is an antisocial twenty-seven-year-old intellectual hanging on to a failing marriage with whiskey. He dreams of going to Africa where the sky sprawls with possibilities. Then, as though walloped by a massive invisible fist, Bird’s Utopian fantasies are shattered when



Book cover of As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams: Recollections of a Woman in Eleventh-Century Japan
Book cover of A Personal Matter

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