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Theatre

W. Somerset Maugham · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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Our Spoons Came from Woolworths

Barbara Comyns · 196 pages

"I told Helen my story and she went home and cried" begins Our Spoons Came from Woolworths. But Barbara Comyns's beguiling novel is far from maudlin, despite the ostensibly harrowing ordeals its heroine endures. Sophia is twenty-one when she marries fellow artist Charles, and she seems to have nearly as much affection for her pet newt as she does for her husband. Her housekeeping knowledge is lack

Artist ProtagonistInfidelityLondonCharacter-Driven
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The Awakening

Kate Chopin · 190 pages

The Awakening is a novel by Kate Chopin, first published in 1899. Set in New Orleans and on the Louisiana Gulf coast at the end of the 19th century, the plot centers on Edna Pontellier and her struggle between her increasingly unorthodox views on femininity and motherhood with the prevailing social attitudes of the turn-of-the-century American South. It is one of the earliest American novels that

Artist ProtagonistMidlife CrisisInfidelityCharacter-Driven
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The Sandcastle

Iris Murdoch · 319 pages

'Iris Murdoch was one of the best and most influential writers of the twentieth century.' Peter Conradi, The GuardianThe quiet life of schoolmaster Bill Mor and his wife Nan is disturbed when a young woman, Rain Carter, arrives at the school to paint the portrait of the headmaster. Mor, hoping to enter politics, becomes aware of new desires. A complex battle develops, involving love, guilt, magic,

Midlife CrisisArtist ProtagonistInfidelityCharacter-Driven
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The Vacationers

Emma Straub · 372 pages

Celebrating their thirty-fifth anniversary and their daughter's high-school graduation during a two-week vacation in Mallorca, Franny and Jim Post confront old secrets, hurts, and rivalries that reveal sides of themselves they try to conceal.

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Women

Charles Bukowski · 297 pages

Low-life writer and unrepentant alcoholic Henry Chinaski was born to survive. After decades of slacking off at low-paying dead-end jobs, blowing his cash on booze and women, and scrimping by in flea-bitten apartments, Chinaski sees his poetic star rising at last. Now, at fifty, he is reveling in his sudden rock-star life, running three hundred hangovers a year, and maintaining a sex life that woul

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The Interestings

Meg Wolitzer · 560 pages

The summer that Nixon resigns, six teenagers at a summer camp for the arts become inseparable. Decades later the bond remains powerful, but so much else has changed. The kind of creativity that is rewarded at age fifteen is not always enough to propel someone through life at age thirty. Their friendships endure and even prosper, but also underscore the differences in their fates, in what their tal

Midlife CrisisArtist ProtagonistDry HumorCharacter-Driven
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A Spot of Bother

Mark Haddon · 368 pages

George Hall is an unobtrusive man. A little distant, perhaps, a little cautious, not at quite at ease with the emotional demands of fatherhood, or manly bonhomie. He does not understand the modern obsession with talking about everything. "The secret of contentment, George felt, lay in ignoring many things completely." Some things in life, however, cannot be ignored.At 61, George is settling down t

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How to Be Good

Nick Hornby · 273 pages

According to her own complex moral calculations, Katie Carr has earned her affair. She's a doctor and her husband David is the self-styled Angriest Man in Holloway. But when David suddenly becomes good - properly, maddeningly, give-away-all-his-money good - Katie's sums no longer add up, and she is forced to ask herself some very hard questions.

Midlife CrisisInfidelityDry HumorLondon
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Intimacy

Hanif Kureishi · 124 pages

Description: 118 p. ; 20 cm. Abstract: An unmarried couple's separation is complicated by children. The father is a TV scriptwriter who has been unfaithful, the mother is in publishing and the setting is London. As he narrates their story, the man describes his mixed feelings, torn between the prospect of freedom and the loss of his sons.

Midlife CrisisInfidelityLondonCharacter-Driven
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The Winter War

Philip Teir · 298 pages

On the surface, the Paul family is living the liberal, middle-class Scandinavian dream. Max Paul is a renowned sociologist and his wife, Katriina, has a well-paid job in the public sector. They live in an airy apartment in the centre of Helsinki. But look closer and the cracks start to show.

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The Jane Austen Book Club

Karen Joy Fowler · 296 pages

"In California's Central Valley, five women and one man join together to discuss Jane Austen's novels. Over the six months they meet, marriages are tested, affairs begin, unsuitable arrangements become suitable, and love happens." "Dedicated Austen readers will delight in unearthing the echoes of Austen that run through this novel, but many readers will simply enjoy the vision and voice that, desp

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Olive Kitteridge

Elizabeth Strout · 288 pages

Olive Kitteridge: indomitable, compassionate and often unpredictable. A retired schoolteacher in a small coastal town in Maine, as she grows older she struggles to make sense of the changes in her life. She is a woman who sees into the hearts of those around her, their triumphs and tragedies. We meet her stoic husband, bound to her in a marriage both broken and strong, and a young man who aches

Midlife CrisisDry HumorInfidelityCharacter-Driven
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Love in a Cold Climate and Other Novels

Nancy Mitford · 284 pages

Character-DrivenDry HumorLondonLiterary Fiction
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The Post-Birthday World

Lionel Shriver · 517 pages

In this eagerly awaited new novel, Lionel Shriver, the Orange Prize-winning author of the international bestseller We Need to Talk About Kevin, delivers an imaginative and entertaining look at the implications, large and small, of whom we choose to love. Using a playful parallel-universe structure, The Post-Birthday World follows one woman's future as it unfolds under the influence of two drastica

Artist ProtagonistInfidelityLondonCharacter-Driven
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The Great Man

Kate Christensen · 312 pages

From the acclaimed author of The Epicure's Lament, a novel of literary rivalry in which two competing biographers collide in their quest for the truth about a great artist.Oscar Feldman, the "Great Man," was a New York city painter of the heroic generation of the forties and fifties. But instead of the abstract canvases of the Pollocks and Rothkos, he stubbornly hewed to painting one subject--the

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Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O'Keeffe

Dawn Tripp · 336 pages

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Asterios Polyp

David Mazzucchelli · 344 pages

Asterios Polyp, its arrogant, prickly protagonist, is an award-winning architect who's never built an actual building, and a pedant in the midst of a spiritual crisis. After the structure of his own life falls apart, he runs away to try to rebuild it into something new.

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While I Was Gone

Sue Miller · 291 pages

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Revolutionary Road

Richard Yates · 346 pages

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Stoner

John Williams · 278 pages

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The Private Lives of Pippa Lee

Rebecca Miller · 239 pages

Pippa seems to have everything in life. But suddenly she finds her world beginning to unravel. Amid the buzzing lawnmowers and suburban coffee mornings, she starts to wonder how she came to be in this place. The answer is a story of wild youth, unexpected encounters, affairs and betrayals, and the dangerous security of marriage. It brilliantly reveals the challenges of modern life - and all the po

Midlife CrisisInfidelityCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Herzog

Saul Bellow · 352 pages

In one of his finest achievements, Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow presents a multifaceted portrait of a modern-day hero, a man struggling with the complexity of existence and longing for redemption. Introduction by Philip Roth

Midlife CrisisCharacter-DrivenDry HumorClassics
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Who Is Rich?

Matthew Klam · 328 pages

"The long-awaited first novel from the acclaimed author of Sam the Cat is a provocative and hilarious satire of love, sex, money, and politics in our new gilded age--for readers of The Nix and This Is Where I Leave You"-- "Two people, who are married to other people, meet at a conference for artists and writers in a charming seaside village much like Provincetown. Rich, a formerly sort-of-famous

Midlife CrisisArtist ProtagonistInfidelityLiterary Fiction
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