What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorBird in Hand
Christina Baker Kline
Four people, two marriages, one lifelong friendship: everything is about to changeIt was an accident. It was dark, it was raining, Alison had only had two drinks. And the other car ran the stop sign. But Alison finds herself trapped under the crushing weight of grief and guilt, feeling increasingly estranged from her husband . . .Charlie, who has his own burdens. He's in a job he doesn't love so t
Fates and Furies
Lauren Groff · 400 pages
Every story has two sides. Every relationship has two perspectives. And sometimes, it turns out, the key to a great marriage is not its truths but its secrets. Lauren Groff presents the story of one such marriage over the course of twenty-four years. At age twenty-two, Lotto and Mathilde are tall, glamorous, madly in love, and destined for greatness. A decade later, their marriage is still the env
The Memory Keeper's Daughter
Kim Edwards · 408 pages
Kim Edwards's stunning family drama evokes the spirit of Sue Miller and Alice Sebold, articulating every mother's silent fear: what would happen if you lost your child and she grew up without you? In 1964, when a blizzard forces Dr. David Henry to deliver his own twins, he immediately recognizes that one of them has Down Syndrome and makes a split-second decision that will haunt all their lives fo
Bright, Precious Days
Jay McInerney · 397 pages
"The crowning achievement from the preeminent writer of his generation: following Brightness Falls and The Good Life, Bright, Precious Things builds on a series increasingly akin to John Updike's Rabbit novels but with a long-standing if weathered couple at its heart. Russell and Corrine Calloway seem to be living the New York dream: book parties one night and high-society charity events the next;
A Widow for One Year
John Irving · 537 pages
No One Is Coming to Save Us
Stephanie Powell Watts · 384 pages
"JJ Ferguson has returned home to Pinewood, North Carolina, to build his dream house and to pursue his high school sweetheart, Ava. But as he reenters his former world, where factories are in decline and the legacy of Jim Crow is still felt, he's startled to find that the people he once knew and loved have changed just as much as he has. Ava is now married and desperate for a baby, though she can'
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.
Dept. of Speculation
Jenny Offill · 185 pages
"Dept. of Speculation is a portrait of a marriage. It is also a beguiling rumination on the mysteries of intimacy, trust, faith, knowledge, and the condition of universal shipwreck that unites us all. Jenny Offill's heroine, referred to in these pages as simply "the wife," once exchanged love letters with her husband, postmarked Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that in
Terms of Endearment
Larry McMurtry · 410 pages
Aurora is the kind of woman who makes the whole world orbit around her, including a string of devoted suitors. Widowed and overprotective of her daughter, Aurora adapts at her own pace until life sends two enormous challenges her way: Emma’s hasty marriage and subsequent battle with cancer.
The Senator's Wife
Sue Miller · 320 pages
Two unconventional women--Meri Fowler, pregnant, newly married, and discovering the gap between reality and expectation, and Delia Naughton, wife of a notoriously unfaithful liberal senator--confront the costs and challenges of love.
The Futures
Anna Pitoniak · 368 pages
Falling in love as Yale students and moving to New York City in 2008, hedge fund employee Evan is embroiled in a deal that risks everything he has worked for, while nonprofit employee Julia reconnects with someone from her past who represents a different kind of life. For Evan, a scholarship student from a rural Canadian town, Yale is a whole new world, and Julia-- blond, beautiful, and rich--
The Bee Sting
Paul Murray · 645 pages
The Believers
Zoe Heller · 312 pages
When radical New York lawyer Joel Litvinoff is felled by a stroke, his wife, Audrey, uncovers a secret that forces her to reexamine everything she thought she knew about their forty-year marriage. Joel's children will soon have to come to terms with this discovery themselves, but for the meantime, they are struggling with their own dilemmas and doubts.Rosa, a disillusioned revolutionary, has found
When it Happens to You
Molly Ringwald · 272 pages
A collection of interlinked stories that explores the numerous betrayals, big and small, that one grapples with across a lifetime.
Freedom
Jonathan Franzen · 579 pages
Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul—the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Whole Foods generation. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbor, who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to actually do their job. She was an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter's dreams. Together with Walter—environmental la
The Pilot's Wife
Anita Shreve · 304 pages
Until now, Kathryn Lyons's life has been peaceful if unextraordinary: a satisfying job teaching high school in the New England mill town of her childhood; a picture-perfect home by the ocean; a precocious, independent-minded fifteen-year-old daughter; and a happy marriage whose occasional dull passages she attributes to the unavoidable deadening of time. As a pilot's wife, Kathryn has learned to
Siracusa
Delia Ephron · 288 pages
"An electrifying novel about marriage and deceit from bestselling author Delia Ephron that follows two couples on vacation in Siracusa, a town on the coast of Sicily, where the secrets they have hidden from each other are exposed and relationships are unraveled. New Yorkers Michael, a famous writer, and Lizzie, a journalist, travel to Italy with their friends from Maine--Finn, his wife Taylor, and
Married Men
Carl Weber · 426 pages
Kyle, Allen, Wil and Jay are each having trouble with the women in their lives and need to count on each other.
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
Happy are the Happy
Yasmina Reza · 148 pages
This citation of Borges resonates with every character in Yasmina Reza's novel, except that they are never so lucky. In fact, what happens to them is the exact opposite of what they crave. The twenty short chapters that make up this unusual book deal with both marital and extramarital vicissitudes, the elusiveness of intimacy, the fear of loneliness, and the desire to be loved or at least understo
On Beauty
Zadie Smith · 455 pages
"Howard Belsey is an Englishman abroad, an academic teaching in Wellington, a college town in New England. Married young, thirty years later he is struggling to revive his love for his African American wife Kiki. Meanwhile, his three teenage children - Jerome, Zora and Levi - are each seeking the passions, ideals and commitments that will guide them through their own lives." "After Howard has a di
Mrs. Kimble
Jennifer Haigh · 394 pages
"Story of three women married in succession to the same man--a charismatic opportunist named Ken Kimble"--Cover