Ordinary Life: Stories by Elizabeth Berg
In this superb collection of short stories, Elizabeth Berg takes us into remarkable moments in the lives of women, when memories and events come together to create a sense of coherence, understanding, and change.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
When Mr. Lockwood has an encounter with the spirit of Catherine Linton at the home of the unsociable Heathcliff, he hears the story of the tempestuous love affair between Catherine and Heathcliff.

Deep green sea by Robert Olen Butler
Traces the romance between a Vietnamese woman whose family is killed in the war and an American veteran returning to Vietnam to make peace with the past.

 

Theft: a love story by Peter Carey
Reduced to living in a remote country house and serving as caretaker for his volatile and childlike brother Hugh, Michael "Butcher" Boone, a once-famous painter, finds his life changed by the arrival of an enigmatic young woman named Marlene.

 

Welsh girl by Peter Ho Davies
At the height of World War II, a forbidden romance blossoms between seventeen-year-old Esther Evans, the daughter of a Welsh shepherd, and Karsten Simmering, a troubled young German POW, who questions what he has been fighting for.

Belong to me by Marisa de los Santos
While Cornelia gains unexpected insight into her troubled marriage, Piper finds her carefully controlled life unraveling in the wake of a friend's crisis, and Lake tells a complex series of lies to gain her son's entry into a school for gifted students.

The evidence against her by Robb Forman Dew
On a September day in 1888, three children are born within hours of each other--Robert Butler, Lily Scofield, and her first cousin Warren Scofield. They are nearly inseparable from birth. Lily feels assured the three will be together for their entire lives, but this is threatened when Agnes Claytor falls in love with Warren--disrupting not only the life within the circle of three, but also in the entire town.

Guide to the birds of East Africa by Nicholas Drayson
Working up the nerve to invite Rose Mbikwa to the Nairobi Hunt Club Ball, Mr. Malik, a reserved, honorable widower, is suddenly confronted by the return of his school nemesis, the flashy Harry Kahn, who also sets his sights on Rose.

Love warps the mind a little by John Dufresne
Leaving his wife and his day job to write the novel he has always dreamed about, Lafayette Proulx moves in with the eccentric Judy Dubey and falls in love with her, a situation that is complicated when Judy is diagnosed with stage IV cancer.

Antelope wife by Louise Erdrich
"History is grief and no passion is complete without its jealous backdrop." In her characteristically swirling narrative style, Erdrich tells the story of two intertwined Ojibwa families, the Roys and the Shawanos, and the fiery love that scars their souls and inhibits their freedom. Booklist

 

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
This exquisite novel tells the story of one of the most compelling heroines in modern literature--Emma Bovary. Unhappily married to a devoted, clumsy provincial doctor, Emma revolts against the ordinariness of her life by pursuing voluptuous dreams of ecstasy and love. But her sensuous and sentimental desires lead her only to suffering corruption and downfall.

 

Souvenir by Therese Fowler
Meg Powell and Carson McKay were raised side by side on their families’ farms, bonded by a love that only deepened. Everyone in their small rural community in northern Florida thought that Meg and Carson would always be together. But at twenty-one, Meg was presented with a marriage proposal she could not refuse, forever changing the course of her life.

 

The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles
Perhaps the most beloved of Fowles's internationally bestselling works, The French Lieutenant's Woman is a feat of seductive storytelling that effectively invents anew the Victorian novel. "Filled with enchanting mysteries and magically erotic possibilities" (New York Times), the novel inspired the hugely successful 1981 film starring Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons and is today universally regarded as a modern classic

 

Glass palace by Amitav Ghosh
Unable to forget the girl he befriended during the British invasion of 1885 when soldiers forced the royal family of Burma into exile, Rajkumar is lifted on the tides of political and social chaos to create an empire in the Burmese teak forests.

 

A virtuous woman by Kaye Gibbons
When Blinking Jack Stokes met Ruby Pitt Woodrow, she was 20 and he was 40. She was the daughter of Carolina gentry. He was a skinny tenant farmer who had never owned anything in his life. They didn't fall in love so much as they simply found each other and held on for dear life. Powell’s Books

 

Stern men by Elizabeth Gilbert
Ruth Thomas, a spunky young woman born into the midst of a feud between two factions of Maine lobstermen, manages to negotiate an end to the conflict.

 

Philosophy made simple by Robert Hellenga
Feeling restless after the death of his wife, Rudy Harrington, a father of three grown daughters, leaves his Chicago home to start his life over at an avocado grove in Texas, where he takes up philosophy, presides over his daughter's Hindu wedding, and falls for his son-in-law's mother.

 

The third angel by Alice Hoffman
Follows the lives of three women in love with the wrong men--Madeleine Heller, attracted to her sister's fiance; Frieda Lewis, the muse to an ill-fated rock star; and Bryn Evans, engaged to be married but secretly obsessed with her ex-husband.

 

Wonder worker by Susan Howatch
Nicholas Darrow, a clergyman who heads a ministry of healing in a small London church, finds his peaceful, sedate life turned upside down by a needy young woman who sets his equilibrium hurtling out of control.

 

Wives of the fishermen by Angela Huth
The long-time, remarkable friendship between flirtatious Annie Macleoud and plain, virtuous Myrtle Duns is tested by romantic disappointment, passion, and a terrible accident that exposes the emotional turmoil that both women have hidden for years.

Sun king by David Ignatius
Charismatic billionaire Sandy Galvin comes to the nation's capital and proceeds to turn it upside down by purchasing the city's most powerful newspaper to challenge thepower brokers of Washington, D.C., until he encounters his former Harvard flame, Candace Ridgway, a beautiful journalist known as the "Mistress of Fact".

 

Widow for one year by John Irving
Chronicles the life of a complex, abrasive woman born in the shadow of her siblings' deaths and her parents' adultery, who only finds love after motherhood and widowhood.

 

Wings of the Dove by Henry James
When Milly, a beautiful and fabulously wealthy American meets the equally beautiful, but impoverished Kate, materialism, romance, self-delusion and ultimately fatal illness, contaminate their glamorous social whirl.

Waiting by Ha Jin
An ambitious and dedicated Chinese doctor, Lin Kong finds himself torn between two very different women--the educated and dynamic nurse with whom he has fallen in love and the traditional, meek, and humble woman to whom his family married him when they were both very young.

 

An unfinished season by Ward Just
Class struggle and family tensions explode in this novel of life in a Chicago suburb in the 1950s, as a teenager watches his father's psyche crumble in the wake of union problems and marital difficulties.

 

The mermaid chair by Sue Monk Kidd
Jessie Sullivan is summoned home to tiny Egret Island, where she meets Brother Thomas, a monk who is about to take his final vows, and encounters the legend of a mysterious chair dedicated to a saint who had originally been a mermaid.

 

Love, again by Doris Lessing
A probing and provocative examination of the experience of love as the mind and body approach old age, by the eminent British author best known for The Golden Notebook. Kirkus

 

Disappearing acts by Terry McMillan
Franklin Swift was a sometimes-employed construction worker, not quite-divorced daddy of two. Women confused his program. Zora Banks was a teacher, singer, songwriter and taking a break from heartbreak. Then they met in a Brooklyn brownstone, and there could be no walking away.

 

Fundamentals of play by Caitlin Macy
Set in trendy Manhattan, this novel follows a group ofboarding school friends--men and women--as they extend their adolescence in this glamorous world, and an outsider who desperately wants in.

 

Emperor’s children by Claire Messud
Three friends on the verge of their thirties--beautiful, sophisticated Marina Thwaite; Danielle, a quiet TV producer; and Julius, a freelance writer--make their way through New York City, until Marina's idealistic cousin, Bootie, arrives to complicate their lives.

 

Twilight by Katherine Mosby
Breaking her engagement to an undesirable partner in the years preceding World War II, Lavinia Gibbs outrages her socially prominent parents and rebuilds her life in Europe, where she experiences a sexual and political awakening at the side of enigmatic Frenchman Gaston Lesseur.

 

First love: a gothic tale by Joyce Carol Oates
Woodcut illustrations complement a dark tale of adolescent love, divided family loyalties, psychological manipulation, and betrayal in the story of eleven-year-old Josie and her relationship with an intriguing twenty-five-year-old cousin, Jared.

Unsuitable attachment by Barbara Pym
Various upper-class members of London's Anglican St. Basil's Church attempt to cope with the encroaching modern world and embark on a trip to Rome which changes their lives.

 

The ground beneath her feet by Salman Rushdie
Photographer Rai narrates the epic romance between his childhood friend, Ormus Cama, and singer Vina Apsara, Rai's sometime lover, revealing--with wisdom and humor--a world of passions, truths, death, and rock 'n' roll.

Olivia and Jai by Rebecca Ryman
The wealthy owners of a British tea-exporting company initially welcome their straight-shooting American niece as a healthy influence on their own spoiled teen-aged daughter, Estelle. Aunt Bridget delights in introducing pretty Olivia to Calcutta society, hoping to find the girl a husband and little suspecting that Olivia has already fallen in love with Jai Raventhorn--Uncle Josh's most imposing business competitor and the man Aunt Bridget hates most in India.

The reader by Bernhard Schlink
Not until he becomes a law student after World War II does Michael Berg realize that the woman who found him ill and nursed him through hepatitis was illiterate and possibly a Nazi war criminal.

 

Peony in love by Lisa See
Peony, the cloistered daughter of a wealthy family, is betrothed to a suitor she has never met. In the garden of the Chen Family Villa, a small theatrical troupe is performing scenes from an epic opera. Peony attends the production, watching from behind a screen, but catches sight of a handsome man and begins a journey of love and sorrow.

 

A ship made of paper by Scott Spencer
Returning with his young family to the Hudson River town of his youth in the hope of finding comfort and security, Daniel Paris finds his job and the lives of several others threatened when he falls in love with Iris Davenport, the mother of his daughter's best friend.

 

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
The classic nineteenth-century Russian novel in which a young woman is destroyed when she attempts to live outside the moral law of her society.

 

The Green Hour by Frederic Tuten
The Green Hour tells the story of Dominique, a brilliant art historian who has recently recovered from a bout with cancer. Following Dominique from her college years to the present, the novel unfolds a moving love story in which Dominique is torn between her passion for the idealistic and seductive Rex, who periodically disappears from her life, and her feelings for Eric, a wealthy American businessman deeply in love with her. By portraying a character for whom love and idealism are lost, the novel hauntingly shows us the importance of pursuing both.

Brazil by John Updike
A chance encounter between Tristao, a poor Black teen from the Rio slums, and Isabel, a pampered upper-class white girl, sparks heated family resistance that forces them to flee to the far reaches of Brazil.

 

The buccaneers by Edith Wharton
When the wealthy St. George girls and their friend are rejected by New York society because their bloodlines are too short, they go to England and make superb marriages, but Nan St. George finds that being a duchess does not necessarily bring happiness.

Almost Heaven by Marianne Wiggins
Returning home to Virginia, Holden Garfield, a young, burnt-out foreign correspondent, is drawn into a passionate love affair with a woman who has been hospitalized with hysterical amnesia since the deaths of her husband and sons in a freak act of nature.