Themes
Books About Marriage
Novels where a marriage — its promise, unravelling or reinvention — drives the story.
20 books · ranked
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1
Rebecca
A new bride is haunted by her husband's glamorous dead wife in a brooding country house; gothic suspense at its finest.
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2
Gone Girl
A wife vanishes and her husband becomes the prime suspect; the twisty thriller that redefined the genre.
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3
The Corrections
The three grown children of Alfred and Enid Lambert return home for a final Christmas as Alfred's Parkinson's progresses and Enid refuses to accept what is happening to her marriage and family. Franzen's National Book Award-winning novel moves between the Lambert children's separate American lives and their parents' Midwestern home in a portrait of family, decline and the late-20th-century United States.
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4
The Year of Magical Thinking
A clear-eyed account of grief after the sudden loss of a husband; precise and unsparing.
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5
The Silent Patient
Alicia Berenson, a famous painter, shoots her husband five times and never speaks another word. Theo Faber, a psychotherapist, becomes obsessed with treating her and uncovering why. Michaelides's debut psychological thriller — with one of the most discussed twists in recent crime fiction — became one of the bestselling thrillers of its decade.
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6
The Sign of Four
Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson are engaged by Mary Morstan to investigate the mysterious death of her father and a series of pearls left for her by an unknown benefactor. The case leads to a stolen Indian treasure, a pact of vengeance and one of Holmes's most elaborate investigations. The novel also introduces Watson's courtship of Mary, who becomes his wife.
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7
Hamlet
The prince of Denmark is commanded by his father's ghost to avenge his murder by his uncle Claudius, who has married Hamlet's mother and taken the throne. Shakespeare's most analysed play circles the question of why Hamlet delays, producing a meditation on consciousness, action, mortality and the impossibility of certainty.
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8
Macbeth
A brave general returns from battle to hear a prophecy that he will be king. Driven by his own ambition and his wife's darker will, he murders his way to the throne — and discovers that the crown brings terror, not peace. Shakespeare's shortest and most concentrated tragedy is a study in guilt, tyranny and the corrosion of the self.
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9
The Nightingale
Two sisters in German-occupied France take different paths through the war: Vianne shelters Jewish children in her home while her husband is a prisoner of war; Isabelle joins the Resistance and guides downed Allied airmen over the Pyrenees. Hannah's novel about women's wartime experience became one of the most-read historical novels of the decade.
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10
Birdsong
In 1910, Stephen Wraysford falls in love with the wife of his host in Amiens; six years later he is in the trenches of the Somme, and the tunnellers who dig beneath the battlefield carry a barely suppressed world of feeling. Faulks's novel interweaves the love story of 1910 with the war of 1914-18 and a 1978 frame narrative, creating one of the most beloved British war novels.
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11
Down the River unto the Sea
Joe King Oliver, a former NYPD detective framed and imprisoned years earlier on charges that destroyed his career and marriage, is approached by the woman who set him up — now wanting his help — while he investigates the case of a journalist accused of killing two police officers. Mosley's Edgar Award-winning novel is a hardboiled meditation on corruption, race and the New York City justice system from one of crime fiction's most distinctive voices.
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12
Othello
A Moorish general in Venice is destroyed by the malice of his ensign Iago, who poisons his mind against his wife Desdemona with fabricated evidence of infidelity. Shakespeare's study of jealousy, race, manipulation and self-destruction is among the most psychologically disturbing of his plays.
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13
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
Sixteen compact, stripped-down stories about ordinary Americans in crisis — marriages failing, drinks being poured, the things people cannot say to each other. Carver's most celebrated collection established minimalism as a mode in American short fiction and showed how much could be conveyed through what is left unsaid.
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14
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Janie Crawford, a Black woman in early 20th-century Florida, tells the story of her three marriages and her search for love, self-determination and voice. Hurston's novel was rediscovered by Alice Walker in the 1970s and is now central to both the Black literary tradition and the feminist canon.
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15
The Awakening
Edna Pontellier, a married woman summering on the Louisiana Gulf Coast, awakens to her own desires and autonomy, refusing the roles of wife and mother that her society demands. Condemned on publication in 1899 and largely forgotten, the novel is now central to feminist literary history and to discussions of women's freedom and selfhood.
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16
Persuasion
Anne Elliot, persuaded against her better judgment to break off her engagement to the naval officer Frederick Wentworth, encounters him again years later — now successful and still unmarried. Austen's last completed novel is her most melancholy and most quietly feminist, written as she was dying and published posthumously.
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17
Wide Sargasso Sea
Set in Jamaica and Dominica in the 1830s, Bertha Mason — the mad wife in the attic of Jane Eyre — tells her own story before she is silenced and imprisoned by Rochester. Rhys's novel is one of the foundational texts of postcolonial fiction, a fierce rewriting of Charlotte Brontë's portrait of Creole womanhood from the inside.
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18
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Michael Henchard, a hay-trusser who in a drunken auction sells his wife and daughter to a sailor, rises to become the Mayor of Casterbridge — only to see his reputation, business and relationships destroyed by the return of the man he sold her to, now his business partner. Hardy's study of self-destruction and the remorselessness of consequence is among the most dramatically compelling of his novels.
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19
A House for Mr Biswas
Mohun Biswas, a Trinidadian Hindu who has spent his life at the mercy of his wife's large, overbearing family, spends forty-six years trying to own a house — and with it, a self. Naipaul's vast, ironic novel is both a portrait of colonial life in Trinidad and an epic of one man's stubborn desire for dignity and autonomy.
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20
A Doll's House
Nora Helmer has secretly borrowed money to save her husband's life and has been repaying it for years without his knowledge. When the truth threatens to emerge, the marriage — and Nora's entire constructed identity — begins to crack. Ibsen's play is one of the founding texts of modern drama and a landmark of feminist literature.