Thinks by David Lodge

Thinks tells one story from two perspectives, that of a department chairman at the (fictional) university of Gloucester and of a female visiting professor, newly widowed. Their very different reactions to the same events are often amusing and the story that appears to be a simple affair at first turns out to be pleasantly tortuous [...]

The Marriage-Go-Round by Andrew Cherlin

The state of marriage in the US today is interesting: we marry much more than people in other developed countries but we also divorce a lot more. Why? That’s what the author of The Marriage-Go-Round sets out to investigate. Armed with statistics, maps, and historical facts he shows how the cultural messages of “marriage is [...]

Crazy Love by Leslie Morgan Steiner

Crazy Love is the disturbing story of a woman who marries an abusive husband (spoiler and good news: she does escape him in the end) and who tells her story frankly and straightforwardly. Yes, he choked her the day before they moved in together — but she still moved in with him, not daring to [...]

Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon

Wonder Boys is the story of a very bad Thanksgiving week for an English professor who, surprisingly to him, finds that his wife is leaving him because he’s having an affair, that his lover is pregnant, and that a student of his committed a robbery and shot a dog while he, the professor, was in [...]

A Happy Marriage by Rafael Yglesias

A Happy Marriage is a wrenching, close-to-perfect novel that seems to be very, very close to autobiographical and describes a thirty-year marriage coming to an end with the painful cancer death of the wife. The story is told from both ends, the beginning and the end of the marriage, and is a contrast between the [...]

That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo

That Old Cape Magic is a messily-written story of a couple, two weddings, and three deaths (but no funerals, only botched ash-dispersing exercises for two of them), and the long quest for the hero, the husband, to get out from the very long shadow of his unhappy (separately and together) parents. Unlike the last book [...]

Wedlock by Wendy Moore

Wedlock is the story of fabulously rich Eleanor Bowes, who, after finding herself widowed at age 24 (with five children!), has a good time with several overlapping boyfriends and haplessly marries one, thinking he’s dying for her when in fact he had staged the duel that seemed to be killing him (yes, it’s 1777). She [...]

Heroic Measures by Jill Ciment

Heroic Measures tells the story of an elderly New York couple who is trying to sell their current apartment and buy a new one with an elevator while coping with their dachshund’s medical problems and a potential terrorist attack. There’s a valiant effort to write some chapters from the point of view of the dachshund [...]

A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick

A woman who is not who she claims to be travels to a small town in Wisconsin to marry, sight unseen, a rich man who was widowed years ago.  The man sees right through her but marries her anyway (as if there were no other women available in the world?) and they live a marriage [...]

The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff

The 19th Wife tells two stories: one is a historical novel about Ann Eliza Young, the 19th wife (probably more like the 50th++ wife) of the Mormon leader Brigham Young, who decided to leave him and speak against polygamy; the other is about a young gay ex-fundamentalist Mormon trying to get his mother, also a [...]