Though first published in 1924, this novel holds up well in light of the contemporary discussion and disruption of traditional gender roles. Our protagonist, Evangeline Knapp, is the model housewife and mother to three young children. She keeps her home in immaculate condition; her children are likewise clean and proper. Dinner is served hot, on time, and on a set table. Outwardly, Evangeline is the perfect housewife, but inwardly, she detests her...

With the preparations for his daughter's wedding serving as a catalyst, Wilson Lewis realizes that his relationship with his wife of thirty years is threatened, and sets out to make his wife fall in love with him once again.

No More Parades (1924) is a novel by Ford Madox Ford. Set during the First World War, the novel is the story of Christopher Tietjens, a brilliant statistician and wealthy aristocrat known as "the last Tory." As he moves from a faithless marriage into an affair of his own, eventually volunteering to fight under dubious-perhaps suicidal-motives, Tietjens appears both symbolic and tragically human, a casualty of a dying era dedicating its final breaths...

Sabine-twenty years a magician's assistant to her handsome, charming husband-is suddenly a widow. In the wake of his death, she finds he has left a final trick, a false identity and a family allegedly lost in a tragic accident but now revealed as very much alive and well. Named as heirs in his will, they enter Sabine's life and set her on an adventure of unraveling his secrets, from sunny Los Angeles to the windswept plains of Nebraska, that will...

Before All Who Have Ever Seen This Disappear, Michael Gills' fifth novel, plumbs the depths of the Stepwell family tendency toward theatrical catastrophe. When Weldon Stepwell, bare-knuckled catcher for the Danville Little Johns and town florist, has his leg amputated in a wood-cutting accident, the team shows up on the hospital lawn to give blood, pray, and curse God. Mostly they gather to be with the stricken wife, daughter, and son and wait to...

All Savannah wanted was to be loved and cherished, but her husband had other plans. Savannah's heart was shattered into a million pieces by her first husband, and now she was sure she'd never mend it back together. Until she met Bryce. His sea-blue eyes were a welcome distraction from her daily bouts of grief and loneliness. His philosophy of life was one of living simply and helping others, not of climbing the corporate ladder. He was a breath...

A young woman faces loneliness and alienation on a journey to find her own life outside of being a wife and mother in Nobel Prize-winning author Peter Handke's The Left-Handed Woman. One evening, when Marianne and her husband, Bruno, are dining out together to celebrate his return from a business trip, Marianne listens to him speak and realizes suddenly yet finally that Bruno will leave her. Whether at that moment, or in years to come, she will be...

p>The Real Adventure (1916) is a novel by Henry Kitchell Webster. Written at the height of Webster's career as a popular author of magazine serials, The Real Adventure is a story of romance, ambition, and identity. Exploring the effects of the burgeoning feminist movement on the institution of marriage, Webster illustrates the psychological effects of inequality on men and women alike. "'Do you remember when you said that before?' asked Rose. 'You...

The Good Soldier (1915) is a novel by Ford Madox Ford. Set just before the First World War, the novel is superficially the story of Edward Asburnham, a man with a reputation for philandering. Considered an important proto-modernist novel, The Good Soldier employs a fragmented narrative told by an unreliable narrator who appears at times as distant, gossipy, voyeuristic, and even vindictive. Praised as one of the greatest English-language novels of...

Helping Howard explores the fraught lifetime marriage of a straight older man, his younger gay wife, and the daughter that survives them. An anti-romantic romance, this book tells the tale of The Author who awakens Howard into consciousness in order to become her accomplice in figuring out what happens next. Their ongoing dialogue pushes the story forward through quarrelsome, humorous, psychological cliffhangers. Playing with, and exposing, the creative...