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- Monica Ali. Brick Lane
- Monica Ali's gorgeous first novel is the deeply moving story of one woman, Nazneen, born in a Bangladeshi village and transported to London at age eighteen to enter into an arranged marriage.
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- Margaret Atwood. Lady Oracle
- Joan Foster is the bored wife of a myopic ban-the-bomber. She takes off overnight as Canada's new superpoet, pens lurid gothics on the sly, attracts a blackmailing reporter, skids cheerfully in and out of menacing plots, hair-raising traps, and passionate trysts, and lands dead and well in Terremoto, Italy.
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- Elizabeth Berg. Open House
- A woman re-creates her life after divorce by opening her house to strangers--and her heart to the simple miracle of possibility--in this unforgettable, deeply felt story.
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- Elizabeth Berg. The Pull of the Moon
- Turning 50 seems to turn women crazy. When Nan hits this mark, she hits the road, leaving behind her home and husband. Driving west from Boston, she consults only her own pleasure. And while this sounds easy, it is often arduous for Nan, who can hardly remember what her own pleasure is . . .
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- Maeve Binchy. Tara Road
- The story about two women who switch lives, and by so doing, learn much about each other -- and themselves. Set in both Ireland and New England, "Tara Road" demonstrates Binchy's incomparable understanding of the human heart.
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- Judy Blume. Wifey
- Wifey is tired of chicken on Wednesdays and sex on Saturdays. When a run-in with a mysterious motorcycle flasher brings her frustrations into rigid focus, Wifey sees her wildest fantasies taking flight and has the uncontrollable urge to catch up with them!
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- Cindy Bonner. The Passion of Dellie O'Barr
- A Texas rancher's wife runs off with a Populist firebrand and helps him burn down a store which denies Populists credit. The romance sours, she returns to stand trial and goes to jail. Through it all her husband sticks by her, making this a novel as much about married love as forbidden love. By the author of Looking After Lily.
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- Jeanne Braselton. A False Sense of Well-Being
- At thirty-eight, Jessie Maddox subscribes to House Beautiful, Southern Living, even Psychology Today. She has a comfortable life in Glenville, Georgia, with Turner, the most reliable, responsible husband in the world. But after the storybook romance, "happily ever after" never came. Now the housewife who once wanted to be Martha Stewart before there was a Martha Stewart is left to wonder: Where did the marriage go wrong?
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- Elizabeth Buchan. Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman
- This novel flips the usual mid-life crisis tale upside down. When Rose Lloyd's husband announces he's leaving her, Rose rejects the vengeful, wronged wife routine in favor of finally choosing the path she could have taken 20 years before.
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- Cannell, Dorothy . The Widow's Club
- Stylish, amusing, and deliciously wicked, the Misses Hyacinth and Primrose Tramwell are hired to investigate a woman's organization whose members choose widowhood over divorce. With the help of a newlywed friend, the spinster sleuths stalk the mastermind of matrimonial murder.
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- Kate Chopin. The Awakening
- A novel that scandalized America because of its sexual frankness, and because of the unconventional behavior of its female protagonist, The Awakening (1899) has enjoyed vast popularity in the 20th century.
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- Susan Coll. Rockville Pike
- From the acclaimed author of "karlmarx.com" comes the hilarious, offbeat story of an unfulfilled housewife who regains her sanity and identity amidst the wackiness of everyday life.
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- Danielle Crittenden. Amanda Bright @ Home
- "Sex and the City" meets "Bridget Jones's Diary" in this hilarious debut novel--the first ever to be serialized by the "Wall Street Journal." When Amanda Bright decides to leave her career to be a stay-at-home mom, Amanda finds that her connections are no preparation for her new life.
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- Barbara Delinsky. The Summer I Dared
- What comes after the moment that forever changes your life? This is the question that haunts Julia Bechtel, Noah Prine, and Kim Colella, the only survivors of a terrible boating accident off the coast of Maine that climed the lives of nine other people... A story of the risky but rewarding search for self, a story of survival, and of the irrepressibleability of the human spirit to rebound from disaster and to create life anew.
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- Loraine Despres. The Scandalous Summer of Sissy LeBlanc
- It's a steamy June afternoon in Louisiana, circa 1956, and Sissy LeBlanc is sitting on her front porch, wondering -- half seriously -- if she could kill herself with aspirins and Coca-Cola. She's been living in stifling old Gentry since the day she was born and trapped in a sham of a marriage to PeeWee LeBlanc since she was only seventeen. In short, she's fed up, restless, and ready for an adventure.
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- Jude Deveraux. Summerhouse
- Three best friends, all with the same birthday, are about to celebrate their 40th birthdays at a summerhouse in Maine. But none of them expects the gift that awaits: the chance for each of them to turn their "what-might-have-beens" into reality.
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- Sabine Durrant. Having It and Eating It
- Maggie Owen lives in London and has given up her job to stay home with her infant and toddler; her husband (well, they aren't exactly married) is a busy advertising executive. Trying to resign herself to a life filled with playground mums, soiled clothing, and a partner who comes home in time to kiss the kids goodnight when he's not away on some business trip, she suddenly runs into Claire, a former classmate whose confidence, looks, and sex life throw Maggie's own confidence, looks, and sex life -and the chaos her life has become - for a loop.
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- Joy Fielding. The First Time
- Behind the shiny facade of her seemingly idyllic life in Chicago, Mattie Hart feels as if she is falling apart. After sixteen years of marriage, and one beautiful teenage daughter, Mattie has discovered that her husband, Jake, a high-profile defense attorney, is ensconced in yet another love affair. After Jake leaves, Mattie receives some devastating news that will alter all their lives.
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- Gustave Flaubert. Madame Bovary
- Set amidst the stifling atmosphere of 19th-century bourgeois France, Flaubert's classic is at once an unsparing depiction of a woman's gradual corruption and a savagely ironic study of human stupidity.
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- Maureen Freely. My Year with the Stork Club
- "When Mike becomes involved as a househusband in a San Francisco parenting group, neither he nor his wife, Laura, imagines how this politically correct group of childrearers will affect their lives." - Library Journal
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- Patrica Gaffney. The Saving Graces
- A smart-mouthed skeptic with a soft heart, Emma is hopelessly in love with a married man. Rudy is desperately trying to hold on to a troubled marriage. Lee, "the normal one", wants a baby more than anything, an obsession that threatens to destroy her idyllic marriage. Isabel, divorced and free, is falling for her neighbor, whom she's sure is gay. Together they are the Saving Graces.
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- Ruth-Miriam Garnett. Laelia
- Women like the protagonists of Garnett's irresistible first novel are all too familiar: Long-suffering wives who are sick and tired of the men in their lives. But in the case of Rebecca, Claudia, and Gracelyn Cates, they plan to do something about it.
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- Stephanie Gertler. Jimmy's Girl
- Jimmy's Girl is the story of first love lost and of the price to be paid for finding it again. Ever wonder what became of your first love? Emily did.
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- Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The Yellow Wallpaper
- A terrifying tale about a woman driven to the brink of insanity by the "rest cure" she is ordered to follow by her doctor to relieve her postpartum depression.
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- Olivia Goldsmith. First Wives' Club
- Elise, Brenda and Annie were all first wives inhabiting the headier spheres of New York society. Then in their forties, with their husbands at the pinnacle of success, they were abandoned for "trophy wives " -- Younger, blonder and more decorative models. Now, they form "The First Wives Club" with the mission of getting even.
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- Olivia Goldsmith. Switcheroo
- This is the hilarious tale of two women, a wife and a mistress, who switch places when they realize that each wants what the other has.
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- Laurie Graham. The Future Homemakers of America
- This moving novel, filled with warmth, wit, and wisdom, is about a group of women who discover--over the course of 40 turbulent years--the nature of true friendship.
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- Graham Greene. The End of the Affair
- The novelist Maurice Bendrix's love affair with his friend's wife, Sarah, had begun in London during the Blitz. One day, inexplicably and without warning, Sarah had broken off the relationship. It seemed impossible that there could be a rival for her heart. Yet two years later, driven by obsessive jealousy and grief, Bendrix sends Pakris, a private detective, to follow Sarah and find out the truth.
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- Jennifer Haigh. Mrs. Kimble
- Follows twenty-five years in the life of a charismatic opportunist as seen through the eyes of his three wives.
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- Kristin Hannah. Distant Shores
- Grieving after the sudden death of her father, Elizabeth Shore retreats to an isolated beach house to pack away the last remnants of her parents' lives. There, the pieces of a past she never knew unfold to reveal a steadfast commitment missing from her own marriage. Faced with her own disillusionment, she makes a terrifying decision, risking everything she has for a second chance at happiness.
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- Suzette D. Harrison. When Perfect Ain't Possible
- Braxton Wade is a 32-year-old high school guidance counselor who loves his job, classical and soul music. A creature of habit and routine, Braxton has sworn off marriage--until he meets Imani Evans.
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- Shelby Hearon. Footprints
- A marriage begins crumbling when a couple meet a Southern preacher whose life has been saved by their daughter's heart. While the husband is overwhelmed by the thought that part of his daughter still lives, his wife is detached. The discovery of such different sensibilities after 25 years of marriage sends the man into the arms of another woman. By the author of Life Estates.
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- Jane Heller. Cha Cha Cha
- The effect on a housewife of the 1987 stock market crash. She is Alison Waxman Koff, wife of a broker on Wall Street. Financially wiped out, he leaves her to return to his first wife and Alison has to get a job. No sooner done, than her employer is killed and she is falsely accused of murder.
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- Jane Heller. An Ex to Grind
- The battle of the sexes rages on in this smart, witty, and extremely timely new comedy by the phenomenally popular Jane Heller ! This time she poses a provocative question: While it's common for deadbeat husbands to dodge their alimony payments by nefarious means, what happens when a woman plays by the same fast-and-loose rules?
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- Susan Hill. Mrs. de Winter
- "This sequel to Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca depicts the further adventures of Maxim de Winter and his second wife." - Publisher's Weekly
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- Zora Neal Hurston. Their Eyes Were Watching God
- Fair and long-legged, independent and articulate, Janie Crawford sets out to be her own person-- no mean feat for a black woman in the '30s. Janie's quest for identity takes her through three marriages and into a journey back to her roots.
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- Susan Isaacs. Compromising Positions
- As they would murmur at his funeral, Dr. M. Bruce Fleckstein was one of the finest periodontists on Long Island. And so good-looking. But as he turned his muscular, white-coated back for the last time, he had no notion that he had shot his final wad of Novocaine, probed his ultimate gum; Judith Singer sinks her teeth into her very first case in Compromising Positions.
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- S. Kaufman. Diary of a Mad Housewife
- When Bettina Balser begins to suspect that she is going mad, she starts a secret diary as a form of therapy and escape. Her fears pour onto the page. Through her observations of herself and those around her, Bettina seeks meaning in her exceedingly dreary life. Her frank examinations lead to many changes, including an extramarital fling, and her voice touches a timeless nerve, resonating on many levels— from the ever-evolving feminist consciousness to the gnawing existential search that is universal.
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- Cathy Kelly. Someone Like You
- Hannah, Emma, and Leonie, three women at critical turning points in their lives, meet on holiday and find themselves changing in unexpected ways.
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- Cassandra King. The Sunday Wife
- A captivating novel about one woman's journey toward independence and the life-changing friendship that guides her there.
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- Susan Kelly. Even Now
- A move to Asheville reintroduces Hannah Marsh to Daintry O'Conner, her best friend from childhood, her nemesis as an adult. Seeing her ex-friend opens old wounds, forcing Hannah to revisit the past and try to make sense of what went wrong.
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- Stephen King. Dolores Claiborne
- The harrowing story of a woman who knows how fierce love can be - & how deadly its consequences.
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- Wally Lamb. She's Come Undone
- An extraordinary coming-of-age odyssey, She's Come Undone tells the story of Dolores Price, a dysfunctional, heartbreakingly comical young heroine, and her wild journey to love, pain, and renewal.
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- Lorna Landvik. Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons
- Sometimes life is like a bad waiter-it serves you exactly what you don't want. The women of Freesia Court have come together at life's table, fully convinced that there is nothing good coffee, delectable desserts, and a strong shoulder can't fix. Laughter is the glue that holds them together-the foundation of a book group they call AWEB - Angry Wives Eating Bon Bons-an unofficial "club" that becomes much more. It becomes a lifeline.
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- Margaret Leroy. Postcards from Berlin
- Catriona Lydgate is a housewife with two children and an adoring husband. Butbeneath the surface of her seemingly perfect life are the dark secrets of thepast she's tried to forget. This is a haunting, heartbreaking novel--domesticfiction at its very finest.
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- Ira Levin. The Stepford Wives
- For Joanna, her husband, Walter, and their children, the move to beautiful Stepford seems almost too good to be true. It is. For behind the town's idyllic facade lies a terrible secret -- a secret so shattering that no one who encounters it will ever be the same.
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- Debbie Macomber. Thursdays at Eight
- In this uplifting tale, four women are bound together through their experiences, triumphs, and tragedies. The one thing that brings them together and allows them to escape life's hardships is their weekly meeting--Thursdays at eight.
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- Regina McBride. The Marriage Bed
- The story of Deirdre O'Breen, who comes from the Great Blasket Island, a windswept place off the Irish coast. It is there that something stunning happens to Deirdre's parents, shamefully driving her to the mainland. The crossing takes her to the civilized world - and toward Manus, the son of a wealthy and devout family. An architect, he is stirred not by God but by imagination: Dublin is struggling to find its way into the twentieth century, and Manus wants to fashion its landscape. Like the city itself, the couple's marriage is fraught with hope and complicated by legacy.
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- Grace Metalious. Peyton Place
- Considered scandalous it its time of publication, Peyton Place , stirred controversy with its explicit - for the time - depictions of sex and sins in a small New England town.
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- Jane Moore. Fourplay
- At age thirty-three, Josephine Miles is forced to come up with a brand-new life when her husband leaves her for "the cliche"--his very young, very pretty secretary. Suddenly she's single and back in the dating game with the added complication of children in tow. But Jo's no wallflower, and she soon finds herself with not one but four eligible bachelors vying for her time and affections. Add her two kids and her now booming interior design business to the mix, and she winds up with a nightmarish schedule but a dreamy love life.
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- Sigird Nunez. Naked Sleeper
- A married woman retreats to a friend's country house to work on a book. While there she meets a man and has an affair, but after visiting his home decides to return to her husband. Unfortunately, in her absence, her marriage has suffered.
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- Sylvia Plath. The Bell Jar
- This extraordinary work chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, successful - but slowly going under, and maybe for the last time.
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- Caroline Preston. Lucy Crocker 2.0
- Nobody -- not her kids, not her MIT math-genius husband -- could have predicted that Lucy Crocker, former children's librarian and unabashed computer ignoramus, would be the one to save the family's software company. Nevertheless, that's exactly what happens when she has an unexpected brainstorm to create a fantasy computer game called Maiden's Quest. Suddenly, Lucy, of all people, is a cyber-guru.
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- Jeanne Ray. Step-Ball Change
- With a ringing phone, Jeanne Ray's charming and amusing new novel gets off to a rollicking start that never lets up. Not for a minute. On the other end of the phone is Caroline's daughter, Kay, a public defender like her father, sobbing at the improbably good news that the richest, most eligible boy in Raleigh, North Carolina, has asked her to marry him. While Caroline and Tom are trying to digest this, the other phone, the "children's line," rings; it is Caroline's sister, Taffy, hysterical over her husband's decision to leave her for a woman two years younger than her daughter.
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- Haywood Smith. Queen Bee of Mimosa Branch
- Southern housewife Linwood Breedlove Scott was happily content in her comfortable, complacent thirty-year marriage, but when her husband cleans out their bank accounts and runs off with a stripper, her life takes a hilarious, yet touching, right turn into reality.
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- Nina Solomon. Single Wife
- Grace Brookman is in a most unusual marital crisis. Her husband of five years, Laz, is prone to disappearing for days at a time. It's just the way he is. And Grace has always dealt with it silently and in stride. But when he doesn't return for several weeks, she begins to wonder if he'll ever come back. Her solution? She decides to pretend that he's still around - to convince everyone that Laz is still home and her marriage is still intact. It seems easier than explaining.
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- Susan Sussman. The Dieter
- "The Dieter chronicles Barbara Aver's increasing avoirdupois. Immediately after her best friend dies of lung cancer, Barbara decides to give up a two-pack-a-day habit. Adding to her stress, her marriage is faltering and relations with her teenage children are going downhill fast. Moreover, she begins to suffer from writer's block, jeopardizing her career as a syndicated advice columnist. Food, and lots of it, seems to be the solution, but even while breaking every eating taboo, Barbara is also hell-bent on a serious course of dieting." - Publisher's Weekly
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- Nancy Thayer. The Hot Flash Club
- Featuring four mature women with different life styles and problems who meet, eat, and scheme, this is "Sex and the City" 20 years later.
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- Leo Tolstoy. Anna Karenina
- Anna Karenina has beauty, social position, wealth, a husband, and an adored son, but her existence seems empty. When she meets the dashing officer Count Vronsky she rejects her marriage and turns to him to fulfill her passionate nature -- with devastating results. One of the world's greatest novels, Anna Karenina is both an immortal drama of personal conflict and social scandal and a vivid, richly textured panorama of nineteenth-century Russia.
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- Adrienne Trigiani. Lucia, Lucia
- The story of a passionate young woman whose fateful choice changes her life forever. Set in a time of possibility for women in America, "Lucia, Lucia" is the story of a girl who risked everything for the belief that a woman could--and should--be able to have it all.
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- Adrienne Trigiani. The Queen of the Big Time
- The Queen of the Big Time is a story of one family's struggle to preserve their cultural identity and family unity and of its matriarch who cannot forget her first and true love.
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- Joanna Trollope. The Rector's Wife
- When Anna's husband Peter, an Episcopal priest, fails to gain promotion to archdeacon, Anna rebels.
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- Anne Tyler. Ladder of Years
- Celia Grinstead walks away from her family one summer day at the beach, and doesn't stop until she reaches a quiet little Delaware town.
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- Judith Viorst. Murdering Mr. Monti
- Brenda Kovner, a Washington columnist, advice dispenser, and amateur psychologist, doesn't consider herself intrusive, just extremely interested in helping. If she knows the answer, she can't shut up--even if no one's listening. Since Brenda knows what's best--for everyone--she secretly decides she must murder her son Wally's prospective father-in-law, before he can get to Wally. She has a foolproof plan. In fact, she has a million of them. But first she's got a few kinky desires of her own to satisfy.
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- Ayelet Waldman. Nursery Crimes
- Ayelet Waldman's delightful new mystery series introduces readers to Juliet Applebaum, a public defender turned stay-at-home mom. Juliet shares parenting duties with her screenwriter husband, but she's bored with playdates and trips to the park. That is, until she finds a way to spice up motherhood--with murder...
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- Fay Weldon. The Life and Loves of a She-Devil
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- Rebecca Wells. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
- When theatre director Siddalee Walker inadvertently reveals some of the less-savory facts of her Louisiana childhood to the New York Times, the article brands her morther, Vivi, a "tap-dancing child abuser." Vivi virtually disowns Sidda, but the Ya -Yas sashay in and conspire to bring everybody back together.
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- Rebecca Wells. Little Altars Everywhere
- This novel embraces nearly thirty years of life on the Walker plantation in Thornton, Louisiana, where the cloying air of the bayou and a web of family secrets at once shelters, traps, and defines an utterly original community of souls.
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- Dorothy West. The Wedding
- This "fascinating and engrossing tale" (People) of race and class set in Martha's Vineyard. West offers a window into the rise of the black middle class as she lived it. Wise, heartfelt, and shattering, The Wedding is Dorothy West's crowning achievement.
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- Meg Wolitzer. The Wife
- As Joan Castleman sits beside her husband on their flight to Helsinki. Joan's husband, Joseph Castleman, is "one of those men who own the world...who has no idea how to take care of himself or anyone else, and who derives much of his style from the Dylan Thomas Handbook of Personal Hygiene and Etiquette." He is also one of America's preeminent novelists, about to receive a prestigious international award to honor his accomplishments, and Joan, who has spent forty years subjugating her own literary talents to fan the flames of his career, has finally decided to stop.
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- Virginia Woolf. Mrs. Dalloway
- Direct and vivid in its telling of the details of a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, the novel manages ultimately to deliver much more. It is the feelings that loom behind those daily events--the social alliances, the shopkeeper's exchange, the fact of death--that give Mrs. Dalloway texture and richness.
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- Richard Yates. Revolutionary Road
- The story of Frank and April Wheeler, a bright, beautiful, and talented couple who have lived on the assumption that greatness is only just around the corner. With heartbreaking compassion and remorseless clarity, Richard Yates shows how Frank and April mortgage their spiritual birthright, betraying not only each other, but their best selves.
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