Jude the Obscure, the semi-autobiographical final novel from Thomas Hardy explores notions of surprising candor; within the eponymous protagonist lies the tragic truth of failed ambitions and relationships. In a fierce exploration of the darkness of love and the intellect, this is one of the great tragic novels of English literature. Jude Fawley, an earnest boy from a rural English village, dreams of a life of academia despite his working-class background....

In Terenure, a pleasant suburb of Dublin, it's snowing. Gina Moynihan, girl about town, recalls the trail of lust and happenstance that brought her to fall for "the love of her life" Séan Vallely. Gina remembers their affair: long afternoons made blank by bliss and denial. Now, as the falling snow makes the day luminous and full of possibility, Gina awaits the arrival of Séan's fragile twelve-year-old daughter - the complication, and gravity, of...

Elizabeth Shaw specializes in wills and trusts at the Boston law firm of Shaw & Cartwright, and over the years she's developed a friendship with the wives of very wealthy men. However, these rich wives have a mutual secret: they've all had an affair with a man named Gary Eisenhower--and now he's blackmailing them for money. Shaw hires Spenser to make Eisenhower "cease and desist," so to speak, but when women start turning up dead, Spenser's assignment...

Set against the backdrop of nineteenth-century bourgeois France, the story focuses on a doctor's wife, Emma Bovary, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life.

"If Avery Chambers can't fix you in 10 sessions, she won't take you on as a client. Her successes are phenomenal--she helps people overcome everything from domineering parents to assault--and almost absorb the emptiness she sometimes feels since her husband's death. Marissa and Mathew Bishop seem like the golden couple--until Marissa cheats. She wants to repair things, both because she loves her husband and for the sake of their 8-year-old son. After...

"When Rose McCarthy's staff at Mode magazine pitches a cover shoot with Hollywood's hottest young actress, the actress's sizzling affair with a bestselling French author is exposed. The author happens to be Rose's son-in-law, which creates a painful dilemma for her. Her daughter Nadia, a talented interior designer, has been struggling to hold her marriage together, and conceal the truth from their young daughters, her family, and the world. But Nicolas,...

When she sees a young, pregnant woman at her husband's funeral, a mourning wife realizes that her husband's midlife crisis went a bit farther than she realized.

"Trudy has betrayed her husband, John. She's still in the marital home--a dilapidated, priceless London townhouse--but John's not here. Instead, she's with his brother, the profoundly banal Claude, and the two of them have a plan. But there is a witness to their plot: the inquisitive, nine-month--old resident of Trudy's womb. Told from a perspective unlike any other, Nutshell is a classic tale of murder and deceit from one of the world's master storytellers."...

Skyla lives alone in the shadow of the defunct drive-in movie theater that she and her husband ran for nearly fifty years. Ever since Hollis?s death in a freak accident the year before, Skyla spends her nights ruminating about the regrets and deceptions in her long marriage. That is, until she rents a cottage on the property to a charming British man, Teddy Cornwell?. A thousand miles away, Linelle is about to turn fifty. Bored by her spouse and...