Genre
Best Novels About Marriage
A novel about a marriage is a novel about the daily texture of two people who have agreed to stay with each other. The right one earns the long view; the wrong one stages the marriage to support an affair-or-divorce plot. These eight all earn the long view.
8 books on this list.
Hamnetby Maggie O'Farrell
5.0“Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell 2020 review. The death of William Shakespeare's eleven-year-old son and the four years before Hamlet is written. The Women's Prize winning novel about marriage, grief, and the play that came out of it.”
Trustby Hernan Diaz
5.0“Trust by Hernan Diaz 2022 review. Four narratives about a Gilded Age financier, his wife, the ghostwriter of his memoir, and the woman who finally tells the true story. Pulitzer Prize 2023 and the canonical contemporary literary novel about American capitalism.”
Tom Lakeby Ann Patchett
5.0“Tom Lake by Ann Patchett 2023 review. A mother tells her three adult daughters about her brief romance with a future movie star while picking cherries during the COVID lockdown. Patchett's late-career literary commercial novel and the most-discussed Meryl Streep audiobook narration of 2023.”
Normal Peopleby Sally Rooney
5.0“Normal People by Sally Rooney 2018 review. Connell and Marianne grow up in the same small Sligo town, attend Trinity College Dublin together, and orbit each other across four years of intermittent intimacy. The literary-fiction novel that defined the Rooney moment.”
Pachinkoby Min Jin Lee
5.0“Pachinko by Min Jin Lee 2017 review. Four generations of a Korean family in twentieth-century Japan, beginning with Sunja's pregnancy by a married Korean gangster in 1933 Busan. The Apple TV+ adaptation source and one of the canonical contemporary Korean-American literary novels.”
Demon Copperheadby Barbara Kingsolver
5.0“Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver 2022 review. A Dickensian retelling of David Copperfield in the opioid-crisis Appalachia of the 1990s and 2000s. Pulitzer Prize and Women's Prize 2023 and Kingsolver's defining late-career novel.”
Beartownby Fredrik Backman
5.0“Beartown by Fredrik Backman 2017 review. A small Swedish forest town stakes its identity on its junior hockey team. An assault by the star player splits the town. Backman's most ambitious novel and the first of the Beartown trilogy.”
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugoby Taylor Jenkins Reid
5.0“The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid 2017 review. An aging Hollywood icon agrees to tell the true story of her career and her seven marriages, but only to an unknown journalist. The TikTok-era literary fiction novel that defined contemporary Hollywood-memoir-fiction.”