Set within the richly imagined confines of Puritan Boston, The Scarlet Letter is Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic tale of the social consequences of adultery and the subversive force of personal desire in a strict religious community.

First serialized in 1924 and published as a complete novel in 1925, "The Painted Veil" is the powerful novel of transgression and redemption by popular and prolific British author W. Somerset Maugham. "The Painted Veil" tells the story of the lovely and superficial Kitty Garstin and her unhappy marriage to Walter Fane, a quiet and honorable man. Kitty agrees to marry Walter not because she loves him, but because she fears being upstaged by her younger...

Derailed by the sudden passing of her husband of thirty years, an artist on the brink of a gallery opening struggles to pick up the pieces of her life before discovering harrowing evidence of her husband's affair.

The publication in 1857 of Madame Bovary, with its vivid depictions of sex and adultery, incited a backlash of immorality charges. The novel tells the story of Emma Bovary, a doctor's wife bored and unfulfilled by marriage and motherhood. She embarks upon a series of affairs in search of passion and excitement, but is unable to achieve the splendid life for which she yearns. Instead, she finds herself trapped in a downward spiral that inexorably leads...

"Tolstoy produced many drafts of Anna Karenina. Crafting and recrafting each sentence with careful intent, he was anything but casual in his use of language. His project, translator Marian Schwartz observes, "was to bend language to his will, as an instrument of his aesthetic and moral convictions." In her magnificent new translation, Schwartz embraces Tolstoy's unusual style - she is the first English language translator ever to do so. Previous translations...

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 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...

Plotting revenge against her unfaithful husband, a policewoman has a one-night stand that inadvertently triggers a series of events that spiral dangerously out of control.

"In his timeless story of two pairs of mismatched lovers, The Return of the Native sets romantic idealism as a destructive counterpoint to reality and disillusionment." "Against the lowering background of Egdon Heath, fiery Eustacia Vye passes her days, wishing only for passionate love. She believes that her escape from Egdon lies in marriage to Clym Yeobright, home from Paris and discontented with his work there. But Clym wishes to return to the...

A deft, insightful, and compulsively readable exploration of obsessive desire—and the dark twists of fate that can shake the lives of even those most insulated by privilege, sophistication, and power.
Ivor Tesham is a handsome, single, young member of Parliament whose political star is on the rise. When he meets a woman in a chance encounter—a beautiful, leggy, married woman named Hebe—the two become lovers obsessed with their trysts,...

"This is the saddest story," the narrator notes of his friend Edward Ashburham's life. A superb soldier and the perfect English gentleman, the Ashburham has one fatal flaw with regard to affairs of love. Ford weaves a brilliant tale-long recognized as one of the masterpieces of twentieth century fiction-in which nothing is quite what it seems, including the narrator's telling of the tale.