After reading all of Jane Austen...
Craving more sharp social satire and immersive character studies after finishing Jane Austen? This curated reading list features compelling fiction for Austen fans, including Ian McEwan's *Atonement*, Barbara Pym's *Excellent Women*, and Edith Wharton's *The House of Mirth*. Discover your next favorite book inspired by classic themes of love, class, and wit.
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Rachel's Holiday
by Marian Keyes
The fast lane is much too slow for Rachel Walsh. And Manhattan is the perfect place for a young Irish female to overdo everything. But Rachel's love of a good time is about to land her in the emergency room. It will also cost her a job and the boyfriend she adores. When her loving family hustles her back home and checks her into Ireland's answer to the Betty Ford Clinic, Rachel is hopeful. Perhaps it will be lovely—spa treatments, celebrities, that kind of thing. Instead, she finds a lot of group therapy, which leads her, against her will, to some important self-knowledge. She will also find something that all women like herself fear: a man who might actually be good for her.
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Moon Tiger
by Penelope Lively
Claudia Hampton, dying in a hospital, remembers a war-time affair with a young tank officer killed in the North African desert war.
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Excellent Women
by Barbara Pym
“The finest introduction to Barbara Pym” (The New York Times): a hilarious comedy of manners by the shrewdly observant British novelist often compared to Jane Austen One of Barbara Pym’s richest and most amusing high comedies, Excellent Women has at its center Mildred Lathbury, a clergyman’s daughter and a mild-mannered spinster in 1950s England. She is one of those “excellent women,” the smart, supportive, repressed women who men take for granted. As Mildred gets embroiled in the lives of her new neighbors—anthropologist Helena Napier and her handsome, dashing husband, Rocky, and Julian Malory, the vicar next door—the novel presents a series of snapshots of human life as actually, and pluckily, lived in a vanishing world of manners and repressed desires.
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Atonement
by Ian McEwan
McEwan's bestselling novel of love and war, childhood and class, guilt and forgiveness, is brought gloriously to life in a new film starring Keira Knightley, James McAvoy, and Vanessa Redgrave, scheduled for release in theaters on December 7, 2007.
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The House of Mirth
by Edith Wharton
Social and romantic misfortunes of a socially prominent woman in New York.
