Best Books About Marriage and Relationships: Essential Fiction and Non-Fiction
The best books about marriage and relationships — from Anna Karenina and The Corrections to Normal People and The Golden Notebook. Love, partnership, and their difficulties.
By Lena Fischer
The best novels about marriage and relationships are not romance novels — they are explorations of what sustains people in long-term intimate life, what erodes it, and what the failure of a relationship reveals about the individuals involved and the society that shaped their expectations. The books below include the full range: nineteenth-century tragedy, mid-century feminist analysis, and contemporary fiction.
The Foundational Works
Anna Karenina — Leo Tolstoy (1878)
The greatest novel about marriage and the greatest portrait of what love and social convention do to people. Three marriages — Anna and the bureaucrat Karenin, Kitty and the farmer Levin, Oblonsky and his long-suffering wife Dolly — are examined with equally distributed sympathy. Anna’s story (the affair with Vronsky, the social destruction that follows) is the tragedy; Levin’s story (the courtship of Kitty, the search for meaning in work and faith) is the counterpoint and, Tolstoy suggests, the more enduring form of love. The novel’s famous opening line — ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’ — is the only generalisation in a work otherwise committed to the particular.
The Awakening — Kate Chopin (1899)
The first great American novel about a woman’s desire for a life beyond marriage — Edna Pontellier, a Creole society wife in New Orleans, gradually awakens to her own autonomy and desires, and the novel traces the consequences of that awakening in a society with no space for a married woman who refuses her role. Published in 1899 and effectively suppressed; rediscovered in the 1960s and now recognised as one of the most important American novels of the nineteenth century.
Twentieth-Century Novels
The Golden Notebook — Doris Lessing (1962)
The most politically serious novel about women’s lives — Anna Wulf’s four notebooks (for her African past, her communist politics, her fiction, and her personal relationships) and the golden notebook in which she tries to integrate them. Lessing’s analysis of the relationship between political commitment, romantic desire, and domestic reality is the most comprehensive available in fiction, and the novel’s formal structure (the fragmentation of the notebooks) enacts the fragmentation it describes.
Contemporary Fiction
The Corrections — Jonathan Franzen (2001)
The finest contemporary American novel about marriage and family — specifically about the long marriage of Alfred and Enid Lambert, which is examined through the eyes of their three adult children. Franzen’s portrait of Alfred’s undiagnosed Parkinson’s disease and Enid’s desperate cheerfulness, and what their marriage has been for fifty years, is the emotional core of a novel that is also very funny about American consumer culture and class anxiety.
Normal People — Sally Rooney (2018)
The best contemporary novel about a relationship in process — Connell and Marianne, two Cork teenagers, and the complicated relationship they sustain through secondary school and university. Rooney’s achievement is showing how two people who genuinely understand each other can keep failing to connect, through class anxiety, miscommunication, and the difficulty of being vulnerable. The novel’s controlled, precise prose is the formal expression of its subject.
The Story of a New Name — Elena Ferrante (2012)
The second volume of Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels and the one that most explicitly examines marriage — Elena and Lila in their twenties, Lila’s disastrous marriage to Stefano, and Elena’s escape through education. Ferrante’s analysis of what marriage means for women without alternatives is the most powerful feminist argument available in contemporary fiction.
Reading Order
Start contemporary: Normal People → The Corrections → Anna Karenina.
Historical span: The Awakening → The Golden Notebook → Normal People.
The great tradition: Anna Karenina → The Golden Notebook → The Corrections.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best novel about marriage?
Anna Karenina by Tolstoy is the greatest novel about marriage — its portrayal of three marriages (Anna and Karenin, Kitty and Levin, Oblonsky and Dolly) and what holds people together or drives them apart is unmatched in depth and sympathy. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen is the finest contemporary American novel about marriage and family — specifically about how the long history of a marriage shapes its later years and how grown children understand their parents' choices. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing is the most politically serious novel about the relationship between women's domestic lives and their intellectual and political commitments.
What is Anna Karenina about?
Anna Karenina (1878) by Leo Tolstoy follows Anna, an aristocratic woman in St. Petersburg who leaves her cold and bureaucratic husband for Count Vronsky, a handsome cavalry officer — and is destroyed by the social consequences. But the novel is not simply about adultery: it is equally about Levin, a landowner in the country who is seeking meaning in work, faith, and love, and whose story provides a counterpoint to Anna's tragedy. Tolstoy's portrait of Russian aristocratic society, his analysis of what marriages become over years and decades, and his compassion for all his characters make it one of the two or three greatest novels ever written.
What is The Golden Notebook about?
The Golden Notebook (1962) by Doris Lessing follows Anna Wulf, a British writer and communist in London in the 1950s, who keeps four notebooks — one for each aspect of her fragmented experience (her African past, her political life, her fiction, her personal relationships) — and then a fifth golden notebook in which she tries to integrate them. The novel is about the relationship between women's personal and political lives, about the limits of ideology when confronted with the reality of desire and domestic experience, and about the difficulty of writing honestly about women's inner life in a culture that has no language for it.
What is Normal People about?
Normal People (2018) by Sally Rooney follows Connell and Marianne from secondary school in County Cork through four years at Trinity College Dublin — a relationship that keeps almost-connecting and failing to connect, shaped by class difference (Connell is popular and working-class; Marianne is unpopular and wealthy), miscommunication, and the specific difficulty of saying what you mean to someone you love. The novel is about how two people who are right for each other can fail to stay together, and about what class and social performance do to intimate relationships.
