In “Madame Bovary”, Charles, an awkward country doctor courts and weds Emma, the beautiful young daughter of a patient. Emma, unsuited to the role of housewife, quickly gets restless and begins to explore her passions. This leads to infidelities which she hides from Charles and, eventually, mounting debts as she turns to merchandise for her happiness. Flaubert’s novel is cited as the first example of literary realism and has been called a “perfect”...

Finally rolling into young womanhood at 257 pounds, Dolores Price is determined to rise to the occasion and give herself one more chance before really going belly up.

A bestseller in Canada, this riveting family saga takes readers from Cape Breton Island to the battlefields of World War I to New York City's jazz scene--and into the lives, and guilty secrets, of four remarkable sisters.

From Isabelle Allende, comes a passionate tale of one young woman's quest to save her lover set against the chaos of the 1849 California Gold Rush. Orphaned at birth, Eliza Sommers is raised in the British colony of Valparaíso, Chile, by the well-intentioned Victorian spinster Miss Rose and her more rigid brother Jeremy. Just as she meets and falls in love with the wildly inappropriate Joaquín Andieta, a lowly clerk who works for Jeremy, gold is...

An Oprah's Book Club selection Samantha Morrow's husband has left her, and after a spree of overcharging at Tiffany's, she settles down to reconstruct a life for herself and her 11-year-old son. Her eccentric mother tried to help by fixing her up with dates, but a more pressing problem is money. To meet her mortgage payments, Sam decides to take in boarders. The first is an older woman who offers sage advice and sorely needed comfort; the second,...

As the Reverend John Ames approaches the hour of his own death, he writes a letter to his son chronicling three previous generations of his family, a story that stretches back to the Civil War and reveals uncomfortable family secrets.

Kaye Gibbons joins Elissa Schappell to discuss The Life All Around Me, the sequel to her novel Ellen Foster. Andrea Marcovicci reads an excerpt.

Michael Cunningham (The Hours) sits down with Stacey D'Erasmo to discuss his novel Specimen Days. Isaiah Sheffer reads an excerpt.

Having run away with her younger brother to live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, twelve-year-old Claudia strives to keep things in order in their new home and to become a changed person and a heroine to herself.

Claire Messud joins Valerie Martin to discuss her book, The Emperor's Children. Hope Davis reads an excerpt from the book.