Books like

Books like The Painted Veil

12 books with a reading profile close to The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham. Inward-looking, contemplative and thought-provoking; a moderate read.

1

Maurice

by E.M. Forster

Also inward-looking and contemplative · romance, literary

Maurice Hall is a middle-class young man who goes to Cambridge, where he falls in love with Clive Durham, a fellow student.
2

Lettres portugaises

by Gabriel de Guilleragues, Mariana Alcoforado

Also inward-looking and contemplative · romance, literary

Published anonymously in 1669, this epistolary novel consists of five letters written by a Portuguese nun, Mariana Alcoforado, to an absent French officer named Noël Bouton de Chamilly.
3

Brokeback Mountain

by Annie Proulx

Also inward-looking and contemplative · romance, literary

Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist are two young ranch hands who spend a summer in 1963 herding sheep on Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming.
4

Corinne

by Germaine de Staël, Isabel Hill

Also inward-looking and thought-provoking · romance, literary

Set against the backdrop of an eighteenth-century Grand Tour, this novel centers on the intense intellectual and emotional connection between Lord Oswald Nelvil, a grieving Scottish aristocrat, and Corinne, a celebrated…
5

A Farewell to Arms

by Ernest Hemingway

Also inward-looking and thought-provoking · romance, literary

Frederic Henry, an American paramedic serving with the Italian army during World War I, experiences the collapse of the front following the retreat from Caporetto.
6

La dame aux camélias

by Alexandre Dumas fils

Also inward-looking · romance, literary

Set in mid-19th-century Paris, this novel recounts the tragic affair between Armand Duval, a young bourgeois lawyer, and Marguerite Gautier, a high-class courtesan known for her constant companion camellias.
7

Bonjour tristesse

by Françoise Sagan

Also inward-looking and thought-provoking · romance, literary

Seventeen-year-old Cécile spends a restless summer on the French Riviera with her widowed father, Raymond, and his current mistress, Elsa.
8

Bilinmeyen Bir Kadının Mektubu

by Stefan Zweig

Also inward-looking and contemplative · romance, literary

A famous Viennese novelist receives a long letter on his birthday from a woman he does not remember.
9

Romeo and Juliet

by William Shakespeare

Also inward-looking and contemplative · romance, literary

Set in the Italian city of Verona, this dramatic tragedy follows the lethal animosity between two noble houses, the Montagues and the Capulets.
10

Lady Chatterley’s Lover

by D.H. Lawrence

Also inward-looking and thought-provoking · romance, literary

Constance Chatterley is a young woman married to Clifford, a baronet paralyzed from the waist down in the First World War.
11

The Professor

by Charlotte Brontë

Also thought-provoking · romance, literary

William Crimsworth rejects a future in the church and an inheritance from his aristocratic uncles to seek financial independence as a teacher in Brussels.
12

If Beale Street Could Talk

by James Baldwin

Also inward-looking and thought-provoking · romance, literary

Set in 1970s Harlem, the story follows nineteen-year-old Tish Rivers and her fiancé, Fonny Hunt, an aspiring sculptor.

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