Classic Pairings

Under the Wide and Starry Sky · Nancy Horan
In 1875, Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne leaves her unfaithful husband in California and sails to Europe with her three children to study art. At an artists' colony in France she meets a young Scottish writer ten years her junior, Robert Louis Stevenson. Their unlikely love takes them from Edinburgh to the South Seas, through illness, money worries and literary fame. A big, warm novel about a woman who refused to live a small life.

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde · Robert Louis Stevenson
In foggy Victorian London, the lawyer Mr Utterson investigates the strange bond between his respectable friend Dr Jekyll and the brutal Edward Hyde. Stevenson wrote it in a few feverish weeks, with Fanny as his first and toughest reader. A short, gripping classic about the double lives people lead.

Why read them together

Horan's novel shows the life behind the books: the woman who travelled, nursed, argued and edited alongside Stevenson. Read Jekyll and Hyde afterwards and you see a famous story through the eyes of the woman who was there when it was written. And Fanny's leap into a new life at 35 is a story many readers abroad will recognise.

One Amazing Thing · Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Late one afternoon, nine people are waiting in the visa office of an Indian consulate in an American city when an earthquake traps them inside. As water and hope run low, a young student suggests that each of them tells one amazing thing from their life. A Chinese-Indian grandmother, a young Muslim American, an ex-soldier, an older American couple and two consulate workers share stories they have never told anyone.

The Decameron · Giovanni Boccaccio
Florence, 1348. As the plague sweeps through the city, seven young women and three young men retreat to a villa in the hills. To pass the time, each tells a story every day for ten days: a hundred tales of love, wit, trickery and luck. Clever, bawdy and surprisingly modern.

Why read them together

Nearly seven centuries apart, both books find the same answer to fear: sit together and tell stories. Divakaruni gives Boccaccio's idea a modern, multicultural cast, and shows how much strangers share once they start listening.

Love and Ruin · Paula McLain
In 1937, 28-year-old Martha Gellhorn travels alone to Madrid to report on the Spanish Civil War, determined to prove herself in a profession run by men. There she falls in love with Ernest Hemingway, already on his way to becoming a legend. Their relationship and careers grow together in Madrid and Cuba, until his fame begins to overshadow her. Martha then has to choose between being a famous man's wife and following her own path as a writer.

Travels with Myself and Another · Martha Gellhorn
Martha Gellhorn reported on almost every major war from Spain in the 1930s to Vietnam and Central America. In this witty memoir she describes some of her worst journeys: a dangerous trip into China during the war with Japan, a tense visit to Moscow, and other journeys that went wrong in memorable ways. Hemingway, never named, is the "Another" of the title. Gellhorn's voice is sharp, brave and very funny.

Why read them together

McLain imagines Gellhorn's private struggle; Gellhorn's own memoir lets you hear her voice, dry, funny and fearless. Together they move her out of Hemingway's shadow and back into her own career.

The Flight of Gemma Hardy · Margot Livesey
Gemma Hardy is an orphan, born in Iceland and raised in Scotland by a resentful aunt, then sent to a harsh boarding school. Clever and determined, she later takes a job as a nanny on a remote estate in the Orkney Islands, where she falls for its owner, Mr Sinclair. When a secret threatens her future, she has to decide what kind of life she is willing to accept. A warm and lyrical modern version of Jane Eyre set in 1960s Scotland.

Jane Eyre · Charlotte Brontë
Jane Eyre grows up as an unloved orphan in her aunt's house and then at a strict charity school, and becomes a governess at Thornfield Hall. There she falls in love with her moody employer, Mr Rochester, until a terrible secret forces her to choose between love and her own sense of right. Insisting on her equality and dignity, Jane remains one of literature's most independent heroines.

Why read them together

Jane and Gemma start out with no money, family or influence, and neither will trade her principles for comfort. Livesey shows how Brontë's questions about a woman's independence still hold in a very different time and place.

Mrs. Osmond · John Banville
Contains spoilers for The Portrait of a Lady. Banville begins exactly where Henry James ended. Isabel Archer, now Mrs Osmond, has travelled to England to sit with her dying cousin and has learned the truth about how her marriage was arranged. Rather than staying safely away, she chooses to go back to Italy and to her husband. The novel follows her as she quietly plans how to take back control of her money, her future and her life. A clever, elegant continuation for anyone who wished Isabel had more freedom.

The Portrait of a Lady · Henry James
Isabel Archer is a bright, independent young American who is brought to Europe by her aunt. She turns down two good marriage proposals because she wants to see the world and choose her own fate. When she suddenly inherits a fortune, she becomes attractive to people with their own plans, and she is drawn to Gilbert Osmond, a charming, cultured American living in Florence. James's portrait of a young woman facing her destiny is one of the great novels about freedom, choice and the price of both.

Why read them together

James asks whether a woman can keep her independence inside marriage and society. Banville asks what comes after: once freedom has been lost, can it be won back?

The Paris Wife · Paula McLain
Hadley Richardson is 28 and has almost given up on love when she meets the young, ambitious Ernest Hemingway in Chicago. After a quick courtship they marry and move to Paris, where they become part of the circle of writers and artists later called the Lost Generation. As Ernest works on his first novel, Hadley tries to hold on to her own sense of self in a world of late nights, drink and shifting loyalties. A moving portrait of a marriage, and of the woman behind a famous man.

A Moveable Feast · Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway's own memoir of his early years in Paris in the 1920s, written late in his life. He describes cafés and cold apartments, writing every morning, being poor and hungry, and meeting Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald and James Joyce. Hadley appears throughout, often with great tenderness. Read after The Paris Wife, it becomes fascinating to see what he chose to remember and what he left out.

Why read them together

One book imagines Hadley's side of the marriage; the other is Hemingway's own memory of it, written decades later. Read The Paris Wife first, then A Moveable Feast, and notice what he remembers fondly and what he leaves out.

The March Sisters · Kate Bolick, Jenny Zhang, Carmen Maria Machado, Jane Smiley
For the 150th anniversary of Little Women, four writers each choose one of the March sisters and write about what she has meant to them. Kate Bolick writes about Meg, Jenny Zhang about Jo, Carmen Maria Machado about Beth and the real Lizzie Alcott, and Jane Smiley defends Amy as a modern role model. Together the essays show how a novel can shape a reader's life.

Little Women · Louisa May Alcott
Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy March grow up in Civil War New England with their wise mother, Marmee, while their father is away at war. Through poverty, ambition, illness and love, each sister has to work out what kind of woman she wants to be. Jo, the writer who refuses to fit in, has inspired generations of readers. A classic about the tension between duty and personal freedom.

Why read them together

Little Women shows the choices open to four sisters in nineteenth-century America. The March Sisters shows four writers today reading those choices through their own lives, a reminder that a character's meaning changes as its readers do.

Vanessa and Her Sister · Priya Parmar
London, 1905. Vanessa, Virginia, Thoby and Adrian Stephen leave their family home and move to Bloomsbury, where they gather a circle of young artists and thinkers who become the Bloomsbury Group. Told largely through Vanessa's diary, the novel follows the painter as she builds a life of art and independence alongside her brilliant, fragile sister Virginia. When love and betrayal strain the family, Vanessa must decide whether to put her own happiness first.

To the Lighthouse · Virginia Woolf
The Ramsay family and their guests spend summers in a house on the Isle of Skye, where a promised trip to the lighthouse keeps being postponed. Through Mrs Ramsay, warm and central to everyone around her, and the painter Lily Briscoe, who struggles to finish her picture, Woolf explores family life, loss and what it means for a woman to make art. Years later, after war and grief, some of them finally make the journey.

Why read them together

One sister painted, the other wrote. Parmar imagines the life behind Vanessa Bell's art, while To the Lighthouse, with its painter Lily Briscoe, shows Woolf thinking about what it costs a woman to make art at all.

Mexican Gothic · Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Mexico, 1950. Noemí Taboada is a glamorous Mexico City socialite who loves parties, fine dresses and red lipstick. When her newly married cousin sends a frightened letter from High Place, a crumbling mansion in the mountains owned by her English husband's family, Noemí goes to bring her home. The house is cold, the family is strange, the old patriarch watches her closely, and the place starts to enter her dreams. Underneath the gothic thrills is a story about colonialism and family power, and a heroine who refuses to be frightened away.

Rebecca · Daphne du Maurier
A shy young woman marries Maxim de Winter after a short romance in Monte Carlo and follows him to Manderley, his great house on the Cornish coast. There she lives in the shadow of his first wife, Rebecca, whose rooms, clothes and memory are kept just as they were by the housekeeper, Mrs Danvers. The new Mrs de Winter, who is never given a name of her own, has to find her footing in a house that seems to belong to someone else. One of the great novels about insecurity, jealousy and finding your own strength.

Why read them together

Both novels turn the grand house into a picture of inherited power. Rebecca is about insecurity and the weight of the past; Mexican Gothic adds a sharper look at colonialism and race.

The Piano Teacher · Janice Y. K. Lee
In 1952, Claire Pendleton, a young English newlywed, arrives in Hong Kong with her husband and takes a job teaching piano to the daughter of a wealthy Chinese family. She begins an affair with their driver, Will Truesdale, and slowly learns about his past: a love affair with the glamorous socialite Trudy Liang during the Japanese occupation in the war. Moving between the two periods, the novel explores love, survival and the choices people make under pressure.

The Painted Veil · W. Somerset Maugham
Kitty, a pretty and rather shallow young Englishwoman, marries a quiet bacteriologist and moves with him to Hong Kong, where she starts an affair. When her husband finds out, he takes her with him into the middle of a cholera epidemic in mainland China. Away from the society she knew, Kitty is forced to look honestly at herself, and through work at a convent she begins to grow into someone new.

Why read them together

Both novels follow women whose lives abroad make them question their marriages and the people they thought they were. Read together, they also show whose stories get told about expatriate life in colonial Asia, and whose stay in the background.

The Days of Afrekete · Asali Solomon
Liselle Belmont is hosting a dinner party in Philadelphia to thank supporters after her husband loses his race for the state legislature. Then a call from the FBI warns her that he may face corruption charges, and she starts to wonder who they have become and how much of herself she has given up. Across town, Selena, the woman Liselle loved in college, is moving through the same day and thinking about her. A warm, funny and deeply human novel about midlife and second chances.

Mrs Dalloway · Virginia Woolf
On a June day in 1923, Clarissa Dalloway walks through London buying flowers and getting ready for the party she is giving that evening. As she goes, she remembers her youth and the choices that shaped her life, including the man and the woman she might have chosen. Across the city, a young war veteran is struggling with shell shock. Woolf follows their thoughts across a single day, creating one of the most beautiful novels about time and the inner life.

Why read them together

Both novels use the hours before a gathering to open up a whole life: the self a woman shows her guests, and the one she carries privately. Solomon's book is also a warm conversation with Woolf's.

The Vanishing Half · Brit Bennett
The Vignes twins grow up in a small Black community in the American South and run away together at sixteen. Years later their lives could not be more different: one has returned home with her daughter, while the other lives in California as a white woman, and her husband knows nothing of her past. Across several generations, from the 1950s to the 1990s, the twins' daughters' paths begin to cross. A gripping family story about identity, secrets and the lives we choose.

Passing · Nella Larsen
Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry were childhood friends in Chicago. Years later they meet again by chance: Irene lives in Harlem with her husband, a Black doctor, while Clare has been passing as white and is married to a racist white man who has no idea. Clare is drawn back to the world she left, and Irene is both fascinated and threatened by her. A short, intense novel from 1929 about race, class, desire and friendship, with a famously ambiguous ending.

Why read them together

Nearly a century apart, both novels count the cost of building a life on a hidden origin. They also ask whether identity can ever be separated from family, memory and the community you leave behind.

Trespass · Valerie Martin
Chloe Dale is an illustrator in the Hudson Valley, working on drawings for a new edition of Wuthering Heights. Her life seems settled: her husband is writing a history of the Crusades, and her only son, Toby, is at university in New York. Then Toby falls in love with Salome, a young woman from a Croatian family in New Orleans who carries the wounds of the Balkan wars. Chloe distrusts her at once, and that distrust begins to pull her family apart. A novel about mothers and sons, outsiders and belonging, and how history follows people across borders.

Wuthering Heights · Emily Brontë
On the Yorkshire moors, the orphan Heathcliff is taken in by the Earnshaw family and grows up alongside Catherine, the daughter of the house. Their bond is wild and complete, but when Catherine chooses to marry the gentle, wealthy Edgar Linton, Heathcliff leaves and returns years later set on revenge. His bitterness reaches down into the next generation. Told through a housekeeper's memories, it is one of the most passionate and unsettling love stories ever written, and a book about who is allowed to belong.

Why read them together

The link is direct: Chloe is illustrating Wuthering Heights while her son lives through his own stormy love. Together the two books ask how often we mistake prejudice for concern about the people we love.

Home Fire · Kamila Shamsie
After years of raising her younger twin siblings in London following their mother's death, Isma finally leaves to study in the United States. She worries about her headstrong sister, Aneeka, and about their brother, Parvaiz, who has gone in search of the jihadist father they never knew. When Isma meets Eamonn, son of a powerful British politician, the two families become tangled together with devastating results. A modern Antigone about citizenship, love and loyalty.

Antigone · Sophocles
After a civil war in which two brothers have killed each other, King Creon orders that one of them be left unburied as a traitor. Their sister, Antigone, refuses to obey, believing her duty to her family and the gods is greater than the law of the state. Creon's pride and her determination drive both of them towards tragedy. Almost 2,500 years old, it is still one of the most powerful stories about a woman who will not give in.

Why read them together

Shamsie turns an ancient clash between family loyalty and the law into a story about citizenship and belonging in Britain today. At the centre of both is a young woman who will not hand her conscience over to the state.

What Happened to Anna K. · Irina Reyn
Anna K. is 37, bookish and romantic, and comfortably married to an older, successful businessman in a close Russian-Jewish immigrant community in Queens, New York. When she meets her young cousin's boyfriend, an aspiring writer from outside their world, her old longing for freedom comes back. Their reckless affair sets her against her husband, her family and the community she belongs to. A sharp modern retelling about immigrant life and the need to be seen.

Anna Karenina · Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina seems to have everything: beauty, a high position in St Petersburg society, a powerful husband and a son she adores. Then she meets the dashing officer Count Vronsky, and their affair shocks society and brings jealousy and isolation. Beside her story runs that of Levin, a landowner searching for meaning in work, faith and family. Often called the greatest novel ever written.

Why read them together

Both Annas pay a price for wanting a love their community will not accept. Reyn moves the story to Russian-Jewish Queens, where the pressure to keep tradition alive in a new country adds a layer Tolstoy's Anna never faced.

Hausfrau · Jill Alexander Essbaum
Anna Benz is an American living in a pretty suburb outside Zürich with her Swiss husband, Bruno, and their three children. From the outside her life looks comfortable, but she feels invisible: she has never really learned the language, has few friends and hardly recognises herself. She tries German classes, sessions with a Jungian analyst and a series of affairs, and finds each step harder to undo. A sharp, uncomfortable novel about loneliness, language and the cost of losing yourself in someone else's country.

Madame Bovary · Gustave Flaubert
Emma marries Charles Bovary, a kind but dull country doctor, and quickly finds married life in provincial Normandy unbearably small. Raised on romantic novels, she longs for passion, elegance and Paris, and looks for them in love affairs and in luxuries she cannot afford. Flaubert's cool, precise style was revolutionary, and the novel caused a scandal when it was published. More than 160 years later, Emma is still one of literature's most recognisable restless women.

Why read them together

Both heroines try to escape a respectable, airless life through affairs that only deepen their unhappiness. Essbaum adds what Flaubert never had to: the loneliness of living in a language that is not your own. For anyone who has moved abroad for someone else's career, it asks how much of yourself you can lose without noticing.