Ten top novels about unfaithful wives

Piers Paul Read is the author of works of fiction, reportage, history, biography and journalism. He is best known for Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors published in 1974, but has won a number of literary awards for his novels. His new novel is Scarpia. One of the author's top ten novels about unfaithful wives, as shared at the Guardian:

The Good Soldier (1915) by Ford Madox Ford

Working title: The Saddest Story. A novel admired by novelists for its shifting perspectives. John Dowell is another unreliable narrator who reveals to the reader things he is not aware of himself. Skilful, intriguing, though not wholly convincing: characters take extreme actions for some fairly flimsy reasons.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Good Soldier also appears on Jean Hanff Korelitz's top six list of her favorite books about failed marriages, Penelope Lively's six favorite books list, John Mullan's lists of ten of the best spas in literature, ten of the best failed couplings in literature, and ten great novels with terrible original titles, and on the Guardian's list of ten of the best unconsummated passions in fiction and Adam Haslett's list of the five best novelists on grief. One line from the novel appears among Stanley Fish's top five sentences.

The Page 99 Test: The Good Soldier.

--Marshal Zeringue