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I don't know if I've described what I'm looking for very well, lol, but I love huge epic romances from literature such as Wuthering Heights, Anna Karenina, even Gone With the Wind, etc.
I've already read these three, so I am thirsting for more! I am of course looking around but I thought I'd see what some of you might recommend.
Personally, I enjoyed Guy De Maupassan works. Maybe not as epic as what you mention, but I read all seven volumes of his works front to back with great pleasure.
Here's my list, off the top of my head in no particular order...you have to read:
Jane Austen (everything lol)
Diana Gabaldon (beginning with Outlander)
Celeste de Blasis (wonderful Swann trilogy)
Judith McNaught (starting with Whitney, My Love...just her historicals IMO, not the contemporaries)
Marion Zimmer Bradley (Mists of Avalon)
James Clavell (Shogun)
Georgette Heyer (every single wonderful historical regency, not really epic, but there are 50 of them)
Karleen Koen (Thru a Glass Darkly)
I'm missing a lot lol, its after midnight, must sleep.
Waiting is a 1999 novel by Chinese-American author Ha Jin which won the National Book Award that year. It is based on a true story that Jin heard from his wife when they were visiting her family at an army hospital in China. At the hospital was an army doctor who had waited eighteen years to get a divorce so he could marry his longtime friend, a nurse.
The plot revolves around the fortunes of three people: Lin Kong, the army doctor; his wife Shuyu, whom he has never loved; and the nurse Manna Wu, his girlfriend at the hospital where he works. Beginning in 1963 and stretching over a twenty-year period, Waiting is set against the background of a changing Chinese society. It contrasts city and country life and shows the restrictions on individual freedoms that are a routine part of life under communism. But Waiting is primarily a novel of character. It presents a portrait of a decent but deeply flawed man, Lin Kong, whose life is spoiled by his inability to experience strong emotions and to love wholeheartedly.
Dr. Zhivago - Boris Pasternak
Set immediately before the Russian Revolution, during the Revolution and immediately after the Revolution. A man whose family has money has just finished his medical studies, is engaged, and...that's just the first few pages. Lots of twists and turns, and makes you question what you would do if it would mean that your beloved could have a better life. The movie doesn't do it justice.
A Town Called Alice - Nevil Shute
A very well written story about a young lady who finds herself in the midst of the Japanese invasion of Malaysia at the beginning of World War II. How she and a small group of women and children handle themselves as Japanese captives, a wildly handsome Australian cattle rancher who is a POW, and basically two interlinked plots. Old fashioned story-telling -- this is that kind of a book that you can't put down -- you end up reading until 3 AM on a work night because it's so fascinating. Nevil Shute is a wonderful writer -- I ended up chain reading about 14 of his books after I read this one.
Shining Through - Susan Isaacs
Legal secretary in World War II New York, sole support of her widowed mother, falls in love with the wrong guy, starts taking dictation for the right guy...and ends up an American spy in Berlin in 1944. If written poorly could be fish wrapping. But Susan Issacs is another author who can spin a tale that has you riveted. I have lost count of the number of times I've read this book.
North and South - Elizabeth Gaskell
Written in the mid-nineteenth century, story of a minister's daughter who moves with her parents from a comfortable parish South of London to a parish in the working class, industrial slums of Manchester (Northern England), which is called "Milton" in the book. There she finds herself in the middle. She wants to make friends with the working people who spend their days and lives in the mills, but is fascinated by a mill owner. He is drawn to her, but feels she wants to side with the workers against him. Fascinating tension in the hands of a master storyteller.
The Forsythe Saga - Galsworthy
Epic three generational tale of the Forsythes, which centers around Soames Forsythe, who is very good at business, but incapable of expressing his powerful emotions, and his pursuit of the poor, but beautiful Irene, and what happens, and how it affects all the lives around them.
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