Births, Deaths and Marriages

A novel about what happens when Death is made redundant and ends up working on a farm.

A whirlwind romance in the South of France leads a poor girl with no name to marry an enigmatic widower and the mystery of his beautiful home in Cornwall.

Which Edith Wharton novel is set amid the impending socially correct marriage of Newland to Mary, when Mary’s cousin Ellen shows up bringing scandal in her wake.

A novel by Ann Tyler explores three adults differing perspectives of their childhoods as they gather at their dying mother’s bedside.

A multi-prize winning novel narrated by Death.

Which play ends with the execution of a flawed but innocent man and his wife’s words, ‘He have his goodness now. God forbid I take it from him!’

A 2012 weepy about teenagers Hazel and Augustus who meet at a cancer support group.

A classic novel that, for its time, radically depicts the drudgery of pregnancy and childbirth. ‘(She) shuddered at the mere recollection of the pain from cracked nipples that she had endured with almost every child.’

A classic novel of the Depression that begins and, tragically ends, by a pond near a ranch in California.

wo sides of motherhood where Offred, trapped in a society women where are defined by their reproductive abilities, uses flashbacks to remember the joys of motherhood.

Maggie O'Farrell’s novel interweaves two stories of new motherhood, one in the 1950s, the other contemporary.

Which Shakespeare comedy ends in three marriages?

Which Jane Austen heroine speaks these words on marriage, ‘I lay it down as a general rule that if a woman doubts as to whether she should accept a man or not, she certainly ought to refuse him.’

Father and new born son both sit by the fire in the opening of Charles Dickens’ eighth novel.

Shakespeare’s play with the highest body count and, possibly, most inventive deaths.

Written in 1930 this William Faulkner novel is narrated by 15 different characters and tells the story of the death of Addie Bundren and her poor, rural family's quest to honour her wish to be buried in her hometown.

A 2002 novel that tells of the rape and murder of a teenage girl who watches over her family and friends as they struggle to move on with their lives.

In which 2003 novel does a troubled mother speak these words, ‘For years I'd been waiting for that overriding urge…the narcotic pining that draws childless couples ineluctably to strangers' strollers in parks…Whatever the trigger, it never entered my system, and that made me feel cheated.’

A dark, tragic novel by Toni Morrison of a racially corrupt society where a slave, Sethe, is not allowed to be a mother to her own child and has her breast milk sucked from her by two white boys.