Top 10 books about cheating

From illicit James Salter to category-defying Jeanette Winterson, here are the best contemporary works about romantic infidelity

Why do we keep coming back to the adultery novel? What is it about infidelity that bears retelling across the centuries, especially now, when the ancient prohibitions against sex outside marriage have all but disappeared? These are questions I asked myself as I was writing Fire Sermon, the story of a married woman’s physical, intellectual and spiritual affair with a married poet.

I’m not sure I have all the answers. However, given the current cultural moment, I believe it’s a crucial time for female artists to write frankly and openly about female sexuality in all its forms: longing, shame, guilt, transgression, ecstasy. The assumption that male writers can have sexually transgressive imaginations while female novelists should be more demure is passé. If we’re going to secure gender equality, we must be allowed the same imaginative expression, on the page, as our male counterparts.

Further, women are bravely speaking out against male abuses of power and sexual coercion in the workplace – but what about sexual coercion and abuse within a marriage? Or within the context of religion, where traditional gender roles and prohibitions against extramarital sex might make it difficult to speak up? Perhaps my protagonist Maggie’s predicament – to stay or not to stay in the marriage – will serve as a platform for discussion.

When I initially drafted this list, I began with the obvious suspects: Anna Karenina, Lady With the Pet Dog, Madame Bovary and The End of the Affair. But these works are always included on lists like this. With these classics taken as read, I’ve listed only contemporary works, all published in my lifetime. I’ve also included a poetry collection and a short story, because I think the compression of these forms is suited to the intensity of the subject matter.

1. Light Years by James Salter (1975)
Not just one of the best novels about marriage and infidelity but one of the best novels ever, period. Salter is known as a virtuoso writer on illicit sex and infidelity. Nedra and Viri Berland have what looks like the perfect marriage and family, yet in private their relationship is imploding. Salter details the dissolution of their marriage while insisting that love still undergirds all – despite their infidelities, the Berlands love one another. Love doesn’t have to be either/or, and this breadth of understanding distinguishes Light Years from other novels about affairs.

2. Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson (1992)
A nameless, genderless narrator falls for a married woman named Louise. They have a passionate affair – until the husband tells the narrator that Louise has leukaemia. Part love story, part philosophical treatise, part anatomical guide, Written on the Body defies categorisation, dispensing with cliches and stereotypes to forge, from the raw physicality of the body itself, a new language for love.

3. What Is Remembered by Alice Munro (2001)
This one’s a short story, but, typical of Munro, the narrator’s retrospective stance gives the piece the scope and import of a novel. Meriel is writing from a point more than 30 years after the central event: a one-night affair with a near-stranger. The story’s heat is in the buildup rather than the act of infidelity itself (the sex happens off stage) and in the “exquisite shame” of the aftermath, when Meriel wonders whether or not to tell her husband. One of her lesser-known stories, this is nonetheless a technical and emotional wonder, and my favourite Munro story.

4. The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante (2002)
I read this on vacation one summer, in a single sitting, paralysed with the exquisite literary sickness that comes from the combination of aesthetic appreciation on the one hand, and recognition of oneself on the other. An account of a woman’s mental unravelling after her husband leaves her for a much younger woman, the book’s power is in its fearless, closeup details (I can’t think of a more painful animal death scene) and in the ways the narrative subtly implicates the reader: given a certain set of horrific circumstances, I, too, might be capable of this psychic fury.

5. We Don’t Live Here Anymore by André Dubus (1984)
This triptych of novellas centres on two married couples, Hank and Edith Allison, and Jack and Terry Linhart. In the title novella, each of them cheats with the other’s partner. In the middle story, Adultery, Edith falls in love with a dying priest. In the final piece, Hank is divorced and trapped in his alternately self-aggrandising and self-pitying habits, unable to find happiness or peace. As a whole, the book asks, as Dubus’s son André III noted: “How can a man and woman ever be truly married to one another without losing their very souls?”

6. The Man in the Wooden Hat by Jane Gardam (2009)
The sequel to Gardam’s Old Filth (told from the point of view of Sir Edward Feathers, the spotlessly groomed barrister), this is related from the perspective of Filth’s wife, Betty. Trapped in a sexually dry marriage, Betty takes her boundless but carefully contained passion elsewhere: to her husband’s arch-enemy Terry Veneering, and to Veneering’s son Harry, for whom she feels a conflicted blend of maternal and sexual love. What if we were capable of choosing passion over propriety, Betty asks of herself – and the novel asks of us.

7. Stag’s Leap by Sharon Olds (2012)
I read this poetry collection with my heart in my throat. Olds looks at the central fact – after 30 years, her husband has fallen in love with someone else – from all angles, finding compassion for the one who is “escaping”: “Even when it’s I who am escaped from, / I am half on the side of the leaver.” It’s difficult to find words to put around this gorgeous book; suffice it to say that it is forensically ruthless and forgiving, right up to the penultimate poem, September 2001, New York City: “And it came to me, / for moments at a time, moment after moment, / to be glad for him that he is with the one / he feels was meant for him.”

8. Dept of Speculation by Jenny Offill (2014)
A groundbreaking book that is, structurally, a series of cohesive fragments (I can’t help the oxymoron) narrated from a woman’s perspective after she discovers her husband is having an affair. I love that the narrator is as passionate about becoming an artist – an “art monster” – as she is about anything else. She’s also acutely, hearteningly awake to the presiding sense of failed ambition that attends such a calling. A singular novel, wholly alive to artistic complexity, grief, anger and rage, and the muddled mix of frustration and joy in parenting and teaching.

9. Euphoria by Lily King (2014)
One of the most startling fusions of intellectual and sexual energy in literary history. Euphoria is a fictional rendering of an episode in anthropologist Margaret Mead’s life, when she and her second husband, Reo Fortune, took a trip to New Guinea and collaborated briefly with English anthropologist Gregory Bateson (who would become Mead’s third husband). Those historical bones have been transformed, in King’s deft hands, into a love triangle between Andrew Bankson and the married Nell and Fen. With competing egos and intellects, and the brilliant elucidation of Mead’s nascent cultural mapping tool (“the Grid”), it is a modern classic and unlike any other book I’ve read about adultery.

10. The First Day by Phil Harrison (2017)
Harrison’s debut novel, set in Belfast, is the story of a married pastor, Samuel Orr, who falls in love with Anna, a much younger Beckett scholar at Queen’s University. The two begin a passionate physical affair, until Anna reveals that she’s pregnant. Filmic in its scope and intensity, spanning 30 years and two continents, The First Day explores the intersection of faith and sexuality, and casts its Christian characters as intelligent and compelling, not caricatures. I hope we’re in for more from this striking new voice in fiction.

• Fire Sermon by Jamie Quatro is published by Picador, priced £14.99. It is available from the Guardian Bookshop for £12.74, including free UK p&p.

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