Books like De Sacrale En Profane Liefdes Machine by Iris Murdoch

Erich Fromm examines love as a practiced art rather than a simple feeling, distinguishing types such as brotherly, motherly, erotic, self‑love, and love of God, and urging genuine care amid modern superficiality.

Set in the 1830s Midlands, George Eliot’s Middlemarch intertwines village life, politics, and the struggles of its characters to explore social reform, gender roles, and community hypocrisy.

Charles Dickens’s classic critique of Victorian industrial society, “Hard Times” follows schoolmaster Thomas Gradgrind as he confronts the limits of utilitarian philosophy and the power of imagination.

Alma Singer, a fourteen‑year‑old New Yorker, searches for a book that might cure her mother’s loneliness, while Leo Gursky, an immigrant in the city, hunts the hidden author of a novel that once inspired his love in Polish exile.

On Beauty explores a New England family’s life as they confront love, identity, and cultural divides over three decades, weaving personal struggles with broader conversations about race and belonging.

C.S. Lewis explores the four distinct loves—friendship, eros, charity, and self-love—in a thoughtful analysis rooted in Christian theology.

Three male explorers arrive in an all‑female society and discover a matriarchal utopia, challenging their assumptions about gender and civilization.

Samuel Butler’s 1903 novel, The Way of All Flesh, sharply critiques Victorian domestic life through a sardonic portrayal of a Christian family across generations.

In the Lake of the Woods follows John and Kathy Wade as they grapple with political defeat, marital strain, and Kathy’s sudden disappearance on a Minnesota lake, prompting a desperate search and a haunted look at their hidden secrets.

Een man lijdt onder schuldgevoelens over het overlijden van een vriend; zijn fanaticus stiefbroer probeert hem te beteren op zijn gedachten.

The novel follows metaphysician Marcus Vallar as he rises to prominence and then collapses, while the ordinary people around him grapple with his philosophical teachings and the uncanny phenomena he engenders.

"Iris Murdoch's life - like her books - was full of extraordinary passions and profound relationships with some of the most inspiring and influential thinkers, artists, writers and poets of her time. During the war she pondered Aldous Huxley's doctrine that, for a writer, 'it is not what one has experienced but what one does with what one has experienced that matters,' and she later wrote that the person who might help her better herself 'must not distinguish between me and my work'. She was sometimes portrayed as a bourgeois grandee living an unworldly, detached intellectual life, inventing a fantastical alternative world for compensation; but much that was thought to be romance in her work turns out to be reality. 'Real life is so much odder than any book,' she wrote to a friend, and her life was as exciting and improbable as her fiction. Her novels are not just stylised comedies of manners with artificial complications, but reflect passionately lived experience, albeit wonderfully transmuted. Peter Conradi's biography returns the reader to her best work, through a quest for the living flesh-and-blood creature: the Irishwoman, the Communist-bohemian, the Treasury civil servant, the worker in Austrian refugee-camps, the RCA lecturer during the 1960s, the lifelong devotee of friendship conducted at a distancce and by letter, and the Buddhist-Christian mystic. It balances the formative years before the creative confusion of youth gave way to a greater stability, with an account of her maturity."--BOOK JACKET.

"In this book, psychiatrist Peter Dally explores the darker side of Virginia Woolf. Bringing together his knowledge as a doctor with his life-long fascination with Virginia Woolf's life and work, he sheds light on the depression that tormented her adult years."--BOOK JACKET.

Gogol, N. The overcoat. Melville, H. [Billy Budd, sailor](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL102746W) James, H. The Aspern papers. Chopin, K. [The awakening](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL65430W) Conrad, J. Heart of darkness. Joyce, J. [The dead](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL15073437W) Kafka, F. The metamorphosis. Lawrence, D.H. St. Mawr. Porter, K.A. Pale horse, pale rider. Pynchon, T. The crying of Lot 49.

A Fairly Honourable Defeat follows the Foster couple as they prepare for a second‑decade anniversary while confronting moral questions about love, ageing, and society.