Books like Nuns and soldiers by Iris Murdoch

A novel about Emma Woodhouse, a young woman's struggles with matchmaking, misplaced pride, and the dangers of meddling in others' lives in 18th-century England.

Cassidy St. John, fired again, discovers hope on Fisherman’s Wharf when she becomes model for the enigmatic artist Colin Sullivan. Their artistic collaboration sparks unexpected love, but Colin’s raw honesty turns every brushstroke into a revelation of Cassidy’s own heart.

Three sisters struggle to reconcile their faith with the world outside the convent.

A contemporary romance that explores friendship, love, and the complexities of inter‑personal relationships in a modern Virginia setting.

A diverse community gathers outside Imber Abbey, where an ancient bell symbolizes religion and mystery, drawing questions of faith, love, and forgiveness into the lives of its members.

During a London‑to‑Egypt journey, Sally, a lady’s maid, follows Lady Lucie Duff Gordon as she seeks treatment for tuberculosis, gaining freedom and love amid the harsh realities of her social rank.

An unofficial rose follows nine intertwined characters, each seeking love while navigating affection, lust, and disillusion, revealing how their actions constantly shape one another’s destinies.

"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.

456 pages ; 20 cm

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.

The novelist Maurice Bendrix's love affair with his friend's wife, Sarah, had begun in London during the Blitz. But, out of the blue she ended the relationship. Years later he sends a private detective to follow Sarah and find out the truth.