Books like The nice and the good by Iris Murdoch

In an elite New England college, a charismatic classics professor lures a group of eccentric students into obsessive study, leading them from intellectual curiosity to corruption, betrayal, and ultimately murder.

The Bell Jar is the sole novel by Sylvia Plath, a psychologically intense and autobiographical look at a young woman’s decline into mental illness.

In 1935 England, a young woman’s allegation of a crime sets off a chain of events that devastates families, alters lives during the Second World War, and echoes into a later life of remorse and reflection.

In *To the Lighthouse*, Virginia Woolf follows the Ramsay family as they spend a summer at their Scottish holiday home, exploring the depths of memory, longing, and the changing dynamics of adult relationships. The novel blends lyrical prose with a keen awareness of transience.

When Enid Lambert calls for a final Christmas at the family home, the aging patriarch with Parkinson’s and his three adult children—banker, screenwriter, and restaurateur—must confront their own discontent and the fractured bonds that hold the family together.

In 1990s America, novelist Nathan Zuckerman narrates a quiet life until the aging classicist Coleman Silk moves in next door.

A charismatic teacher at Edinburgh’s Marcia Blaine School in the years before World War II shapes the lives of six chosen girls, leaving an indelible mix of inspiration and manipulation that echoes into their adulthood.

A disorienting journey through memory and identity as a Nebraska truck driver with Capgras Syndrome confronts a sister who may be an impostor, while a cognitive neurologist probes the blurred line between reality and perception.

From Kay Redfield Jamison - an international authority on manic-depressive illness, and one of the few women who are full professors of medicine at American universities - a remarkable personal testimony: the revelation of her own struggle since adolescence with manic-depression, and how it has shaped her life. Vividly, directly, with candor, wit, and simplicity, she takes us into the fascinating and dangerous territory of this form of madness - a world in which one pole can be the alluring dark land ruled by what Byron called the "melancholy star of the imagination," and the other a desert of depression and, all too frequently, death. A moving and exhilarating memoir by a woman whose furious determination to learn the enemy, to use her gifts of intellect to make a difference, led her to become, by the time she was forty, a world authority on manic-depression, and whose work has helped save countless lives.

A ghost with no memory falls in love with her former teammate and seeks to reclaim her human identity before accepting her fate as a ghost.

Private investigator Claire Lécuyer uncovers a murder mystery in New Orleans while FBI agent Michael Murrieta investigates a government conspiracy, both wrapped up in a sultry, dangerous world of pleasure and desire.

A blind woman investigates a serial killer through her musical therapy skills.

After his no-nonsense assistant, Joceline Perry, comes to his rescue time and time again, FBI agent Jon Blackhawk realizes that he cannot live without her and must convince this beautiful single mother that he is worth the risk.

A police detective and a federal agent who meet on the job are drawn to each other on the personal level, and the story unfolds as they both start to uncover the secrets of Ann Silver's life.

Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) è stata autrice di numerosi romanzi, nonché di importanti opere di filosofia; il testo qui tradotto (The Sovereignty of Good, Routledge & Kegan Paul 1970; 2001; 2002; 2003) racchiude i temi cardine della sua riflessione in ambito morale, in particolare il rigetto della concezione del valore e dell'immagine dell'uomo affermatesi nel panorama filosofico anglosassone contemporaneo, che privilegiano l'azione a scapito della vita di coscienza. A questa concezione, la Murdoch contrappone l'importanza di recuperare una visione più ampia, meno specialistica del compito della filosofia morale (che non potrebbe essere esaurito da indagini logico linguistiche), e soprattutto la necessità di restituire all'individuo significato e spessore, pensandolo come essere sempre moralmente orientato verso una perfezione che lo trascende. È giusto considerare la sfera della morale come ambito che concerne solo determinati momenti della vita dell'individuo (quelli nei quali si fronteggiano scelte che conducono all'azione), o piuttosto bisognerebbe considerarla pertinente all'orientamento fondamentale e profondo della vita di coscienza? Nei tre saggi che compongono l'opera qui tradotta, Iris Murdoch fornisce una risposta a questo interrogativo, insistendo sull'importanza unica del concetto di virtù in tutti i diversi campi del sapere. Giuliana Di Biase è ricercatrice di Filosofia morale presso l'Università "G. D'annunzio" di Chieti-Pescara; oltre che di numerosi saggi, è autrice di due volumi, R.M. Hare. Pensiero e parola morale nell'opera più recente (Laterza 2004), e Etica analitica. Un metodo tra sviluppi e diversità nell'opera più recente (Carabba 2004).

In 1950s Dublin, Yvonne, a spirited young woman drifting toward adulthood, wrestles with family expectations, a courtship with a Jewish suitor, and her own desire for independence.

Dame Iris Murdoch who has written several works of philosophy as well as twenty-four distinguished novels, now crowns her philosophic quest with a book that asks many questions and reflects on the essential aspects of the great subject: moral philosophy. Among her concerns are the roles literature, politics, art, and science play in the search for morality in a world that avoids the issue. What is morality, after all, Murdoch asks. Is it important? Is it true? Can it be taught in schools? Is it the very basis of our existence, or is it just one of many peripheral matters? A main theme of this profound work concerns religion and its relation to morals, to moral philosophy, and to the great metaphysical systems which have supported it in the past. These are questions that concern us all, as we are driven to reflect upon the relation between religion and morals and upon the various conceptions of what religion is. Iris Murdoch believes it is time for a dialogue between moral philosophy and a demythologizing theology. She casts fresh light on our great western metaphysicians, Plato and Kant. She writes that philosophy is now in danger of being fragmented into psychology, sociology, anthropology, and other peripheral disciplines. Some universities are closing their philosophy departments. Moral philosophy (ethics), if considered at all, tends to be segregated as a small, special subject. Technology, so beneficial in innumerable ways, displays to us a vast, colorful world of facts within which "moral value" may appear as a little particular item. In her lucid and tightly reasoned "reflections," Dame Iris Murdoch constructs a warning that the survival of philosophy with its persistent ever-new attempts to seek "foundations" is more than ever essential, when the very question of "human being" is at stake. A grand work by one of the most distinguished thinkers of our time.

After a bomb goes off backstage at one of her concerts, pop singer Kendra Blake flees to a remote cabin in Arizona. Little does she know, FBI agent Charlie Whitmore has been assigned to keep her safe and is staying right across the street. The two develop a friendship that hovers on the verge of romance--but there may be a link between a notorious serial killer and Kendra that threatens them both.

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.