Books like Scandalous truths by Susan Howatch

A historical novel set in the 12th century, focusing on the building of a cathedral and the surrounding community's fortunes amidst historical events of the time.

In Edith Wharton’s classic, Lily Bart, a beautiful and intelligent young woman devoted to luxury, struggles to navigate New York’s strict social hierarchy and moral expectations, ultimately confronting the limits of her independence.

The Thorn Birds chronicles the sweeping saga of the Cleary family on a pastoral station in the Australian Outback over five decades, interweaving love, faith and the complex ties of a Catholic priest‑family.

A Catholic priest, scarred by his past, navigates early 1930s Mexico while the church faces persecution, providing aid to impoverished peasants under the threat of ruthless police and betrayal.

In a small East Texas town, a convicted football star faces execution while the true perpetrator, now paroled, must decide whether to confess and risk his own life to save an innocent man.

An Indian judge in a Himalayan estate grapples with retirement and family secrets when his orphaned granddaughter Sai arrives, sparking personal discovery amid the echoes of colonial history.

English heiress Gabby schemes to keep her family's fortune by pretending her half-brother is still alive.

In Regency London, Charlotte Wyndham, an outspoken, bookish newcomer, battles debt, jealous rivals, and a mysterious neighbor, Sir Maxim Talgarth, while hiding an explosive narrative of her own.

Katherine Mansfield is remembered for writing brilliant short stories that helped to initiate the modernist period in British fiction, and for the fact that her life - lived at a feverish pace on the fringes of Bloomsbury during the First World War - ended after a prolonged battle with pulmonary disease when she was only thirty-four years old. While her life was marred by emotional and physical afflictions of the most extreme kind, argues Mary Burgan in Illness, Gender, and Writing, her stories have seemed to exist in isolation from those afflictions - as stylish expressions of the "new," as romantic triumphs of art over tragic circumstances, or as wavering expressions of Mansfield's early feminism. In the first book to look at the continuum of a writer's life and work in terms of that writer's various illnesses, Burgan explores Katherine Mansfield's recurrent emotional and physical afflictions as the ground of her writing. Mansfield is remarkably suited to this approach, Burgan contends, because her "illnesses" ranged from such early psychological afflictions as separation anxiety, body image disturbances, and fear of homosexuality to bodily afflictions that included miscarriage and abortion, venereal disease, and tuberculosis. Offering a thorough and provocative reading of Mansfield's major texts, Illness, Gender, and Writing shows how Mansfield negotiated her illnesses and, in so doing, sheds new light on the study of women's creativity. Mansfield's drive toward self-integration, Burgan concludes, was her strategy for writing - and for staying alive.