7 Novels About Women Chasing Love Abroad

Screenshot of The Expatriates on Prime Video I have spent nearly all my adult life living in foreign countries. That includes working, dating, marrying, and now—parenting abroad. Aside from the potential challenges of language and geography, what it means for a woman to be in a foreign land is to understand and navigate the joys and threats of womanhood particular to another culture. A woman abroad comes to see herself and her romantic partners through a different set of expectations, standards, and biases. She sees herself anew. My debut novel, Shanghailanders , features a Japanese-French woman who moves to Shanghai with her husband. In the span of nearly 25 years that the book covers, Eko suffers from anxiety at her foreignness, has a short-lived affair with a local, and wrestles with the ways she and her husband and children change or do not change. I was interested in exploring how a person forms over time, and how outside forces—including place—come to shape a life. The following books are all narratives about women pursuing love in foreign countries (and, in one case, foreign universes). All these novels follow characters experiencing literal and emotional displacement. They are met with the challenge of redefining their relationships, and themselves, on new grounds. The Lover by Marguerite Duras To the young French girl living in 1929 Indochine, her entanglement with an older Chinese lover is a breach of multiple boundaries in her life—of race, class, and age. A lush, sensual, nostalgic novel, The Lover portrays a romance that breaks the narrator’s family and home, and that shapes her future as an artist. She is sent back to her “original” country of France, while the lover is married off to a more appropriate Chinese woman. But we come to know, from the beautiful structure of the book, that she has been chasing her lover, writing him onto the page, for the entirety of her life. Take a break from the news We publish your favorite authors—even the ones you haven’t read yet. Get new fiction, essays, and poetry delivered to your inbox. Submit YOUR INBOX […]

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