5 Novels Promoting the Value of Forgiveness and Loyalty

recommended by Jason Sanders

  • 1

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    Love For Lydia
    by H.E. Bates

    This is about unrequited love, forgiveness of being wronged, and has an unsentimental happy ending that feels very real. You really feel this is based on a true event in the author's life. The descriptions of the winter landscape is also the most beautiful I've come across in literature. Bates knows so many flowers names.

  • 2

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    Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse (Oxford World's Classics)
    by Alexander Pushkin

    The James Falen translation is the best! Pushkin is Russia's Shakespeare and Eugene Onegin is a great novel in verse which is about a jaded Byronic anti-hero, an womanizing Aristocrat who finally has his heart broken when he meets an innocent young woman who really does love him, even after he spurns her. A broken heart is a bigger heart they say! And it is her loyalty and forgiveness which matters.

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    Solaris
    by Stanislav Lem

    A classic Sci-Fi which has a romantic love story at its heart, and which inspired a great film by Tarkovsky. Once again, the lovers must overcome big obstacles and forgive, and show loyalty in the face of cynical bystanders....after many years of separation they meet again in space station, with a little bit of help from a sentient planet/ocean!! One of the most unusual novels you can read, and the philosophical sub text is eery and moving too.

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    Far from the madding crowd (The New Wessex edition)
    by Thomas Hardy

    Thomas Hardy in his earlier fiction was lighter and less grim than his later years. This is a great novel from that earlier period in his writing career, and his descriptions of country life of 200 years ago is of a very high standard. Gabriel Oak loves a lass long and hard, and his inferior social station, and a dashing rival must be overcome before she learns a lesson and is able to give in to his loyal forgiving love. Probably my favourite of his novels I've read.

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    Jane Eyre.
    by Charlotte Bronte

    What can I say? This is a great Victorian classic of English love stories. The love feels real, and is more mature (and sweeter) than her sister Emily's love story in "Wuthering Heights", which doesn't feel like love at all, rather passionate infatuation. Of course the path to true love is never easy, and loyalty and forgiveness must save the day.

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