Five best books about betrayals of love

Tessa Hadley is the author of The Master Bedroom, Sunstroke and Other Stories, Everything Will Be All Right, Accidents in the Home, and The London Train.

For the Wall Street Journal she named her five best books on betrayals of love.

One title on the list:

The Maples Stories
by John Updike (2009)

This collection draws together the stories John Updike wrote about Joan and Richard Maples over four decades, chronicling their marriage, adulteries and separation. The writer grows old with his characters in a more literal sense than usual. Time dulls the sting of parting, so that when Joan and Richard meet as new grandparents in their 50s, each long married to someone else, they only bear the mildest and most-domesticated of grudges. As a young couple in the story "Wife-Wooing," they burned with such desire that when she turned to him with "a kiss of toothpaste," he thought: "an expected gift is not worth giving." What has changed them so absolutely? In Updike's tragicomedy of half-consenting treacheries, time and not adultery is the worst betrayer.

Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue