Kia ora and welcome to the Reading Doctor! Each week, literary critic and devoted reader Dr Louise recommends books to us on a particular theme, or responds to reader questions. 

Send us your questions for her by emailing: communications@read-nz.org

This week, Louise answers a reader request:

I'm looking for more short stories or novels with a wide range of characters who suffer from betrayal (but not infidelity).

I have The Dowry by Guy de Maupassant (short story). Her new husband takes off with her money.

And One Thousand Hills by James Roy and Noël Zihabamwe (novel). A young Tutsi is lured to the church (but doesn't enter) where the priests prioritise their ethnic group over their faith.

I guess another way of thinking about it is “stories containing a hoax or scam.”

Regards, Karen

Hi Karen,

I’ve tried to think broadly about your theme, and hope these fit the bill. Please excuse the necessary plot spoilers.

· A father betrays his son when he teaches him that the outside world must be shunned because it is dangerously plague-ridden in The Others by Mark Brandi; the boy’s slow realisation of the truth is also read as a betrayal of and by his father.

· The claims of family and class lead a woman to betray her own feelings and deny her love in Jane Austen’s Persuasion, a mistake which is realised and then corrected over the course of the novel.

· A tennis coach never quite gets over being betrayed by a rising star, who ditched him just as his promise began to be realised, in Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty; only, it turns out the real betrayal came from his wife, who secretly engineered the break.

· A nurse is hired to watch and test the mystery of an apparently miraculous fasting girl in 19^th-century rural Ireland in Emma Donoghue’s novel The Wonder, in which loyalties become very tangled indeed.

· Emma Donoghue’s book of short stories, The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits is a collection of stories based on real tricksters and their tricks: the title story describes an attempt to perpetrate a bizarre hoax; another, Union, describes an evening in which a young man is invited to dine and tricked into a hasty marriage, assisted by means of unwise amounts of poteen.

· A young man finds himself used and abused, though never maliciously, by a friend who betrays his trust, steals his car, kidnaps his brother and derails his plans, in The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles.

· A woman travels on holiday to Vietnam with her boyfriend; after he’s killed in a hit and run accident, she discovers he’d been lying to her about why they’re there and who he is, in The Red Lotus by Chris Bohjalian.

· The Bible story has Jesus betrayed firstly by Judas for 30 pieces of silver, and then by his beloved Peter when he denies knowing him: in C K Stead’s novel, My Name Was Judas, the charge is denied forty years after Jesus’ death.

· In The Melody by Jim Crace, an elderly, recently bereaved man is subject to the machinations of an unscrupulous nephew with designs on his grand old home.

· Klytemnestra believes she’s escorting her daughter to her wedding day, only to discover her husband’s horrifying betrayal; she is actually presenting Iphigenia for sacrifice to the gods, in Daughters of Sparta by Claire Heywood.