Themes
Books About Love
Stories where love — in all its forms — is the engine of the narrative.
20 books · ranked
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1
Beloved
A formerly enslaved mother is haunted, literally, by the past she escaped; a towering, harrowing masterpiece.
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2
A Walk in the Woods
Two unfit friends attempt the Appalachian Trail; very funny, with real love for wild places.
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3
Sense and Sensibility
Elinor and Marianne Dashwood embody two opposing temperaments — sense and sensibility — as they navigate love, heartbreak and financial precarity after their father's death leaves them dependent on others' goodwill. Austen's first published novel is a sophisticated study of what it costs women to feel and what it costs them not to.
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4
The Fault in Our Stars
Two teenagers with cancer fall in love; funny and heartbreaking without ever being saccharine.
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5
Fahrenheit 451
A fireman whose job is burning books begins to question why; a passionate defence of reading.
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6
The Remains of the Day
An English butler looks back on a life of duty and the love he never let himself feel; restrained and quietly shattering.
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7
Wuthering Heights
A storm of obsession and revenge on the Yorkshire moors; for readers who want their love stories dark and uncompromising.
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8
Neuromancer
A washed-up hacker pulled into one last job in cyberspace; the book that named and shaped cyberpunk.
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9
The Name of the Wind
A legendary figure tells the story of his own rise from orphan to arcanist; lyrical, immersive and beloved.
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10
War and Peace
Russian aristocrats live, love and survive the Napoleonic wars in a vast, surprisingly readable panorama of a society in upheaval.
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11
Anna Karenina
A passionate affair against the grain of high society, threaded with one of fiction's most honest portraits of an ordinary good life.
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12
Americanah
Ifemelu, a young Nigerian woman, moves to the United States for university and spends fifteen years discovering what it means to be Black in America — a category she did not inhabit in Nigeria. Meanwhile Obinze, her first love, tries and fails to build a life in England and returns to Lagos. Adichie's richly observed novel is about race, class and the specific discovery of race-consciousness that comes from leaving home.
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13
The Argonauts
Part memoir, part theory, part love story — Nelson writes about her relationship with the artist Harry Dodge and her pregnancy, while drawing on feminist philosophy, queer theory and literary criticism. The Argonauts is a book about how language both creates and fails the experiences it tries to hold.
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14
The God of Small Things
Twins, forbidden love and a single terrible day in Kerala; lush, fractured and unforgettable.
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15
The Great Gatsby
Wealth, longing and a green light across the bay in the Jazz Age — short, perfect and quietly devastating.
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16
We
D-503, a mathematician in a future totalitarian state called the One State where all citizens live in glass apartments with no privacy, falls in love with the revolutionary I-330. Zamyatin's novel — written in 1924 and suppressed in the Soviet Union — was a direct influence on Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.
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17
Still Life
In the Quebec village of Three Pines, a woman is found dead in the woods on the morning after Thanksgiving. Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec arrives to investigate — and finds a village of artists, eccentrics and buried secrets. Penny's debut introduced one of crime fiction's most beloved series and established Three Pines as a genuinely compelling literary setting.
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18
A Memory Called Empire
Mahit Dzmare arrives as ambassador to the vast Teixcalaanli Empire carrying the memories of her predecessor — who has died under suspicious circumstances — implanted in her brain. Martine's Hugo Award-winning novel is space opera built on questions of cultural assimilation, imperial seduction and what it means to love the empire that is erasing your home.
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19
The House of the Spirits
Four generations of the Trueba family in an unnamed Latin American country — from the clairvoyant Clara to her granddaughter Alba, who survives the military coup — are traced through love, violence, magic and political catastrophe. Allende's debut draws on García Márquez's magical realism while making it entirely her own, and is one of the foundational texts of Latin American feminist fiction.
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20
Network Effect
Murderbot — the anxious, TV-obsessed security AI who would rather be left alone — returns in the first full-length Murderbot novel, drawn into a crisis involving a kidnapped friend, a hijacked ship and a conspiracy that forces Murderbot to confront its feelings about the humans it protects. Wells's Hugo and Nebula-winning novel combines thriller pacing with one of science fiction's most beloved unconventional narrators.