Forget about the traditional romances, why not celebrate Valentine’s Day this year with a more unconventional pick?
Whether you’re interested in exploring what it means to build a meaningful life without romantic partnership, want to dive into an adventure featuring a married couple lost at sea, or wonder what love would look like between a human and a machine, these books celebrate love in all its forms.
Love can change your life. Can it survive it?
In this novel, Howard Jacobson looks at the way romantic love can change across a lifetime, taking us to the edge of desire, love and betrayal. In What Will Survive of Us , he reveals what is left of us when we strip away every layer.
What happens when the life you’ve been working towards isn’t the one that ends up making you happy? Dylan decides to leave everything behind to housesit for an artist she’s never met and ends up finding herself in a love affair with a married man, while she is in a relationship herself. She begins to consider what is fixed and what is variable. Can a person be both? Is Gabe the thing he seems? Is she?
How to be Somebody Else is an uncoming-of-age story to lose yourself in.
Maurice and Maralyn couldn't be more different. He is as cautious and awkward as she is charismatic and forceful. It seems an unlikely romance, but it works. Bored of 1970s suburban life, Maralyn comes up with an idea: sell the house, build a boat, leave England forever. Turning dreams into reality, they set sail for New Zealand only to have their beloved boat is struck by a whale. It sinks within an hour, and the pair are cast adrift in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
What begins as an eccentric English love story turns into one of the most dramatic adventures ever recorded.
Can you design the perfect partner?
When Charlie comes into money, he buys Adam, one of the first batch of synthetic humans. With Miranda's assistance, he co-designs Adam's personality. This near-perfect human is beautiful, strong and clever - and soon a love triangle forms, which leads Charlie, Miranda and Adam to a profound moral dilemma.
Provocative and moving, Machines Like Me explores whether a machine can ever truly understand the human heart.
Amy Key looked forward to a life shaped by romance, fuelled by desire, longing and the conventional markers of success that come when you share a life with another person. But that didn't happen for her. Now in her forties, she sets out to explore the realities of a life lived in the absence of romantic love.
Arrangements in Blue elegantly honours a life lived completely by, and for, oneself.
This is the story of Sam and Sadie. It's not a romance, but it is about love.
If you’re one of the few who hasn’t had the chance to devour this Sunday Times bestseller yet, it might finally be time to read this captivating tale of friendship and rivalry, fame and art, betrayal and tragedy, perfect worlds and imperfect ones.
Above all, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow explores our need to connect: to be loved and to love.
What would you do if the two people you loved the most hated each other?
Set over a single day, husband, wife and best friend Temi toe the lines of compromise and betrayal. Told in three parts, three people's lives, and their visions of themselves and one another begin to slowly unravel, until a startling discovery throws everyone's integrity into question.
Part coming-of-age story, part historical fiction, if you’re in the mood for a novel that will make you laugh and devastate you in turns, there’s no better choice than Rose Tremain’s electrifying Absolutely and Forever .
Follow the rebellious, determined Marianne Clifford as she searches for love and freedom in the 1960s. At the centre of this story is the question: how do you find the courage to make your own life?
Erin Morgenstern’s debut novel takes star-crossed lovers to a whole new world — that of the Night Circus.
Celia and Marco are two young magicians who have been trained since childhood for a deadly dual. With the lives of everyone at the Circus of Dreams at stake, they must test the very limits of the imagination, and of their love. Prepare to be stunned by this modern classic.
On her quest to discovering lesbian role models overlooked by history, Amelia Possanza uncovers seven incredible love stories in the archives. Their stories illuminate a forgotten history, as well as show us all a new way to understand what love means when there’s nothing material to be gained.
Although non-fiction might not always be top of the list for Valentine’s Day, this is a genre-defying repository of sapphic romance like no other.
2023 Sunday Times Novel of the Year, Tom Crewe’s The New Life is a daring story of forbidden longing.
Set against the backdrop of the Oscar Wilde trial in 1894 London, John and Henry have a vision for a new way of life that is under threat. How high of a price are they willing to pay for it?
Read what Douglas Stuart describes as ‘some of the best writing on desire’.
From master writer Italo Calvino, this dazzling collection of stories follows the individual adventures of a varied cast of characters exploring the concerns of love and the difficulty of communication.
Celebrate love in all its quirky and intimate lenses in this spectacular display of the writer’s early work.
Nearing fifty and married with two children, Maggie and her husband drive from Baltimore to Deer Lick to attend the funeral of a friend. During the journey, with its several unexpected detours into the lives of old friends and grown children, her eternal optimism and her inexhaustible passion for sorting out other people's lives and willing them to fall in love is severely tested...
Rather than the optimistic beginning days of love, this is a novel about the kind of love that is lived in, day to day, year to year, and the challenges it endures.
What happens when time gets in the way of love?
Rediscover this time-bending story that has inspired multiple adaptations across screens and stages. It’s the tale of an impossible but true love between two people at the whims of time and time travel . Intensely moving and entirely unforgettable, this is a novel you will think of long after the final page.
