Love, Complicated
Novels about love in all its forms — the kind that builds you up and the kind that costs everything.
Love is easy to write badly and extraordinarily hard to write well. These novels manage it — capturing the specific texture of being known by another person, or the specific agony of almost being known. Sally Rooney maps the push-pull of young desire with sociological precision; George Eliot finds the tragedy of unrealised potential in a 19th-century marriage; Gabrielle Zevin asks whether a creative partnership can also be a love story. Together they form a portrait of intimacy that is honest, complicated, and utterly recognizable.
- 1
Normal People
Sally Rooney
3.83.8literary-fictionRooney captures the intoxicating, maddening circuit of two people who can't quite get out of their own way.
- 2
Middlemarch
A Study of Provincial Life
George Eliot
4.24.2literary-fictionEliot's Dorothea Brooke makes a catastrophic marriage and still manages to be one of fiction's most luminous heroines.
- 3
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Gabrielle Zevin
4.24.2literary-fictionA decades-long creative partnership that is also, unmistakably, a love story — generous and quietly devastating.
- 4
The God of Small Things
Arundhati Roy
4.14.1literary-fictionRoy's forbidden love story is inseparable from the society determined to destroy it — tragic and ravishing.
- 5
Remarkably Bright Creatures
Shelby Van Pelt
4.24.2literary-fictionA grieving widow, a missing young man, and an octopus narrator — surprisingly, a moving meditation on connection.
- 6
Lincoln in the Bardo
George Saunders
3.93.9historical-fictionLincoln's grief for his dying son becomes a chorus of voices from the beyond — strange, tender, and unlike anything else.
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