Love, love, love... love is all you need. If you're stuck for presents this Valentine's Day, look no further than our 'lovelist,' 15 books about love in all its epic, romantic, tragic, yearning glory.
These books range from the classic to the contemporary, from the street-wise to the world-weary. Each one depicts love in its entirety, each one is love at its most true.
So this Valentine's Day- forget the ubiquitous flowers and generic box of chocolates, go for the heart- give the gift of words.
Love
Love, love, love... love is all you need. If you're stuck for presents this Valentine's Day, look no further than our 'lovelist,' 15 books about love in all its epic, romantic, tragic, yearning glory.
These books range from the classic to the contemporary, from the street-wise to the world-weary. Each one depicts love in its entirety, each one is love at its most true.
So this Valentine's Day- forget the ubiquitous flowers and generic box of chocolates, go for the heart- give the gift of words.
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Pride and Prejudice
PenguinPride and Prejudice is an ironic novel of manners. In it the garrulous and empty-headed Mrs Bennet has only one aim - that of finding a good match for each of her five daughters. -
Noughts and Crosses
Doubleday Children's BooksAs well as being a compelling tale of love and friendship, this is an outstanding and thought-provoking exploration of the futility of prejudice. -
Wuthering Heights
PenguinWuthering Heights is a wild, passionate story of the intense and almost demonic love between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff. -
Possession
VintageThis Booker-winning novel is bound to set pulses racing and increase yearning and longing as its historical love affair affects the modern-day action. -
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Far from the Madding Crowd
Penguin ClassicsFar from the Madding Crowd is perhaps the most pastoral of Hardy's Wessex novels. It tells the story of the young farmer Gabriel Oak and his love for and pursuit of the elusive Bathsheba Everdene, whose wayward nature leads her... -
A Song for Summer
Macmillan Children's BooksA deliciously old-fashioned story, which encompasses love, adventure and a host of memorable characters. -
Romeo and Juliet: Manga Shakespeare
Self Made HeroSet in modern Tokyo, with the Capulets and Montagues recast as organised-crime rivals, this racy retelling gets to the heart of the love story and the foolish rivalry that dooms it. -
Love in the Time of Cholera
PenguinFlorentino Ariza has never forgotten his first love. He has waited nearly a lifetime in silence since his beloved Fermina married another man. No woman can replace her in his heart. -
Frenchmans Creek
Virago PressUnhappy with her shallow existence and empty marriage in London, Lady Dona St Columb decides to leave Charles II's court and seek solace at her husband's remote Cornish estate, Navron, with her two young children. -
The Pursuit of Love
PenguinThis funny book is known for its portrayal of independent yet eccentric women and its depiction of love as being the ultimate goal despite its true course running far from smoothly. -
Norwegian Wood
VintageLike Proust's Madeleine cake, the Beatles song of the title sets off a wave of memories for the narrator, Toru Watanabe as his remembers his teenage relationships with fragile first love Naoko and impetuous and unpredictable Midori. -
English Patient
BloomsburyThe exhausted nurse, Hana; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary bomb-defuser, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless burn victim who lies in an upstairs room. -
Tipping the Velvet
ViragoTipping the Velvet, all 472 pages of it, is as saucy, as tantalising, and as touching as the narrator's first encounter with the seductive but shame-ridden Miss Kitty Butler. -
Love Me
Chatto & WindusWritten in similes that drip with cultural relevance, rhythmical intelligence and poetical sibilance, she weaves textures into a simple tale where a punk rock girl falls in love with a hip-hop guy and obsesses over the perfect memory of a...
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