Six Brilliant Reads: Literary Romance

With St Valentine’s Day coming up you might like to celebrate with a good book. If you’re not normally a romance reader, here are some books found on our general fiction shelves that will still tug at your heartstrings.

Normal People by Sally Rooney was a runaway bestseller which made it to our screens a few years ago. It’s the story of Connell and Marianne, who know each other from school, but who come from very different backgrounds. They meet unexpectedly at Marianne's house where Connell's mother comes in to clean. The story follows the ups and downs of their relationship as they move on to university, showing their difficulty in expressing their feelings, as well as issues around privilege and power in relationships.

Call Me by Your Name by Andre Aciman, which also made it to the screen, takes us to Italy and the summer of 1983, where seventeen-year-old Elio is holidaying with his family at their villa. His life is altered when he meets Oliver, the American intern who arrives to work with Elio’s professor father. It’s a story about awakening desire, also chronicling Oliver’s and Elio’s lives over the years that follow.

Another book that begins with young feelings and continues in the years that follow is Heart the Lover by Lily King. Our narrator is swept up into an intense friendship with Sam and Yash when they meet at college. But there are unpredictable passions simmering beneath their relationship. Decades later, married and with children, she receives a surprise visit and the decisions she made in her youth are thrown into the spotlight.

Clare Chambers takes a couple of real events from 1950s Britain as inspiration for her novel Small Pleasures. Jean lives a quiet life with her mother in an England still dealing with rationing. Working at a newspaper reporting on women’s issues, Jean is thrown into the world of the Tilburys when Gretchen Tilbury tells the paper her daughter was the product of a virgin birth. The Tilburys open up Jean’s world and offer a new chance at happiness. This book has an ending that will make you gasp.

Tan Twan Eng takes us to the heady world of expats living in Penang in 1921 when the popular author, W Somerset Maugham visits Lesley and Robert Hamlyn for an extended stay. Told from both Maugham’s and Lesley’s point of view, The House of Doors is a sweeping historical novel, based on real events - including a court case for an English woman tried for murdering her lover, and a visit to Penang by Sun Yat Sen. There’s also a secret love affair, with another heart-stopping ending.

If melancholy and nostalgia for opportunities not taken are more your thing, try Madelaine Lucas’s novel Thirst for Salt. It begins with our narrator thinking back to the time when she met Jude, an older man living at the beach she visited on holiday with her mother. The story describes their relationship - the intensity, jealousy and insecurity she feels - all beautifully evoked and reflected in the wild seacoast which is vividly described.

Posted by JAM

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