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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.

6 booksPublished 18 May 2026Updated 18 May 2026

1
Normal People
Sally Rooney
3.8
3.8 · 145,000 reviewsliterary-fiction
Rooney 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
4.2
4.2 · 97,000 reviewsliterary-fiction
Eliot'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
4.2
4.2 · 158,000 reviewsliterary-fiction
A decades-long creative partnership that is also, unmistakably, a love story — generous and quietly devastating.
4
The God of Small Things
Arundhati Roy
4.1
4.1 · 165,000 reviewsliterary-fiction
Roy's forbidden love story is inseparable from the society determined to destroy it — tragic and ravishing.
5
Remarkably Bright Creatures
Shelby Van Pelt
4.2
4.2 · 122,000 reviewsliterary-fiction
A grieving widow, a missing young man, and an octopus narrator — surprisingly, a moving meditation on connection.
6
Lincoln in the Bardo
George Saunders
3.9
3.9 · 87,000 reviewshistorical-fiction
Lincoln's grief for his dying son becomes a chorus of voices from the beyond — strange, tender, and unlike anything else.