10 love stories that stay with you

Love here rarely runs smooth: Shakespeare's teenagers have three days and a feud, while Brontë's Jane Eyre carries her own fierce sense of worth into a strange house. What these books share is feeling under pressure, and you read them for the company of people who want something badly and say so.

1.Romeo and Juliet

William Shakespeare, 1597

Two teenagers from feuding families fall in love over three days, and the adults around them keep choosing sides.
2.Breaking Dawn

Stephenie Meyer, 2008

The fourth Twilight novel: Bella and Edward marry, and every supernatural faction in the Pacific Northwest has an opinion about it.

The brilliant light overhead was still blinding-bright, and yet I could plainly see the glowing strands of the filaments inside the bulb. I could see each color of the rainbow in the white light, and, at the very edge of the spectrum, an eighth color I had no name for.

Excerpt from Breaking Dawn, Stephenie Meyer 2008. Quoted for discovery. Source Rights & removals
3.Wuthering Heights

Emily Brontë, 1847

A storm of a love story told by two unreliable narrators, in which childhood devotion curdles into revenge across two generations on the Yorkshire moors.
4.The Three Musketeers

Alexandre Dumas, 1844

Four swaggering swordsmen, a cardinal who wants them dead, and a queen's secret: a serial adventure written at a gallop, with jokes and a very cold villain.
5.Les Misérables

Victor Hugo, 1862

A convict, a relentless inspector and a city on the edge of revolt: a huge novel about mercy, poverty and the price of a second chance.
6.Anna Karenina

Leo Tolstoy, 1878

A society novel about a marriage coming apart and a landowner trying to build a meaningful life, full of dinner tables, fields, jealousy and philosophy.

Anna said what came to her lips, and marveled, hearing herself, at her own capacity for lying. How simple and natural were her words, and how likely that she was simply sleepy! She felt herself clad in an impenetrable armor of falsehood. She felt that some unseen force had come to her aid and was supporting her.
7.Jane Eyre

Charlotte Brontë, 1847

An orphan with no money, no beauty and a ferocious sense of her own worth takes a job at a strange house. A first-person voice that still feels startlingly direct.
8.Η ζωή του χωριού

Κωνσταντίνος Θεοτόκης, 1914

A Corfiot village where a dance, a handkerchief and a rumour can decide a woman's whole life. Theotokis writes rural Greece without a trace of gloss.
9.Τα λέμε τον Αύγουστο

Γκαμπριέλ Γκαρσία Μάρκες, 2024

A woman with a settled family life returns each August to an island, where desire unsettles what she thought she knew about herself.
10.Η κερένια κούκλα

Κωνσταντίνος Χρηστομάνος, 1911

In turn-of-the-century Athens, desire and grief blur into landscapes, music and the changing seasons.