In honor of Valentine’s Day, here are 10 books with great love stories
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If you ask me, every good book has a good love story.
Nicholas Sparks, the author of many good love stories, wrote in “A Walk to Remember,” “Love is like the wind, you can’t see it but you can feel it.”
With Valentine’s Day approaching, love is at the front of our minds. Here are 10 books by authors who make the feeling of love visible through their storytelling.
10 books with the best love stories
1. ‘Anna Karenina’
Author: Leo Tolstoy.
Publication date: 1878.
In 2012, romance author Jill Cooper told The Guardian about what she thinks makes “Anna Karenina” so interesting. “Very few men write very well about women, but Tolstoy understood women just as well as men,” she said.
Goodreads describes the plot like this: “Anna is a sophisticated woman who abandons her empty existence as the wife of Karenin and turns to Count Vronsky to fulfill her passionate nature — with tragic consequences.”
Notable quotation: “I think ... if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.”
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2. ‘A Walk to Remember’
Author: Nicholas Sparks.
Publication date: 1999.
Set in the 1950s, this novel tells the love story of high school students, Landon Carter and Jamie Sullivan. She’s the quiet daughter of a widowed pastor and deeply religious, while he’s popular, carefree and somewhat immature. They fall in love and then things turn tragic.
Adam Shankman directed the film adaptation of this book three years after its publication in 2002.
Notable quotation: “I held her close to me with my eyes closed, wondering if anything in my life had ever been this perfect and knowing at the same time that it hadn’t. I was in love, and the feeling was even more wonderful than I ever imagined it could be.”
3. ‘Jane Eyre’
Author: Charlotte Brontë.
Publication date: 1847.
This novel tells the story of the orphan Jane Eyre, who was raised by her cold aunt.
Barnes & Noble describes the plot in this way: “When (Jane) finds love with her sardonic employer, Rochester, the discovery of his terrible secret forces her to make a choice. Should she stay with him whatever the consequences or follow her convictions, even if it means leaving her beloved?”
Notable quotation: “I have for the first time found what I can truly love — I have found you. You are my sympathy, my better self, my good angel — I am bound to you with a strong attachment. I think you good, gifted, lovely: a fervent, a solemn passion is conceived in my heart; it leans to you, draws you to my centre and spring of life, wrap my existence about you, and, kindling in pure, powerful flame, fuses you and me in one.”
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4. ‘Far From the Madding Crowd’
Author: Thomas Hardy.
Publication date: 1874.
This book tells the story of Bathsheba Everdene’s relationship with Gabriel Oak. The author, Thomas Hardy, explores power balances in relationships, as the couple struggles to have a healthy relationship until they stand on equal ground.
This novel was most recently adapted in a 2015 film that was directed by Thomas Vinterberg.
Notable quotation: “I shall do one thing in this life — one thing certain — that is, love you, and long for you, and keep wanting you till I die.”
5. ‘Much Ado About Nothing’
Author: William Shakespeare.
Publication date: Between 1598 and 1599.
There are two main romantic relationships in this play by Shakespeare, but when talking about love, it’s much better to focus on Beatrice and Benedick. Claudio almost kills Hero at the alter.
Though Beatrice and Benedick initially hate each other, their friends gradually trick them into seeing each other in a new light.
Notable quotation: “I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest.”
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6. ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’
Author: Gabriel García Márquez.
Publication date: 1985.
Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall deeply in love as teenagers, but Fermina chooses to marry the wealthy Dr. Juvenal Urbino. Then, “as (Florentino) rises in his business career, he whiles away the years in 622 affairs — yet he reserves his heart for Fermina,” Goodreads reports. When Fermina’s husband dies, Florentino comes to the funeral.
Notable quotation: “Amputees suffer pains, cramps, itches in the leg that is no longer there. That is how she felt without him, feeling his presence where he no longer was.”
7. ‘North and South’
Author: Elizabeth Gaskell.
Publication date: 1855.
Margaret Hale and John Thornton’s love story begins as Hale moves with her family to Northern England.
Goodreads notes that, though she originally dislikes her new home, “Margaret becomes aware of the poverty and suffering of the local mill workers and develops a passionate sense of social justice. This is intensified by her tempestuous relationship with the mill-owner and self-made man, John Thornton, as their fierce opposition over his treatment of his employees masks a deeper attraction.”
Notable quotation: “I know you despise me; allow me to say, it is because you do not understand me.”
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8. ‘Precious Bane’
Author: Mary Webb.
Publication date: 1924.
This novel is set in rural England in the early 1800s and tells the story of Prue Sarn, an intelligent young woman with a cleft lip, which, at the time, was called a “precious bane.”
When the carpenter Kester Woodseaves comes to her family’s farm to build a barn, the pair begin to bond. Their relationship deepens, and it turns into love.
The Guardian praised Webb’s “dexterity with words” in a review of this novel. They wrote, “She’s a marvelous writer — able, for instance, to take twee countryside details and turn them into something greater than their sum.”
Notable quotation: “What did I do, I, that knew his smile was my summer?”
9. ‘War and Peace’
Author: Leo Tolstoy.
Publication date: 1867.
Tolstoy makes his second appearance on this list for creating the love story of Natasha and Pierre in “War and Peace.” The novel is historical fiction and intertwines events surrounding Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of Russia with three characters’ personal experiences.
Audrey Hepburn starred in King Vidor’s 1956 adaptation, and the book was adapted again by BBC into a miniseries in 2016 starring Lily James.
Notable quotation: “The whole world is divided for me into two parts: one is she, and there is all happiness, hope, light; the other is where she is not, and there is dejection and darkness.”
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10. ‘Gone With the Wind’
Author: Margaret Mitchell.
Publication date: 1936.
Simon & Schuster described the plot like this: “This is the tale of Scarlett O’Hara, the spoiled, manipulative daughter of a wealthy plantation owner, who arrives at young womanhood just in time to see the Civil War forever change her way of life.”
This book is a Pulitzer Prize winner. “The Wizard of Oz” director Victor Fleming adapted this book into a movie in 1940.
Notable quotation: “Well, my dear, take heart. Some day, I will kiss you and you will like it. But not now, so I beg you not to be too impatient.”
