I don't know if I'm making sense, but I need something with angst and melodrama, but it doesn't need to be particularly plotty, I just like to cry and feel things. lol
It absolutely doesn't have to be a romance-focused book, but I would prefer there be some element of romance even if the relationship/attraction isn't acted on, or reciprocal, or satisfying in the traditional sense.
I'm open to any genre apart from horror.
some books I love are: Walking on Glass – Iain M Banks, Acts of Desperation – Megan Nolan, Norwegian Wood – Haruki Murakami, Skylarking – Kate Mildenahall, anything by Richard Siken.
TYIA !!!
by posting-about-shit
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Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier and The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer both involve lovers and family members torn apart by war and struggling to reunite.
I just started The Wedding People last night & it seems to perfectly fit what you’re looking for. I’m 200+ pages in and enjoying it.
East of Eden, The Thorn Birds
As long as you aren’t turned off by people who don’t fit the traditional definition of “nice,” *Wuthering Heights* might tick a lot of those boxes for you. Sharing the quick recap: Wuthering Heights, a gothic novel by Emily Brontë, is a story of passionate, tumultuous love, revenge, and the destructive power of unresolved emotions, set against the backdrop of the Yorkshire Moors.
Remains of the day by Ishiguro. Never let me go also by Ishiguro. Actually most Ishiguro novels might work for you tbh haha
the english patient by Ondaatje
The Nightingale
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
The Bridges of Madison County
Fingersmith, Sarah Waters
The Well of Loneliness by Radlclyffe Hall
Wellness by Nathan Hill, it’s also a great satirical state of nation commentary !
A different perspective on love would be Rabindranath Tagore’s Shesher kovita, which beautifully illustrates that true love gives freedom and is reflected in the ability to let go.
Suffering in love, would be Wuthering Heights, The Great Gatsby, Thomas Hardy’s Jude and Tess of d’Urbervilles, Charles Dickens’ The Great Expectations, and the epitome of sacrifice in love would be A Tale of Two Cities.
Both of these books are told from multiple points of view in time frames separated by years. Neither one is a traditional love story, but each one touches my heart in the way a traditional “romance” couldn’t come close to.
**The Golf Bug Variations**, by Richard Powers. The Gold Bug Variations is a double love story of two young couples separated by a distance of twenty-five years. Stuart Ressler, a brilliant young molecular biologist, sets out in 1957 to crack the genetic code. His efforts are sidetracked by other, more intractable codes – social, moral, musical, spiritual – and he falls in love with a member of his research team. Years later, another young man and woman team up to investigate a different scientific mystery – why did the eminently promising Ressler suddenly disappear from the world of science? Strand by strand, these two love stories twist about each other in a double helix of desire.
The Gold Bug Variations received the following awards:
Time Book of the Year, 1991
Publishers Weekly Best Books of 1991
Vrij Nederland Best Books of 1991
The New York Times Notable Book, 1991
De Morgen Best Book of 1991 (named in 1999, in a compilation of the best books each year over the last half century)
Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, 1991
**The Map of Love**, by Ahdaf Soueif. Nominated for the Booker. In 1900 Lady Anna Winterbourne travels to Egypt where she falls in love with Sharif, and Egyptian Nationalist utterly committed to his country’s cause.
A hundred years later, Isabel Parkman, an American divorcee and a descendant of Anna and Sharif, goes to Egypt, taking with her an old family trunk, inside which are found notebooks and journals which reveal Anna and Sharif’s secret.
[Soueif](https://www.qatar.georgetown.edu/ahdaf-soueif-shares-her-journey-to-literary-and-greatness-and-political-agency-at-gu-qs-qalam-series/) is an Egyptian writer and political commentator.
Outlander by Diana Gabaldon
‘The ordeal of suffering for love and human connection’ okay for that line alone I am recommending When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi