Love & Passion

Stories of romance, desire, and the bonds that connect us across cultures.

All countries Austria Azerbaijan Brazil Canada China Colombia Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) Denmark Egypt France Germany Iceland India Iran Iraq Ireland Japan Kyrgyzstan Mexico Norway Pakistan Palestine Philippines Romania Russia Saudi Arabia Spain Sweden Taiwan Tanzania Türkiye United Kingdom United States

Newest first Oldest first

Boulder

In Boulder, Eva Baltasar tells the story of a solitary woman who works as a cook on a ship and finds comfort in a life defined by independence, physical desire, and freedom from emotional commitments. Her carefully constructed world changes when she meets Samsa, a woman with whom she begins a relationship. When Samsa expresses her desire to become a mother, their partnership enters unfamiliar territory, forcing Boulder to confront the tensions between intimacy and autonomy. Through sparse, intense prose, Baltasar explores queer desire, jealousy, motherhood, and the difficulty of building a shared life without losing oneself. The novel offers an uncompromising portrait of love as both a source of connection and a challenge to personal freedom.

Iceland Spain 2022

X Is Where I Am

X Is Where I Am

In this intimate, lyrical novel, a young Spanish writer navigates the overlapping experiences of grief, desire, and complicated love. When twenty-eight-year-old Sara moves from London to Barcelona for a university teaching position, she leaves behind her long-term girlfriend while beginning an intense affair with a woman she calls Girl. At the same time, her mother is dying of cancer in Asturias, forcing Sara to confront the approaching loss of one of the most important relationships in her life. As these emotional worlds collide, she struggles with guilt, longing, and the impossibility of controlling either her own desires or the people she loves. Blending fiction with philosophical reflection, Torres explores the body as a site of pleasure, vulnerability, and suffering. Her prose moves between intimate encounters and meditations on attachment, sexuality, and mortality, capturing the messy contradictions of being human. X Is Where I Am is ultimately a moving exploration of how we continue to love amid loss—and how grief can transform our understanding of ourselves and our relationships.

About this theme

Books: 2
Countries: 33

Countries with this theme

Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast)