Love & Passion

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

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Autumn Rounds

Every summer, a quiet, solitary man known only as the Driver travels along the coast of Quebec in his bookmobile, bringing books to small villages too remote to have their own libraries. As he visits his regular readers, he listens to their stories and offers companionship through the simple pleasures of books and conversation. This year’s journey, however, may be his last. The Driver meets Marie, a captivating woman travelling with a troupe of musicians, jugglers, and performers, and finds himself drawn into a world of unexpected connections. Set against the vast landscapes of rural Quebec, Autumn Rounds is a tender, bittersweet meditation on ageing, loneliness, love, and the quiet ways people make one another’s lives more meaningful. With understated humour and gentle melancholy, Poulin celebrates the restorative power of literature and the possibility of new beginnings at any age.

Beautiful World, Where Are You

Beautiful World, Where Are You

Beautiful World, Where Are You follows Alice, a successful novelist, and Eileen, her childhood friend, as they navigate love, friendship, and uncertainty in their late twenties. After experiencing a mental health crisis, Alice moves to a small coastal town in Ireland, where she meets Felix, a warehouse worker with whom she begins an unpredictable relationship. Meanwhile, Eileen remains in Dublin, working at a literary magazine and reconnecting with Simon, a childhood friend whose feelings for her are complicated by years of shared history. Through emails exchanged between Alice and Eileen, the novel explores their anxieties about relationships, work, politics, and the future of a world marked by inequality and environmental crisis. Rooney examines the tension between private desires and broader social concerns, asking how people can pursue intimacy and meaning amid uncertainty. The result is a thoughtful portrait of contemporary adulthood, emotional vulnerability, and the search for beauty in an imperfect world.

Ti Amo

Hanne Ørstavik

Can love survive when the person you love is disappearing before your eyes? In this intimate, autobiographical novel, a woman in her fifties discovers that her husband has cancer. As they confront his illness together, their shared life takes on a new intensity, and ordinary moments become charged with tenderness, fear, and impending loss. The Italian words ti amo—“I love you”—become a quiet expression of devotion in the face of something neither of them can control. Through spare, precise prose, Hanne Ørstavik explores the strange isolation of caring for someone who is dying, the vulnerability of the body, and the ways love changes when time becomes painfully limited. Neither sentimental nor detached, the novel captures the contradictions of grief before death has even arrived: the desire to hold on, the exhaustion of caregiving, and the desperate wish to make every remaining moment count.

The Book of Everlasting Things

The Book of Everlasting Things

Aanchal Malhotra

Set in Lahore during the final years of British rule in India, The Book of Everlasting Things tells the story of Samir Vij, a Hindu perfumer, and Firdaus Khan, a Muslim calligrapher. Their shared appreciation for beauty, craftsmanship, and traditional arts develops into a deep love as they imagine a future together. However, the Partition of India in 1947 transforms their world, dividing communities and forcing them onto opposite sides of a newly created border. Samir becomes an Indian citizen, while Firdaus becomes Pakistani, making their relationship increasingly difficult to sustain. Spanning decades and continents, the novel explores the ways political upheaval reshapes private lives and cultural traditions. Through the evocative worlds of perfume-making and calligraphy, Malhotra examines love, memory, belonging, and the enduring power of art to preserve what history threatens to destroy.

India Pakistan 2022

Klara and the Sun

Klara and the Sun

In Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro tells the story of Klara, an Artificial Friend designed to provide companionship to children. From her place in a shop window, Klara carefully observes the world around her, developing a remarkable understanding of human behavior and emotions. When a teenage girl named Josie chooses her as a companion, Klara enters a world shaped by love, illness, family tensions, and technological inequality. Narrated through Klara’s perceptive yet limited perspective, the novel explores what it means to be human and whether love and devotion can transcend the boundaries between artificial intelligence and human life. With quiet poignancy, Ishiguro examines loneliness, mortality, sacrifice, and the human desire to believe in something greater than ourselves.

United Kingdom 2022

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

Love on the Second Read

Love on the Second Read

Emma Morales knows everything about romance novels but remains sceptical about love in real life. As a dedicated romance editor, she suddenly finds herself working alongside Kip Alegre, the charmingly nerdy editor of science fiction and fantasy, on a manuscript that could save their publishing house from bankruptcy. Their professional rivalry quickly turns into a battle of literary references, flirtatious banter, and undeniable chemistry. But with an obsessive ex-boyfriend, a beautiful ex-fiancée, and meddling friends complicating matters, Emma and Kip must decide whether they’re willing to take a chance on a love story of their own. A witty, book-filled romantic comedy celebrating literary fandom, second chances, and the unexpected magic of falling in love.

Philippines 2023

Kairos

Jenny Erpenbeck

In East Berlin in 1986, nineteen-year-old Katharina meets Hans, a married writer in his fifties, by chance on a bus. Drawn together by their shared passion for music, literature and art, they begin an intense affair that transforms both their lives. Initially filled with excitement and tenderness, their relationship gradually becomes increasingly controlling and destructive, as jealousy, manipulation and emotional cruelty undermine their intimacy. Meanwhile, the world around them is undergoing its own dramatic transformation. As the German Democratic Republic approaches collapse, the political ideals and certainties that have shaped their lives begin to crumble. Erpenbeck intertwines the deterioration of the couple’s relationship with the dissolution of East Germany, creating a powerful parallel between private disillusionment and national upheaval. Through precise, evocative prose, she examines the complicated relationship between love and power, the persistence of nostalgia, and the difficulty of recognising when devotion has become oppression. Winner of the 2024 International Booker Prize, Kairos is both an intimate portrait of a destructive relationship and a profound meditation on history, memory and the cost of holding on to the past

Desertion

Abdulrazak Gurnah

Spanning several decades in East Africa, Desertion examines love, social divisions, and the enduring consequences of colonialism. The story begins in the late nineteenth century, when an English traveller, Martin Pearce, falls ill in a small coastal town and is cared for by Rehana, a local woman whose own life has been marked by abandonment. Their relationship challenges the racial and cultural boundaries of the colonial society in which they live. Generations later, their descendants continue to grapple with the complicated legacy of this relationship and the secrets surrounding their family history. Moving between different periods and perspectives, Gurnah explores how private choices become entangled with larger historical forces, revealing the lasting influence of prejudice, memory, and inherited expectations.

As The Crow Flies

As The Crow Flies

Veronique Tadjo

In As the Crow Flies, Véronique Tadjo creates a lyrical, fragmented portrait of human life through a series of interconnected stories, reflections, and poetic vignettes. Rather than following a single plot, the book moves between different voices and experiences, exploring how people meet, fall in love, suffer, separate, and continue searching for meaning. Its characters are often anonymous, representing lives that might otherwise go unnoticed. Through intimate observations, allegories, everyday encounters, and references to ancestral myths, Tadjo reflects on desire, loneliness, loss, and the fragile connections that bind people together. The narrative moves freely across emotional and geographical boundaries, suggesting that individual lives are never entirely separate but continually intersect and influence one another. Blending prose and poetry, the book challenges conventional storytelling, embracing the uncertainty and complexity of human experience. Its central message is that life rarely follows a neat, predictable path: relationships change, people drift apart, and destinies remain unresolved. Like a crow flying across an open landscape, the narrative follows the unpredictable routes through which love and human connection unfold.

Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) 2024

Waist Deep

Linea Maja Ernst

Five university friends reunite for seven summer days at a lakeside house in the Danish countryside, hoping to recapture the freedom and intimacy of their younger years. Sylvia, who has always dreamed of a more unconventional way of living, finds herself increasingly disillusioned as her friends arrive with careers, children, and established relationships. The situation becomes even more complicated when Esben, the object of Sylvia’s long-standing crush, announces that he intends to marry Karen at the end of the week. Meanwhile, Sylvia’s relationship with her girlfriend, Charlie, forces her to confront the tension between romantic commitment and her desire for something less conventional. As the friends swim, drink, flirt, and argue beneath the midsummer sky, old attractions resurface and carefully maintained boundaries begin to dissolve. Through their conversations and intimate encounters, Linea Maja Ernst explores the contradictions of adulthood, the changing nature of friendship, and the difficulty of reconciling youthful ideals with the realities of everyday life. Sensual, witty, and emotionally perceptive, Waist Deep asks whether growing up necessarily means abandoning the freedom to imagine a different kind of life.

Taiwan Travelogue

Taiwan Travelogue

Shuāng-zǐ Yáng

Set in Taiwan in 1938, during Japanese colonial rule, Taiwan Travelogue follows Aoyama Chizuko, a young Japanese novelist invited to undertake a lecture tour of the island. More interested in discovering Taiwan’s culture and cuisine than participating in official colonial events, she travels across the island with her Taiwanese interpreter, Ō Chizuru. Through local dishes, lively conversations, and journeys between towns, the two women develop a close and increasingly complicated relationship. As Chizuko becomes more emotionally attached to her companion, she struggles to understand Chizuru’s reserve and the barriers separating them. Their relationship unfolds against the inequalities of colonial society, where language, nationality, and political power shape even the most intimate connections. Blending historical fiction, romance, food writing, and metafiction, Yáng explores love, cultural identity, and the silenced histories of colonial Taiwan. The novel also challenges readers to consider who has the power to tell a story—and whose perspective history chooses to preserve.

About this theme

Books: 62
Countries: 33

Countries with this theme

Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast)