Love & Passion

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

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Murjana

Baghdad, 830 CE: a city of dazzling scholarship, artistic brilliance, and dangerous political divisions. When the Abbasid caliph falls gravely ill, his physician discovers that the cause is an overwhelming passion for Murjana, a beautiful young woman from a Shia family. Their marriage promises to unite two hearts, but threatens to ignite conflict in a society divided by religious loyalties and competing ambitions. As palace intrigue, jealousy, and vengeance gather around the couple, Ghada Karmi brings medieval Baghdad to life in a richly imagined historical novel about forbidden love and the destructive power of sectarian hatred. Inspired by the intellectual and cultural world of the Abbasid era, Murjana asks whether love can overcome the divisions that history keeps creating.

stay with me

Hanne Ørstavik

How do you recognise love when fear is the feeling you know best? A year after the premature death of her husband, a 53-year-old Norwegian writer living in Milan falls in love again. M, a man fifteen years her junior, offers an intensity she has never experienced before. But as their relationship deepens, his troubling anger begins to surface, awakening memories of the fear that dominated her childhood. Her father’s violent temper and her mother’s eventual departure have left wounds she struggles to understand, let alone escape. Meanwhile, she writes a novel about Judith, a woman navigating love, loss, and the possibility of starting over. As the boundaries between the writer’s life and her fictional character’s story begin to blur, both women confront the painful patterns that shape their relationships. With unflinching honesty, Hanne Ørstavik explores the desire for intimacy, the legacy of trauma, and the difficult question of whether love can ever free us from the past.

Engagement

Gun-Britt Sundström

Martina and Gustav are university students in 1970s Stockholm when they meet and fall in love. Their relationship quickly becomes an ongoing negotiation over what it means to be a couple: how much time lovers owe each other, whether fidelity is essential, and whether commitment must eventually lead to marriage. Gustav dreams of building a conventional life together, while Martina fears that marriage and domestic expectations will undermine her independence. Over the years, they separate and reunite, repeatedly drawn back to one another despite their incompatible ideas about love. Meanwhile, Martina observes friends settling down, participates in political demonstrations, and explores philosophical ideas in search of a life that feels genuinely her own. With sharp wit, intellectual curiosity and emotional honesty, Sundström challenges romantic conventions without offering easy answers. Both a love story and a feminist examination of personal freedom, Engagement asks whether two people can remain devoted to each other without sacrificing their individuality.

Homeseeking

Homeseeking follows Suchi and Haiwen, childhood sweethearts whose lives are transformed by the political upheavals of twentieth-century China. They first meet in Shanghai, where Haiwen’s violin draws Suchi into his world. Their young love is interrupted when Haiwen joins the Nationalist army in 1947, leaving Suchi behind with little explanation. Over the following decades, war, migration, and changing political circumstances carry them through Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the United States, shaping their lives in different ways. Sixty years later, they unexpectedly encounter one another again in Los Angeles. Chen moves between their perspectives to explore memory, sacrifice, and the meaning of home. The novel examines how historical forces can separate people while emotional attachments continue to endure across distance and time.

China Taiwan United States 2025

Stations

In a small Irish town in 1982, Róisín and Red form an intense bond as two sharp-minded teenagers who feel out of place in their own lives. Red is rebellious and troubled, while Róisín carries the pain of growing up with an absent father and a difficult home life. When Red’s encounter with the law forces him to leave Ireland for England, their connection survives across distance, becoming a fragile thread linking them through the years. Eventually, Róisín travels to London to visit her estranged father and finds Red again, moving into his squat in Pimlico. But the life he has chosen is darker and more complicated than she imagined, and the pair gradually drift apart. Even as their paths diverge, Róisín remains haunted by her unfulfilled passion for him. Moving between Ireland and London over decades, Stations explores first love, addiction, friendship, and the lasting consequences of youthful choices. It asks whether we can release the people who shaped us—and whether learning to love someone else begins with learning to love ourselves.

Ireland United Kingdom 2026

Main Characters

Main Characters

Clara and Seb are about to fall in love. They just don’t know it yet. When they meet in a quiet corner of London, an unexpected connection sparks a romance that captivates everyone around them. Clara dreams of becoming a film director, while Seb, an aspiring actor who has drifted between different careers, is still searching for his purpose. As their relationship deepens, Clara casts Seb in the film that could launch her career, but what should be the happiest moment of their lives ends in a devastating betrayal. Spanning two decades, Main Characters tells their love story through the eyes of the people who witness it: friends, flatmates, former lovers, rivals, and strangers. Each has a different perspective on the couple, revealing how little we can truly know about other people’s relationships. With its inventive narrative structure, this novel explores love, perception, friendship, and the complicated ways our lives intersect.

United Kingdom 2026

A Private Man

Stephanie Sy-Quia

Rome, 1953. David is a young Catholic priest who has devoted his life to God and sworn himself to celibacy. Margaret, meanwhile, is a fiercely independent woman drawn to theology and the possibility of a more progressive Church. When their lives intersect in 1960s England, an intellectual connection develops into a love that challenges everything they believe about faith, duty, and freedom. Decades later, their grandson Adrian discovers the extraordinary secret behind his family history while caring for his aging grandmother. As the past gradually emerges, the consequences of David and Margaret’s choices reveal themselves across generations. Inspired by the author’s own grandparents, A Private Man is a tender, complex exploration of forbidden love, religious devotion, and the difficult compromises between personal desire and deeply held convictions.

United Kingdom 2026

Bad Words

Rioghnach Robinson

When sharp-tongued literary critic Selina Chan delivers a devastating review of novelist Parker Navarro’s work for the second time, their private animosity erupts into a viral public feud. But behind the headlines and cutting remarks, an unexpected connection begins to grow. A witty, slow-burn romance set in the world of books and publishing, Bad Words explores ambition, vulnerability, and the complicated relationship between art, criticism, and the people who create it.

United States 2026

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.

The Last Movement

The Last Movement

Robert Seethaler

In the spring of 1911, the celebrated composer and conductor Gustav Mahler boards a ship in New York, beginning his final journey back to Europe. Gravely ill and aware that his life is drawing to a close, he spends much of the voyage wrapped in blankets on deck, watching the vast ocean and revisiting memories of the past. His thoughts move between the musical triumphs that made him famous, the summers he spent in the mountains, the devastating death of his young daughter Maria, and his complicated relationship with his wife, Alma. Once the great love of his life, Alma has fallen for the young architect Walter Gropius, leaving Mahler struggling with jealousy, regret, and the painful realisation that love cannot be commanded. Through fleeting memories and quiet moments of reflection, Robert Seethaler creates an intimate portrait of a brilliant artist confronting mortality. Poignant and restrained, the novel meditates on love, loss, artistic ambition, and what remains when a life approaches its final note.

People in Love

Claire Daverley

Nora has spent a decade building a life with her partner, Robin. Their relationship is comfortable and deeply affectionate, shaped by private jokes, quiet mornings, and the small rituals that make a shared life feel like home. When Robin unexpectedly proposes, Nora says yes. They had always agreed that marriage was unnecessary, but perhaps this is simply the next step in a life that already feels settled. Then, on the night of their engagement party, Bren appears at her door. Bren was Nora’s childhood best friend, the person everyone once assumed she would eventually marry. But a painful heartbreak drove them apart: he left, she stayed, and the feelings neither could articulate remained unresolved. Now his return rekindles an attraction Nora thought belonged to the past, forcing her to reconsider the choices that brought her to this moment. Moving between the comfort of a long-term relationship and the intoxicating pull of a love left unfinished, Daverley explores the complicated nature of commitment, longing, and regret. This tender, emotionally perceptive novel asks whether the right life is necessarily the one we have chosen—or whether the people we once loved can reveal possibilities we never fully considered. It is a story about the paths not taken, the misunderstandings that shape our lives, and the difficult work of understanding our own hearts.

United Kingdom 2026

Strangerland

Monika Radojevic

Set in 1990, Strangerland follows two people whose lives are shaped by migration, family obligations, and the search for belonging. Zivoin has recently arrived in London from Yugoslavia. As the dependable eldest son, he works long hours and sends his savings home to support his family, while watching news of his homeland’s growing political turmoil. Thousands of miles away, in Uberlândia, Brazil, Alegria prepares to leave the country and family she loves in pursuit of a better future. Ambitious and determined, she hopes to provide her parents with greater security, even if it means building a life far from home. When their paths cross, Zivoin and Alegria discover an unexpected connection that offers them a sense of belonging in unfamiliar surroundings. Their journey together takes them across countries and continents, testing their relationship and forcing them to confront the sacrifices involved in making a life elsewhere. Inspired by the author’s family history, the novel explores immigration, cultural identity, family loyalty, and the enduring power of love to transcend borders, languages, and time.

About this theme

Books: 62
Countries: 33

Countries with this theme

Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast)