Whether you like a love story that reads like a thriller or prefer poetry to prose, these page-turners have a little something for everyone.
Becoming Jane Eyre
By Sheila Kohler
256 pages; Penguin
With Becoming Jane Eyre, Sheila Kohler joins the swelling ranks of novelists who imagine the inner lives of classic female English writers: this time, Charlotte Brontë. A buttoned-up, dutiful daughter and sometime governess, Charlotte was irresistibly drawn to a married French professor she dubbed "her Master" and "her black swan," apparently the inspiration for Jane Eyre's smoldering Mr. Rochester. What sets this story apart is Kohler's feel for the prickly drama behind the romance, as the three talented Brontë sisters—Charlotte, Emily, and Anne—vie for the only thing more seductive than a brooding gentleman in a drafty mansion: that is, of course, literary fame.
— Cathleen Medwick
Clara and Mr. Tiffany
By Susan Vreeland
432 pages; Random House
Available at: Amazon.com | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound
The author of Girl in Hyacinth Blue here imagines a woman torn between art and love in a novel based on the real-life creator of the iconic Tiffany lamps.
— Karen Holt
A Fierce Radiance
By Lauren Belfer
544 pages; Harper
Lauren Belfer's panoramic new novel is a love story wrapped around a spy story with a pivotal medical breakthrough at its center. A Fierce Radiance begins days after the attack on Pearl Harbor propels the United States into World War II. Claire Shipley, a savvy Life magazine photographer, has been assigned a photo essay on a young father whose life might be saved by the new miracle antibiotic, penicillin. The divorced Claire has a particular interest in the case, both because she is still mourning the death of her 3-year-old daughter from blood poisoning, which the drug might have cured, and because she is drawn to James Stanton, the doctor overseeing its clinical trials. At first Jamie seems perfect; he respects Claire's work and loves her son. But he soon grows preoccupied with the suspicious death of his scientist sister Tia, who was also on the track of new medications. He starts to disappear on secret missions, and is soon presumed dead in an explosion in North Africa. So Claire begins to tend to her own life. She strengthens her ties with her wealthy father, from whom she had been estranged—although he, too, behaves suspiciously—and has a fling with Jamie's colleague Nick, who might or might not be a suspect in Tia's murder. She also plunges into some important government work of her own, photographing companies developing antibiotics for the troops. Talented, determined, and vulnerable, Belfer's Claire proves herself a war hero on the home front.
Glover's Mistake
By Nick Laird
256 pages; Viking
"A friendship, too, is a kind of romance"—complete with possessiveness, jealousy, and mistrust—in Nick Laird's satirical second novel, Glover's Mistake. David Pinner, a paunchy academic on the fringes of London's art scene, reconnects with his idol and former teacher, Ruth Marks, a celebrated American feminist artist. When she falls for David's roommate, Glover, a hunky pure-minded barman, David's darkest impulses come into play. What takes this tale beyond the perils of triangulation is Laird's savvy portrayal of the cultural elite, and his insights into the deft deceptions of love.
— Cathleen Medwick
Happens Every Day
By Isabel Gillies
272 pages; Scribner
Josiah Robinson (not his real name) falls in love with Isabel Gillies (her real name) when he is 7. Fifteen years later, they remeet. This time Isabel reciprocates. Josiah, a beautiful poet ("Heathcliff with an earring"), says: "I will call you at 2:30 and if you aren't there I'll try every minute after until you are." Reader, she marries him. She abandons her New York acting career and follows him to a teaching post in Ohio.
"I missed any signs of trouble," Isabel writes in Happens Every Day: An All-Too-True Story. The reader won't. Isabel throws Josiah into her new best friend Sylvia's path over and over. She makes the thing happen she is most afraid of happening.
If Gillies weren't so plucky, she would break your heart. When the blow comes, it's her sons she is most devastated for. They are blessed to have her kind of love. It's the same kind of love Isabel got growing up, mother-lode mother love.
"I am not a writer, but I have been told I write good e-mails," Gillies says. I bet.
— Patricia Volk
The Invisible Bridge
By Julie Orringer
624 pages; Knopf
A Grand, Sweeping Romance Set in Word War II Hungary
An old-fashioned romantic drama, Julie Orringer's The Invisible Bridge is as rich in historical detail as it is human in its cast of sympathetic characters. The novel begins in 1937 Budapest, where a discriminatory quota system has forced a 22-year-old Hungarian Jew named Andras Lèvi to seek his education abroad. He heads to architecture school in Paris, a place of modernist ferment, and finds an even fuller education in the arms of Klara Morgenstern, a 31-year-old ballet instructor and Hungarian èmigrè with a shadowy past. But Hitler's Third Reich is on the march, and when Andras's visa expires, he and Klara return to Hungary, a Nazi-allied country that nevertheless seems an uneasy sanctuary for Jews. Over the next four years, Andras serves in several labor services while Klara and her relatives are fleeced by corrupt authorities. Despite the clearly imminent doom, Orringer keeps these chapters surprisingly buoyant: Andras works for one subversive newspaper after another in the labor camps (a sports section covers "wheelbarrow-pushing, snow-shoveling, and tree-felling"), and is saved from certain death by a pair of officers. But as the Nazis advance, thousands of Hungarians die in a wave of bombings that leaves Budapest's bridges "in ruins, their steel cables and concrete supports melting into the sand-colored rush of the river." This is a painful novel of war. And it is a hopeful one that speaks to the power of love and the steadfastness of the heart.
— Taylor Antrim
Love in the Time of Cholera
By Gabriel García Márquez
368 pages; Vintage/Alfred A. Knopf
This is one of the greatest love stories I have ever read. ... It is so beautifully written that it really takes you to another place in time and will make you ask yourself—how long could you, or would you, wait for love? —Oprah
Featured in Oprah's Book Club 2007
Lost Hearts in Italy
By rea Lee
256 pages; Random House
Why not start with a knockout? Novelist Andrea Lee's sensuously unsentimental Lost Hearts in Italy mines the past of Miranda Ward, an American transplant to Italy who once cheated on her golden-boy husband with Zenin, an aging Italian billionaire with the inner warmth of a reptile. Years later and deep into another marriage, she still feels the pull of Zenin and Nick, her wounded ex-husband, "as we always belong forever to people who have hurt us badly, or been badly hurt by us." Lee's Rome is a city filled with gorgeous ruins, and she's not just talking about architecture.
Love Poetry Out Loud
200 pages; Algonquin
The ritziest country club has a less restricted admittance policy than the usual cloistered collections of love poetry, with their odes to the joys, passions, and many splendoredness of the thing that's like a red, red rose. Love Poetry Out Loud (Algonquin), edited by Robert Alden Rubin, contains plenty of feverish verse for lovers to recite, each to each. But Rubin has not overlooked the lovesick, the spurned (and the spurning), the bitterly single, and the eternally optimistic. He's gathered bedrock poems in the love canon by Donne and Dickinson, as well as Wendy Cope's paean to personal ads, "Lonely Hearts" ("Successful, straight, and solvent? I am too / Attractive Jewish lady with a son. / Can someone make my simple wish come true?"), and the lyrics of rapper Common (Signed sealed delivered for us to grow together / Love has no limit, let's spend it slow forever). This is a collection for those who live for Valentine's Day and those who live in spite of it.
Love Today
By Maxim Biller
224 pages; Simon &Schuster
The course of true love is bumpy indeed for the couples in Love Today (Simon & Schuster), Maxim Biller's first story collection to be translated into English. Set mainly in Germany and the Czech Republic, with side trips to Tel Aviv, France, and New York, these wry, elliptical narratives chart the passions and the discontents of men and women who vanish from each other's lives and reappear without notice, and whom Biller often catches at the moment of confronting the mystery of what keeps them together, or what has driven them apart. In "Seven Attempts at Loving," after a long separation childhood sweethearts meet by accident at a tram stop in Prague; in "Baghdad at Seven-Thirty," a man and his much younger girlfriend watch war news coverage in a bar, straining for a glimpse of the man's American soldier son, about to be deployed to Kuwait; and in "The Architect," an artist named Splash and his Lebanese lover distract themselves from their problems by spying on a neighbor. Deceptively transparent, Biller's brief, gossamer fictions may remind you of narrative poems in their ability to simultaneously elude and haunt you.
— Francine Prose