Love is the engine of the human soul, and love books show that it is invaluable material for an art that seeks, precisely, to understand the human soul: literature. Here you have books that will fill your reading time with love.
From classic authors to current romance novels and love books for teens, you’ll discover stories that will invite you to read.

  • You can also read: The 20 books for teenagers that you must read.

Classic love books
Love is one of the themes that has always served as an argument for artists, and also the great classics of universal literature have used its power.

1. Romeo and Juliet (William Shakespeare)
The quintessential romantic classic was written by, who else, William Shakespeare (the best connoisseur of the human heart) in England in 1597 . It is one of the best love books because it simply lays the foundations for a theme that will accompany art and literature forever: forbidden love.
Inevitably in Shakespeare, reflection on love leads to tragedywhen passion meets the brakes of social conventions. In this case, it is expressed in the forbidden romance of Juliet and Romeo, two young people belonging to the great families at odds in Verona, the Capulets and the Montagues.
Although they fight to save their love, the forced separation leads them to a tragic ending that concludes that epic play that has inspired , during the following centuries until today, movies, books, plays, songs and other manifestations of art. .

2. Love in times of cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
If you want to read one of the best romantic books, then you have to get a copy of Love in times of cholera, written by the famous Gabriel Garcia Marquezin 1985.
In this work, the already consecrated Colombian writer managed to achieve in a more successful way than ever that mixture of literary height and colloquial closeness that contained the great contradictions of the human soul. Love and hate, happiness and suffering, friendship and resentment , desire and obligation are disputed in a round novel.
In this novel, the author proposes the heroic ambition of revealing what true love is , and faith that he achieves it, building the endearing story of Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza. Although they court each other since they were young, social impositions force Fermina to marry a renowned doctor, but Florentino does not give up.
He promises to wait for the doctor and die and when he dies fifty years later,begins the arduous path of reconquest .

3. Don’t say it was a dream (Terenci Moix)
Competing in the epics of the great Spanish writers (Camilo Jose Cela, Antonio Gala, Paco Umbral…) has cast a shadow over his name, unfairly relegated to oblivion, but his novels full of naked emotion They return from the past to remind us of the greatness of one of the best writers in the Spanish language, Terenci Moix.
And when it comes to love, it’s always a good idea to go back to Don’t Say It Was a Dream, a love book set against the backdrop of Cleopatra and Mark Antony’s romance. In addition to knowing how to represent the stage like no other (Terenci Moix was obsessively in love with Egypt), he reconstructs characters disfigured by history.
In this work you will find a profound and intelligent Cleopatra, contradictory, and a capricious and proud Marco Antonio who condemns her to abandonment. Between the two, the most passionate and pure of love stirs and leads us to an inevitable tragic destiny .

4. Doctor Zhivago (Boris Pasternak)

Many still consider it the quintessential love novel . Not in vain, in a difficult time like 1958, in the middle of the cold war, it earned the Russian writer Boris Pasternak the Nobel Prize for Literature.
After the Russian revolution, doctor Yuri Zhivago is involved in the complicationsthat the civil war between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks inflicts on the Russian people. In this context, he falls madly in love with Lara, who is running away from an unhappy past, and both can realize their love in a secluded place that inspires Zhivago to write poetry.
However, the return of Lara’s first love ends in tragedy. The melodramatic tint turned the epic work into a commercial best-seller whose impact on the general public increased with the film that David Lean masterfully directed in 1965.

5. Anna Karenina (Leon Tolstoy)
Literary critics continue to consider Anna Karenina as the character best built femaleof literary history, and readers continue to feel chills when they reach the last pages of one of the love books and share the tragic and at the same time heroic destiny of its protagonist.
His author, Leo Tolstoy, had achieved his fame as one of the best Russian writers thanks to the publication of War and Peace, where he demonstrated his ability to capture the ins and outs of the human soul and social reality.
In Ana Karenina (1977) he returns to a recurring theme such as forbidden love, but this time Tolstoy takes a turn thanks to the evolution of the female character, who rebels against his destiny. Married to a nobleman, she falls in love with Count Vronsky, for which the aristocratic society turns its back on him. Her husband offers her exile in exchange for not seeing her son anymore.
The tragic end of the novel, unlike the death of Juliet and other dramatic characters in the history of literature, means in Ana Karenina a voluntary act of heroic liberation .

  • More romance: 6 beautiful love letters (fun and romantic).

6. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
Self-improvement and love as medicine that heals everything are the themes of one of the great romantic books, Jane Eyre (1847), which tells the story of an orphan girl, Jane, whose intelligence leads him to overcome all obstacles.
The miserable orphanage in which she has to grow up is no limit to her, and when she finds work as a governess she falls madly in love with her employer, Mr. Ella Rochester. When she finally gets her love, the scandal that he was already married jumps, and in search of a new direction, Jane ends up going to India with a priest.
However, it is at the end of the story where the writer Charlotte Bronte deploys her narrative weapons to give the story dramatic depth: Jane Eyre feels the call of her old love and when she arrives at her old house, it is in ruins. Inside her is Rochester, blind, but the recovery of her love makes him see again, and they have a son.

7. Our Lady of Paris (Victor Hugo)
In 1931, the masterpiece of French romanticism, Our Lady of Paris, was published, in which, among other features of this literary style, Victor Hugo managed to build one of the most sad and human of literature. Without a doubt, although it is not about classic love , it is one of the most recommended romance books.
In this case , love and friendship bring together two characters from the lowest layers of 19th century French society, the marginalized, the miserable: a gypsy dancer accused of witchcraft, Esmeralda, and a hunchback who hides from society by playing while working. bell ringer at Notre-Dame Cathedral, Quasimodo.
Victor Hugo describes two tormented souls in search of salvation. Esmeralda is the only one who offers Quasimodo water when he is flogged in public, and Quasimodo saves Esmeralda and gives her shelter in the church. But the tragic ending is inevitable, as is crying imagining the hunchback caressing her love on the rope where she has been executed.

best love books for teens
In recent years the genre of love books for teenagers has experienced an impressive boom.

8. Noah’s Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)

The fever for love books for teenagers has moved to the cinema, and many of these works have ended up in films that are very well received by this type of audience. This is the case of Noah’s diary, which also has a historical background.
The fiction is set in North Carolina, in 1946. While the population is still waking up from the disasters of war , Noah Calhoun returns home to run the family plantation. His efforts are mixed with his efforts to forget an old love that keeps hitting the memory of him.
Suddenly, he meets the girl by chance, and although she is engaged to another man, she confesses that her love for Noah is still intact. One of the most acclaimed writers of the current romantic novel, Nicholas Sparks, presents us with this original story that speaks of true love and loss .

9. To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (Jenny Han)
The movie has been an overwhelming success helped by the Netflix phenomenon, but the novel will catch you even more if possible. To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before is a suggestive title for a funny novel that is, at the same time, one of the best love books for teenagers.
It is a very easy read and presents the original story of a teenager who writes love letters to the boys she likes, although she never sends them and keeps them in a secret box. However, they mistakenly reach their recipients turning Lara Jean’s life upside down. She has become one of the most beloved female characters of the teenage public.
With a fast and fun literature, fresh and surprising, Jenny Han tells an original story that could happen to us all. One of those stories that she has all the ingredients to succeed.

10. Twilight (Stephenie Meyer)

When the teenage sagas had not yet exploded, Stephanie Meyer became a famous writer of children’s literature thanks to this love book for teenagers. In this case, she resorts to the vampire phenomenon to give it a magical touch, and stages the classic theme of forbidden love.
Because, what are Bella Swan and Edward Cullen but a modern Romeo and Juliet, a passionate love made impossible by the fact that she is mortal and he is a vampire. The purity of love is debated on the nature of Edward, who poses a danger to Bella , and the condition of immortality.
This plot of vampires fell in love with a whole generation of teenagers who, later, were hooked on its adaptation to the cinema. The novel sold 25,000 copies and was translated into 37 different languages .

11. Excuse me if I call you love (Federico Moccia)

This Italian writer broke into the genre of love books for teenagers with such force that not even the film adaptations have managed to overcome the hook that his novels had. Excuse me if I call you love was his great success, in 2007, although he had already managed to consolidate himself with his first work, in 1992, Three meters above the sky.

It exceeded one million copies in a publishing phenomenon that has a very attractive plot: Niki and Alessandro’s love is a forbidden romance, since the two are separated by 20 years of difference. However, both defy love and launch into a passionate romance against the backdrop of the streets of Rome.
In this novel Federico Moccia repeats the formula of the success achieved with his previous books, with a dense repetition of adolescent love topics .

12. Take me anywhere (Alice Kellen)

Two opposite souls, two people who hate each other , fight for the prize of a journalism contest. He, an ambitious Englishman, is determined not to listen to the siren song of Leane’s seductive French accent, who needs the prize money at all costs. However, their rivalry will give way in favor of a growing love tension.
The originality of the book is unquestionable, because at the beginning the writer offers us the point of view of the girl, and then she goes on to speak from the heart of the boy. In addition, the story does not portray the typical platonic love, but goes from less to hands accompanying us on the emotional journey of both, in their transformation from hate to love .
A simple story told in an original and different way that has caught thousands of readers.

13. Damn Romeo (Leisa Rayven)
More than 2 million online readers have fallen in love with this modern, light and very daring romance between a good girl and the campus bad boy whose love is born when they play the role of Romeo and Juliet in a play.
Although their love story seems destined for success, the boy’s betrayal breaks Cassie’s heart and everything seems to end. But years later they see each other again and review their teenage love: Ethan regrets losing the love of his life, but Cassie’s spiteful heart prevents her from forgiving him .
The temptation of what not to do becomes irresistible, so don’t miss the outcome of this best-selling novel.

Current love books
Although the romantic novel has seen with its uncontrolled reproduction a loss of the narrative background that gives it meaning, some authors maintain the level of the genre thanks to original stories that convey more depth to feelings.

14. South of the border, west of the sun (Haruki Murakami)
Many of his readers revere him for Tokyo Blues, a work that otherwise consolidates Haruki Murakami’s style. But if we talk about love, we must return to this work by a Japanese writer who was educated between jazz and Western culture , and who has never been attracted to traditional Japanese culture.
That is why this work, which moves away from the surrealism of his first novels and which contains autobiographical elements, describes modern Japan where local traditions coexist with Western culture. That is why the love between the protagonist and his high school classmate is born in the heat of Nat King Cole’s vinyl .
Over the years, he will sink into the passions of loveless sex and a conventional marriage that will always remind him how unhappy he is far from his true love , that teenage girl who returns many years later to break his unhappy stability.

15. La carne (Rosa Montero)
In her new novel, La carne, one of the best current writers in the Spanish language, Rosa Montero, uses suspense to maintain the viewer’s tension and take it to the terrain she wants, the dissection of the feelings and emotions of its protagonists.
An art historian distraught over her rapid advance into old age sees all of her fears and insecurities reaffirmed.when her lover relegates her for a younger one. Thirsty for revenge, she hires a gigolo who, unconsciously and throughout the plot, becomes a soul mate for the protagonist.

Both are beings that accumulate suffering and seek salvation , so what began as a game ends up revealing itself as a great love story.

16. Dance in the air (Nora Roberts)

To save themselves from burning during the witch hunt , in 1692, three sisters (Fire, Air and Earth) make a spell and create the Island of the Three Sisters. In 2001, fleeing the mistreatment of her husband, Helen Remington flees to a distant island, faking her own death. There, two women, Mia and Ripley, will make her know her true destiny.
On the island, and with a new name, she will have to face a new love (when she meets the handsome sheriff) and the demons of the past.

The brilliant pen of Nora Roberts signs one of the great works of love for romantics, fleeing from the usual sensitivity of these novels and creating an original plot in which love and magic go hand in hand.

17. Wait for me in New York (Caroline March)

Caroline March builds a story full of light and images with a cinematographic aesthetic that encloses the story of a flight to start from scratch from anonymity.
We have all wanted to do it at some time, and this is the drastic decision that the protagonist of the novel makes when she discovers that her life is a big lie. Far away, in New York, a new life begins thanks to her nice neighbors and a new love that turns out to be less problematic than it was in the past.
But just when she begins to enjoy life and her new romance, fate puts the two lovers to the test and, once again, the protagonist. In addition to a firm and moving literary style, Caroline March signs her best work for how disturbing and stimulating her message is on each page of the book.

18. Call Me By Your Name (Andre Aciman)
Call Me By Your Name is an award-winning novel from theEgyptian-born American writer Andre Aciman . It is a novel that overflows sensuality everywhere. Deeply captivating.

A movie was made , very well made by the way, which however failed to find the depth of feelings that Andre Aciman describes with his verb.
The plot is very original: Elio’s family has the habit of sheltering every summer artists who help the head of the family in his cultural commitments. One year, the guest is a young American writer who awakens Elio’s erotic passions .
It had been a while since a love story was written with such a balance of sensitivity and epicness , at the height of the great romantic classics.

19. My name is Liberty (Lisa Kleypas)
The renowned romantic novel writer Lisa Kleypas displays all her narrative talent in this novel that puts the reader’s emotions to the test with constant twists and turns.
The harsh life in a small Texas county is the suffocating atmosphere in which the author frames the loving avatars of a sensitive heart, that of the adolescent Liberty. She is she knows her very young love , from the hand of Hardy Cates, who however only sees her as a friend of hers.
Later Liberty meets Churchill Travis, a billionaire who offers her the protection of the father she never had, though she has to defy accusations of freeloading from the locals and the rich man’s sons. She eventually starts a relationship with one of her sons, Gage, but then Hardy returns, and she finds herself at a crossroads in love .

20. Entre Suenos (Angeles Ibirika)
The ingredients of Entre Suenos will invite you to read a well-constructed novel that is less simple than current romantic literature is. It is a work by the writer Angeles Ibirika, born in Bilbao and who has always been surrounded by books: first she ran her own bookstore, and then she changed her youthful poetry for romantic novels.
This is his most successful work, combining an absorbing landscape with a complex plot. In an area of ​​the Pyrenees, the Roncal Valley, two completely different people accidentally meet : an uptight city woman who returns to her grandfather’s farm out of obligation, and a village veterinarian who sees the tenant as interested.
The love and peace that surrounds the small mountain town will tame the two proud hearts to transform hate into love.

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