Best Romance Books

Pilar and her childhood friend reunite in Spain after eleven years apart. He has become a spiritual teacher; she has become practical and cautious. As they travel through France and Spain together, the question of whether to love — really love, with all the vulnerability that requires — becomes the central conflict. Coelho's most romantic novel.

A bored aristocrat escapes her London life for the Cornwall coast, where she discovers a French pirate ship hidden in a creek and falls in love with its captain — du Maurier's most overtly romantic novel and a study of the desire for freedom.

The second All Souls novel — Diana Bishop and Matthew Clairmont timewalk to Elizabethan London, where Diana must learn witchcraft and retrieve the enchanted manuscript that holds the secrets of all creatures.

Deviant King's unanswered questions start to resolve — but Aiden King's answers raise darker ones. The Elites' grip on Elites Academy tightens, and Ellie begins to understand that the world she was placed in has rules she was never told about.

Dawson Cole and Amanda Collier were high school sweethearts in Oriental, North Carolina — until their different worlds tore them apart. Twenty-five years later they return to town for the funeral of an old friend, and the feelings they buried surface with a force that neither of them expected. A reunion romance that asks whether second chances are ever truly possible.

Sonia, a British woman, travels to Granada to learn flamenco after her relationship ends. Staying with family friends, she discovers letters and photographs that reveal the story of the Ramirez family during the Spanish Civil War — a story of love, betrayal, and the violence that divided Spain. Alternating between the present day and the 1930s, The Return is Hislop's portrait of Granada and the civil war's lasting trauma.

Don Tillman, a brilliant but socially rigid genetics professor, designs the Wife Project — a rigorous questionnaire to identify the perfect partner — only to find himself derailed by Rosie, who fails every criterion.

Juliette has escaped the Reestablishment and found safety at Omega Point, a refuge for those with supernatural abilities. But safety has its own demands, and when Warner — the Reestablishment commander she fled — reveals unexpected depths, Juliette's certainties begin to unravel.

Colin Singleton has dated nineteen girls named Katherine and been dumped by all nineteen. A child prodigy now between his last Katherine and his uncertain future, Colin and his best friend Hassan embark on a post-graduation road trip to Gutshot, Tennessee, where Colin tries to derive a mathematical theorem to predict the rise and fall of romantic relationships.

Ellie has always avoided the Elites — the four students who run Elites Academy with brutal authority. Now Aiden King, the most dangerous of them, has decided she is his. She has no idea why. She is not sure she wants to find out.

Maria, a young Brazilian woman, travels to Geneva dreaming of fame and fortune. Instead, she becomes a high-end prostitute, all while searching for — and philosophising about — the nature of love, desire, and the sacred in the profane.

Hajime, a successful jazz bar owner in Tokyo with a comfortable marriage, is reunited with Shimamoto — his only close childhood friend, with whom he spent hours listening to records. Their reunion opens something he cannot close. A quiet, compressed novel about the specific grief of the road not taken and the women who persist as figures of the unlived life.

In the third Lou Clark novel, Louisa travels to New York City as a personal assistant to a wealthy family, navigating a new world, a complicated love triangle, and the ongoing question of what it means to live the life Will Traynor urged her toward.

The conclusion of the All Souls trilogy — Diana and Matthew return to the present, the mysteries of Ashmole 782 are resolved, and the conflict between creatures and the Congregation reaches its conclusion.

Brown University, early 1980s. Madeleine Hanna is writing her senior thesis on the Victorian marriage plot in literary fiction; Mitchell Grammaticus is having a religious crisis; Leonard Bankhead is brilliant, charismatic, and bipolar. Their triangular relationship unfolds against the backdrop of literary theory and manic depression.

A young woman living in a converted church with her deeply dysfunctional family falls for a boy hiding his own secrets while navigating depression and family dysfunction.

Brida O'Fern is a young Irish woman driven by a hunger for spiritual knowledge. She seeks out two teachers — a wise man in the forest and a witch who teaches through the Wiccan Tradition of the Sun — in search of magic, purpose, and her soulmate.

American twins inherit a flat overlooking Highgate Cemetery in London from an aunt they never met — and find themselves entangled with a ghost, the aunt's former lover, and a mystery about the family's past.

A world-famous author — unmistakably Coelho himself — wakes one day to find that his war-correspondent wife Esther has disappeared, seemingly of her own will. His obsessive search for her, and for the meaning behind her departure, takes him from Paris to the steppes of Central Asia.