Good Minds Suggest—Anna Quindlen's Favorite Love Stories
Posted by Goodreads on January 6, 2014
The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy
"Galsworthy's three-book masterwork doesn't get the attention it
deserves for its rich portrayal of family life and its complex view of
love: young love, obsessive love, late-in-life love. The central love
object of the novels is Irene, who has married for security and is
paying the price, but the affairs of many members of the extended
Forsyte family worm their way into your heart and stick there."

The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
"A multilayered story of a lost manuscript and a lost love,
Krauss's book takes place in many places, on many levels. There is the
old man who entrusted his beloved Alma with a book he'd written when
both were young, the teenager who is named Alma after that woman, and a
series of events and accidents that leads all their lives to intersect.
Running through the book is an indelible message: love survives,
endures, and changes everything, for everyone it touches."

Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object by Laurie Colwin
"Almost all of Colwin's wonderful novels are in some sense about
love, usually among those with prosperous, perfectly ordered lives that,
beneath the surface of the porcelain and the paintings, are anything
but. This one is my favorite because it limns love at both ends of the
continuum in the life of Olly Bax, a young widow who is trying to
rethink her own existence from the bottom of the well of grief. It is
smart, and funny, and deeply affecting."

Tales of Passion, Tales of Woe by Sandra Gulland (Goodreads Author)
"Gulland, too, has written a trilogy, this one about Josephine, who
became Napoleon's wife and empress. This second book begins when the
couple is married and living in Paris, and while it encompasses the
political machinations and the battlefield encounters that made the
Emperor famous, Josephine is always at the story's center, utterly
devoted to a man who loves her passionately but will eventually prove to
love power more."

Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers
"I'm a sucker for a good English mystery novel, and none more so than the books Sayers wrote about the urbane titled sleuth Peter Wimsey.
A large part of their charm is Harriet Vane, the brainy mystery writer
Wimsey meets and falls for when she stands trial for poisoning her
lover. It takes three wonderful novels to get there—Strong Poison and Have His Carcase come first—but at the end of this one Harriet realizes, as the reader did long ago, how irresistible Wimsey truly is."

Vote for your own favorites on Listopia: Best Love Stories
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