Anti Valentine's Day Reads
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This time of year is always filled with bouquets of flowers, fancy date nights, and bold declarations of love. But we're looking past the romantic, happily-ever-after, too-good-to-be-true type of romances and recommending some books that represent more... real and unconventional relationships. (It's about to get messy!)
Real love isn't perfect. This list will make you rethink the saccharine sweetness of Valentine's Day... and as Miley said, take yourself dancing and hold your own hand.
For Piglet—an unshakable childhood nickname—getting married is her opportunity to reinvent. Together, Kit and Piglet are the picture of domestic bliss. But thirteen days before they are due to be married, Kit reveals an awful truth, cracking the façade Piglet has created. It has the power to strip her of the life she has so carefully built, so smugly shared. To do something about it would be to self-destruct. But what will it cost her to do nothing? As the hours count down to their wedding, Piglet is torn between a growing appetite and the desire to follow the recipe, follow the rules. Surely, with her husband, she could be herself again. Wouldn’t it be a waste for everything to curdle now?
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You Made A Fool Of Death With Your Beauty
It's the opportunity of a lifetime. Feyi is about to be given the chance to escape the City's blistering heat for a dream island holiday: poolside cocktails, beach sunsets, and elaborate meals. And as the sun goes down on her old life our heroine also might just be ready to open her heart to someone new. The only problem is, she's falling for the one man she absolutely can't have...
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Every relationship has one beginning. This one has two endings. Andy loves Jen. Jen loved Andy. And he can't work out why she stopped. Set adrift on the sea of heartbreak at a time when everything he thought he knew about women, and flat-sharing, and his friendships has transformed beyond recognition, Andy clings to the idea of solving the puzzle of their broken relationship. Because if he can find the answer to that, then maybe Jen can find her way back to him. Andy still has a lot to learn, not least his ex-girlfriend's side of the story. A sharply funny, beautifully observed and exquisitely relatable story of heartbreak and friendship, and how to survive both.
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Maggie’s marriage has ended just 608 days after it started, but she’s fine—she’s doing really good, actually. Sure, she’s alone for the first time in her life, can’t afford her rent and her obscure PhD is going nowhere... but Maggie is determined to embrace her new status as a Surprisingly Young Divorcée™. As she throws herself headlong into the chaos of her first year of divorce, she finds herself questioning everything. Laugh-out-loud funny, razor sharp and painfully relatable, Really Good, Actually is an irresistible debut novel about the uncertainties of modern love, friendship and happiness from a stunning new voice in fiction, Monica Heisey.
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Lydia, a young artist living in London, is unable to eat ramen, sashimi, bubble tea, iced coffee, or cake. Her body doesn't work like those of other people. The only thing she can digest is blood, and she struggles to find fresh pigs' blood in London. Lydia also faces challenges in sourcing human prey, but she can't bring herself to feed on them. Lydia contemplates her place in the world, feeling miserable, lonely, and hungry. As she develops as a woman and artist, she must reconcile her demon and human sides, mixed ethnic heritage, and relationship with food and humans to find a way to exist.
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Maggie Millner's seductive debut is a novel-in-verse about a woman in her late twenties who leaves a long-term relationship with a boyfriend for another woman. The affair thrusts her from an outwardly conventional life into queerness, polyamory, kink, and unalloyed, consuming desire. What ensues is an exploration of obsession, gender, identity-making, sexual experiment, and the art and act of literary transformation. Couplets is a dazzling fusion of form and content, chronicling the strictures, structures and pitfalls of relationships—the mirroring, the pleasing, the small jealousies and disappointments.
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When Ralph and Abby Lamb move in with Ralph's mother, Laura, Abby hopes she and her mother-in-law will finally connect. After a traumatic childhood, Abby is desperate for a mother figure. But Laura is venomous and cruel, and life with her is hellish. When Laura takes her own life, her ghost haunts Abby and Ralph in very different ways: Ralph is plunged into depression, and Abby is terrorized by a force intent on destroying everything she loves. With everything on the line, Abby comes up with a chilling plan that will solve everything. All it requires is a little ingenuity, a lot of determination, and a unique recipe for chicken à la king...
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Kitchen juxtaposes two tales about mothers, transsexuality, bereavement, kitchens, love and tragedy in contemporary Japan. It is a startlingly original first work by Japan's brightest young literary star and is now a cult film. When Kitchen was first published in Japan in 1987 it won two of Japan's most prestigious literary prizes, climbed its way to the top of the bestseller lists, then remained there for over a year and sold millions of copies. Banana Yoshimoto was hailed as a young writer of great talent and great passion whose work has quickly earned a place among the best of modern literature, and has been described as 'the voice of young Japan' by the Independent on Sunday.
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Dorothy Daniels has always had a voracious—and adventurous—appetite. From her idyllic farm-to-table childhood (homegrown tomatoes, thick slices of freshly baked bread) to the heights of her career as a food critic (white truffles washed down with Barolo straight from the bottle) Dorothy has never been shy about indulging her exquisite tastes—even when it lead to her plunging an ice pick into her lover's neck. There is something inside Dorothy that makes her different from everybody else. Something she's finally ready to confess. But beware: her story just might make you wonder how your lover would taste sauteed with shallots and mushrooms and deglazed with a little red wine.
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On a perfect August morning, Elle Bishop heads out for a swim in the pond below 'The Paper Palace'—her family's holiday home in Cape Cod. As she dives beneath the water she relives the passionate encounter she had the night before, against the side of the house that knows all her darkest secrets, while her husband and mother chatted to their guests inside... So begins a story that unfolds over twenty-four hours and fifty years, as Elle's shocking betrayal leads her to a life-changing decision—and an ending you won't be able to stop thinking about.
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Meet the Ramdin-Chetan family: forged through loneliness, broken by secrets, saved by love. Irrepressible Betty Ramdin, her shy son Solo and their marvellous lodger, Mr Chetan, form an unconventional household. Happy in their differences, they build a home together. Home: the place keeping these three safe from an increasingly dangerous world—until the night when a glass of rum, a heart to heart and a terrible truth explodes the family unit, driving them apart. Brave and brilliant, steeped in affection, Love After Love offers hope to anyone who has loved and lost and has yet to find their way back.
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Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of the American Dream and the New South. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime he didn't commit, leaving Celestial bereft and unmoored. After five years, Roy's conviction is overturned, and he returns to resume their life together. The story explores the struggles of past and present, offering an intimate look deep into the souls of people who must reckon with the past while moving forward— with hope and pain—into the future.
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Frances is twenty-one years old, cool-headed and observant. A student in Dublin and an aspiring writer, at night she performs spoken word with her best friend Bobbi, who used to be her girlfriend. When they are interviewed and then befriended by Melissa, a well-known journalist who is married to Nick, an actor, they enter a world of beautiful houses, raucous dinner parties and holidays in Provence, beginning a complex ménage-à-quatre. But when Frances and Nick get unexpectedly closer, the sharply witty and emotion-averse Frances is forced to honestly confront her own vulnerabilities for the first time.
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Modern love is never easy. Society is obsessed with stories of romance, but what comes after happily ever after? This is a love story with a difference. From dating to marriage, from having kids to having affairs, it follows the progress of a single ordinary relationship: tender, messy, hilarious, painful, and entirely un-Romantic. It is a love story for the modern world, chronicling the daily intimacies, the blazing rows, the endless tiny gestures that make up a life shared between two people. Moving and deeply insightful, The Course of Love offers us a window into essential truths about the nature of love.
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When it comes to the trials and triumphs of becoming a grown up, journalist and former Sunday Times dating columnist Dolly Alderton has seen and tried it all. She vividly recounts falling in love, wrestling with self-sabotage, finding a job, throwing a socially disastrous Rod-Stewart themed house party, getting drunk, getting dumped, and finding that that your mates are always there at the end of every messy night out. It's a book about bad dates, good friends and—above all else—about recognising that you and you alone are enough.
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Here, at her most provocative and intensely personal, the renowned scholar, cultural critic, and feminist bell hooks skewers our view of love as romance. In its place she offers a proactive new ethic for a people and a society bereft with lovelessness. As she uses her incisive mind and razor-sharp pen to explore the question "What is love?" her answers strike at both the mind and heart. In thirteen concise chapters, hooks examines her own search for emotional connection and society's failure to provide a model for learning to love.
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