Our favourite literary love stories

Mary Mount, Picador Publisher, says: Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart is many things and is, at times, shocking and unsettling. But at the heart of the novel is one of the tenderest and truest love stories of recent years. It will absolutely break your heart.

Andrea Henry, Publishing Director, says: Douglas Stuart's stunning depiction of young gay love captures all the terrible agonies of adolescence and amplifies them to epic proportions. This book sort of rips your heart out.

Rosie Shackles, Assistant Editor, says: The Great Gatsby is a classic love story full of glitz and glamour, jeopardy and heartbreak, and so much longing! It is a beautifully-written page-turner about a love that lasts a lifetime. 

James Taylor, Editorial Assistant, says: Winner of the T.S Eliot Prize for Poetry, Rapture by Carol Ann Duffy is a book-length love poem which takes the reader through the entire heady, complex and unforgettable experience of love, from the first moment to the last. It's a complete revelation; each poem is explosively, deeply tender, and the story Duffy weaves through the poems is as gripping as any novel. It's so moving to feel an entire universe of romance, in every shade and hue, lying between the pages of this slim and symphonically perfect book of poetry. If you want to experience every emotion love has to offer, from the euphoric to the ruthless, then Rapture is the book for you.

Sophie Jonathan, Publishing Director, says: Days of Light by Megan Hunter begins with a tragedy. The disappearance of her brother on Easter Sunday in 1938 is the event that will set the course of Ivy's life as she searches for answers to what happened, but Joseph's death also delivers someone into Ivy's life: Frances. Ivy and Frances are both young mothers the second time they meet, but the war allows them to entangle their lives in a way that might not otherwise have been possible, and so begins a gorgeous love story that will break and mend your heart. Ivy's is a life lived in search of an answer, and surely, in the end, the answer is Frances.

Alpana Sajip, Senior Commissioning Editor, says: Crying in H Mart is one of the most heartbreaking love stories I've read. It's about the knotty, deep-rooted, all-consuming love between mother and daughter. What an act of love it is to bring a daughter into the world and show her its magic through the food you make for her; when words fail, a big bowl of kimchi-jjigae can say so much. And what an agonising love it is to care for a parent in her dying days, for the roles to be so poignantly reversed. Michelle Zauner has taken one of the most painful experiences of her life and transformed it into a paean – to her mother, to food, and to the power of the human spirit.

James Taylor, Editorial Assistant, says: Not all great love stories need be romantic, and while the author does encounter romantic love in the wild universe of Shetland, Storm Pegs by Jen Hadfield is the story of falling in love with a community, a language, a different way of living, and most of all, the majestic and uncompromising beauty of the natural world. This kind of love can change you, support you, and surprise you as much as any other. The descriptions of the intense and majestic landscapes are breathtaking, and I'd defy anyone not to be utterly moved by what is easily one of the most beautiful and heartfelt love letters, to anything or anyone, in recent years.

Colm Tóibín's beloved novel Brooklyn features one of the most believable and moving love triangles in literature. Long Island is its long-awaited, equally humane and exhilarating sequel. Following her return to New York, Eilis has built a secure, happy life with Tony; twenty years married and with two children looking towards a good future. Then a man with an Irish accent knocks on their door, and everything changes, the life they have built together called into question. And so, Eilis is drawn back to Ireland once again. Is it too late to take a different path? Is it ever possible to renew a great love that seemed gone forever?