Especially for you, in honor of Valentine's Day, check out these NEW and EXCEPTIONAL novels about romance and love:
Hayat Shah is a young American in love for the first time. His normal life of school, baseball, and video games had previously been distinguished only by his Pakistani heritage and by the frequent chill between his parents, who fight over things he is too young to understand. Then Mina arrives, and everything changes. Through Hayat Shah, Akhtar shows readers the powerful forces at work on young men and women growing up Muslim in America. This is an intimate, personal first novel.
From the Man Booker Prize–winning author of The Line of Beauty: a magnificent, century-spanning saga about a love triangle that spawns a myth, and a family mystery, across generations.
It’s the early 1980s—the country is in a deep recession, and life after college is harder than ever. In the cafés on College Hill, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels. With devastating wit and an abiding understanding of and affection for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides creates a story so contemporary and fresh that it reads like the intimate journal of our own lives.
In this extraordinary novel, Anne Enright explores the momentous drama of everyday life; the volatile connections between people; the wry, accurate take on families, marriage, and brittle middle age.
The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, and it is only open at night. Behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway—a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose. Despite themselves, however, Celia and Marco tumble headfirst into love—a deep, magical love that makes the lights flicker and the room grow warm whenever they so much as brush hands.
Unfolding over a single night, Nina sits at the bedside of her husband, Philip, whose sudden and unexpected death is the reason for her lonely vigil. Too shocked yet to grieve, she lets herself remember the defining moments of their long marriage, beginning with their first meeting in Paris.
A sudden death, a never-mailed postcard, and a long-buried secret set the stage for a luminous and heart-breakingly real novel about lost souls finding one another.
In a novel based on the author's real-life tragedy, Goldman, consumed with grief and guilt over the accidental death of his wife just before their second anniversary, obsessively collects every memory of her, especially her writings, with the hope of keeping her alive in his mind.
You are about to travel to Edgecombe St. Mary, a small village in the English countryside filled with rolling hills, thatched cottages, and a cast of characters both hilariously original and as familiar as the members of your own family. Among them is Major Ernest Pettigrew (retired), the unlikely hero of Helen Simonson's wondrous debut. Wry, courtly, opinionated, and completely endearing, Major Pettigrew is one of the most indelible characters in contemporary fiction, and from the very first page of this remarkable novel he will steal your heart.
A deeply evocative story of ambition and betrayal, The Paris Wife captures a remarkable period of time and a love affair between two unforgettable people: Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley.
A Nigerian resident in psychiatry wanders around in 
Eugenides’ latest book covers about a year in the lives of three college seniors at Brown in the early 1980s. A love triangle of one young woman and two young men is examined as the three friends reach the end of their student days and start moving toward adulthood. Several reviewers mention the book as having a particular appeal to English majors, probably because, according to the Wall Street Journal, “his send-ups of the pretensions of chic undergraduate subcultures are hilarious and charmingly rendered.”
In another story of a love triangle, Hollinghurst “stages a splendid satire on the English social strata of the 20th century...grandly capturing the beauty, despair, and desire of the British upper class,” according to critic Michael Leonard. The story stretches from 1913 to the present in a witty, insightful generational saga that one reviewer calls a “thrilling, enchanting work of art.”
Pearlman’s collection of stories include a love affair between young cousins, an elderly couple's decision to shoplift, a young girl’s deathbed secret revealed, a young college graduate intent on fulfilling an obligation to herself, and a retired gastroenterologist deciding how she wants to leave this world, along with other enticing plots. Her characters range across different eras and geographical locations, and each is rendered with precision.
After retreating from his once-promising career, aging rock singer Nik has created his own alternate biography from invented news clippings, fake photographs, and fictional reviews. His sister Denise and niece 
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