Five Love Stories for the Month of Love

It can’t have escaped your notice that February is the month of love and too many chocolates, or at least that’s the traditional view. Some of you are all loved up. Some pining silently for the “gorgeous one” to notice you as you walk to the coffee machine at work. Maybe you are embracing deep family love or simply prefer to spend time with your galentines. Love fills our lives in many ways.

However you choose to celebrate the month of love, the Lady Wimbledon Book Club has the perfect book for you. What are you waiting for? Get yourself comfortable and dive into the month of love.

1. The Forty Rules of Love. Elif Shafak

“Every true love and friendship is a story of unexpected transformation. If we are the same person before and after we loved, that means we haven’t loved enough…”

International best selling author, Elif Shafak, brings a colourfully woven journey of love where the past and present fit together in harmony. It is both enlightening and intelligent; a story that will stay with you long after you have finished it.

Ella Rubinstein has a husband, three teenage children, and a pleasant home. Everything that should make her confident and fulfilled. Yet there is an emptiness at the heart of Ella’s life – an emptiness once filled by love.

So when Ella reads a manuscript about the thirteenth-century Sufi poet Rumi and Shams of Tabriz, and his forty rules of life and love, her world is turned upside down. She embarks on a journey to meet the mysterious author of this work.

It is a quest infused with Sufi mysticism and verse, taking Ella and us into an exotic world where faith and love are heartbreakingly explored.

2.Love And Other Dramas. Ronali Collins

In this warm and witty story three women from two different cultures in West London are at a crossroads in their lives. Tania is recently divorced, Helen, her mother is recently widowed and her best friend Priya who narrowly escaped being sacked plan to reinvent themselves.

Love and Other Dramas is a story of surprises, shocks and past secrets which will play havoc with their relationships as they navigate the dramas that come with family life and interfering busy bodies, (in a culture where Aunty knows best!). Will they get their second chance?

3.Love and Friendship – Juvenilia and other short stories. Jane Austen

Jane Austen revolutionised the literary world when she wrote about class systems and the politics of gender whilst injecting an often mischievous look at romance. She went on to become a mature novelist who drew her readers into the world her characters inhabited despite a publishing career that was less than a decade long. As early as 1787, Austen began to write poems, stories, and plays for her own and her family’s entertainment. Later she compiled “fair copies” of these early works into three bound notebooks, now known as the “Juvenilia,” containing pieces originally written between 1787 and 1793. This edition also includes letters that she wrote during her life.

This is a perfect book to dip in and out of when a few minutes is all you have to read.

4.The Woman Who Stole My Heart. Anne Riley Hawkins

Is love a dangerous emotion?

Anne Riley Hawkins has created a tender love story which tests the bond of love between two women. Neither realised that a love such as theirs was possible. As you are taken on their journey you will discover the toll taken on both of them and how a different kind of love is subjected to boundaries they didn’t know existed.

The Book Club found this book to be truly compelling. It is an absolute unputdownable read, one you may find yourself binge reading..

5.The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. Taylor Jenkins Reid

If you haven’t heard of or read this book yet, where have you been?

Soon to be a Netflix film, you want to read it before it is made into a movie!

Monique is a writer who needs a lucky career break.

Evelyn Hugo is an ageing and reclusive Hollywood icon.

Evelyn is about to reveal the truth about her glamorous and scandalous life. She chooses Monique Grant, an unknown reporter to write her biography. Monique is not in a good place, her husband has left her and her career isn’t exactly going anywhere. Despite her confusion as to why Evelyn has chosen her, she recognises the golden opportunity that has come her way.

Within the walls of Evelyn’s luxurious apartment she gradually reflects upon her tumultuous journey in Tinseltown.Her story reveals forbidden love, ruthless ambition, unexpected friendship and, of course, her seven husbands.

As their time together passes by Monique feels a very special connection to Evelyn and as they near the end of the biography it becomes clear that her life intersects with Evelyn’s in tragic and irreversible ways.