11 Booker-nominated novels that contain dramatic love triangles

Love triangles are found frequently in fiction, with complex affairs of the heart and simmering will they/won’t they/who-will-they-choose tension bristling across our bookshelves. Although most common in romance, they’re a staple throughout other genres, too. You’ll find them in many beloved classics, from the tortured love affair between Yuri, Tonya and Lara in Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago to Cathy’s agonising choice between Heathcliff and Edgar in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. 

The film Materialists – released in cinemas last month, with an all-star cast including Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans and Pedro Pascal – also contains a complicated love triangle, as a successful matchmaker (Johnson) finds herself caught between her aspiring actor ex-boyfriend (Evans) and a charismatic billionaire (Pascal).

Love triangles feature throughout the Booker Library, too. Here, we’ve compiled a list of Booker-nominated novels featuring love triangles that take shape under all sorts of circumstances. From unrequited love to illicit affairs, these books go beyond two people vying for the same person’s affections, instead taking the well-worn literary trope in new directions.

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

Sharing the Booker Prize in 1992 with Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger, The English Patient is set in a bombed-out Italian villa that serves as a makeshift hospital during the Second World War. The book revolves around the titular protagonist, who is horrifically injured, and whose identity is revealed to be László de Almásy, a Hungarian desert explorer. Suffering from severe burns and amnesia, he is cared for by a Canadian army nurse, Hana, and starts to recollect some of his memories. 

Two other characters also reside in the villa, each escaping their damaged pasts: a Sikh British Army sapper, Kip, and a Canadian-Italian thief, Caravaggio. While trying to grapple with his forgotten identity, Almásy tells them about the love affair he had with a married woman, Katharine Clifton, the wife of Geoffrey Clifton, who served as a British spy. After a short and passionate affair, Katharine puts an end to the relationship, afraid of what her jealous and possessive husband might do. 

Eileen Battersby from the Irish Times praised Ondaatje’s novel: ‘War and pain; public and private histories are interlocked in a narrative in which the multiple themes, complexities and horrors are starkly and beautifully developed in exact, mesmeric prose of hypnotic grace.’

As well as winning the Golden Man Booker Prize in 2018, a prize launched to mark the 50th anniversary of the Booker Prize, the 1996 film adaptation of the book took home an impressive nine Oscars. 

The Night Watch by Sarah Waters

A group of Londoners find their lives intertwined against the background of London, a city broken by the Second World War. 

The novel, which is told in reverse, starting in 1947, follows Kay, an ambulance driver whose previous lover was the controlling and insecure Helen. There’s also glamorous Viv, who is in a relationship with a married man, and finally Duncan, Viv’s younger brother, who has spent three years in prison and is now trying to move on from his past. The novel revolves around the complex web of relationships, and within it, the prominent love triangle between Kay, Helen, and another of Kay’s former lovers, Julia. While Helen and Julia pursue a relationship, Helen becomes possessive and jealous, suspecting that Julia has been involved with other women. 

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2006, The Night Watch was described by Melanie McGrath in the Evening Standard as ‘leaving you with the sense of having read something rich and complex pared down with consummate skill by a first-class storyteller into a series of deceptively simple tales of love.’

Possession by A.S. Byatt 

A.S. Byatt’s Possession won the Booker Prize in 1990, with fellow Booker Prize-nominated author Michèle Roberts praising it for its ‘exhilarating brew of riveting story, experimental form, richly textured writing and historical exploration’.

Switching between the present day and the Victorian era, the book follows two academics – Roland Michell and Maud Bailey – as they research the lives of a pair of famous Victorian poets, Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte. While Randolph is married to Ellen, and Christabel has her companion and possible lover Blanche, the academics discover the two poets were also having an affair with each other. As Roland and Maud examine various letters, diary entries and poems – all woven into the novel – more secrets are revealed, with the complex Victorian love quadrangle ultimately leading to tragedy.

In the Guardian, Sara Richards wrote: ‘The novel reflects the various meanings of the word possession, from the obsessive urge to possess, which drives some individuals to extreme behaviour to get what they want, to love itself. The novel examines, in a humane way, the relationship of love with shame, daring and loss.’

The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst

Longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2011, The Stranger’s Child is an elaborate tale full of juicy secrets and illicit affairs, spanning a century. It begins in 1913, with Cecil Valance, a young poet, visiting his Cambridge University friend, George Sawle, at his family home. George’s younger sister, Daphne, develops a crush on Cecil, unaware that George and Cecil are lovers. As years pass and a series of tragedies unfurl, the impact of that fateful summer shapes lives for years to come. The novel is split into five sections, each set in a different time period, and Hollinghurst creates a unique love triangle that in turn produces a myth that reverbates across multiple generations.

In the Independent, Richard Canning called the novel a remarkable and unmissable achievement: ‘Written with the calm authority of an author who could turn his literary gifts to just about anything. As for the mercurial title, readers will find much, but characteristically not all, revealed by the closing pages. One leaves the novel with a sense of the truly extraordinary.’

Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín

Unable to find work in her small town in 1950s Ireland, Eilis Lacey seeks out better opportunities in New York. While there, she meets and falls in love with Tony, an Italian plumber who has plans to build a life out on Long Island. Their relationship becomes serious and they decide to marry, unbeknownst to Eilis’s family and friends. But after tragedy calls her back home to Ireland, Eilis reconnects with Jim Farrell, a prior acquaintance whom she initially found rude and abrasive. As they begin to spend more time together, Eilis’s impression of Jim changes and they begin a relationship, with Tony none the wiser.

According to Liam McIlvanney from the London Review of Books, ‘It may be that Tóibín’s most significant gift is a very basic and mysterious one: he creates fictional worlds in which readers find it easy to believe … This ability to vivify imagined worlds is central to Brooklyn’s success. So long as we remain with Eilis Lacey in New York, her new world engrosses and enthrals us.’ Longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2009, Tóibín’s heartbreaking novel was also adapted into a film, starring Saoirse Ronan, and won multiple awards.