The best love stories in Booker-nominated books

Robbie and Cecilia in Atonement by Ian McEwan

As childhood companions, Robbie and Cecilia have known each other their entire lives. Both are deeply in love, yet a complicated class gap has always been a barrier. Finally, in the hazy summer heat, the two confess their feelings. 1935 England is the backdrop to Ian McEwan’s 2001 Booker-shortlisted novel, where in a short 24-hour period their promising future together is shattered after Robbie is wrongly accused of a crime and imprisoned. Though separated, the pair maintain their love through a series of heartfelt letters, but are cruelly divided once again by the Second World War. 

Told through the eyes of Cecilia’s sister, Briony, an unreliable narrator, McEwan’s acclaimed novel shows how someone else’s actions have the power to derail a relationship and life. It remains one of literature’s most tragic love stories. 

Boulder and Samsa in Boulder by Eva Baltasar, translated by Julia Sanches

A chance encounter results in a life-changing love affair In Eva Baltasar’s 2023 International Booker Prize-nominated novel, Boulder. Baltasar’s eponymous narrator is a plain-talking nomad who cooks on a merchant ship. While in port, her paths cross with Samsa, an Icelandic woman with ‘white-blonde hair [and] swimmer’s shoulders’. Baltasar’s prose, translated by Julia Sanches, is deeply sensual, often crackling with electricity as she chronicles queer love.

‘I can’t not look at her, like when you peer over the edge of a boat and come face-to-face with a shark. I forget to add sugar to my coffee, I burn my tongue. I feel the hardness of the rock in which desire has become lodged, as if for all time. I look at her and feel woozy, even though she’s Scandinavian and makes her living from a multinational with blood on its hands. I look at her and she fills every corner of me.’

Praised by the International Booker Prize judges as a ‘sumptuous exploration of desire,’ the novel is also a tender exploration of motherhood. While Boulder and Samsa’s relationship ebbs and flows on a tide of parental pressures and the limitations of familial life, the book provides a captivating examination of intimacy, independence, love and loss.

Thomas and John in Days Without End by Sebastian Barry

In Sebastian Barry’s ninth novel, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2017, the diminutive Thomas McNulty flees from Ireland to escape the famine, exchanging one country’s hardships for those of another. Barely an adult, he finds a place fighting in the Indian Wars, and later the American Civil War, where he encounters ‘Handsome’ John Cole. It is there, amidst the chaos of battle, their bond deepens, evolving from brothers in arms to lovers, partners, and eventually family.

‘In the darkness as we lie side by side John Cole’s left hand snakes over under the sheets and takes a hold of my right hand. We listen to the cries of the night revelers outside and hear the horses tramping along the ways. We’re holding hands then like lovers who have just met or how we imagine lovers might be in the unknown realm where lovers act as lovers without concealment.’

This work of historical fiction may seem an unlikely setting for a love story that challenges binary notions of masculinity, gender, and familial structures, but Barry’s light touch ensures the connection is seamless. His portrayal of 19th-century America in the making is at times brutal, yet the gentle, unwavering relationship at its core elevates it far beyond its genre.

Sue and Maud in Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

Love can blossom where you least expect it. At least that seems to be the case in Sarah Waters’s delightful Victorian romp, Fingersmith, which was shortlisted for the Booker in 2002. The novel tells the story of Sue Trinder, an orphan, abandoned as an infant in the care of Mrs. Sucksby, a conniving and resourceful ‘baby farmer’, whose bread and butter comes from raising children to become petty thieves - fingersmiths - in the London slums. Sue’s world changes forever when Gentleman, a well-dressed and sophisticated con-man arrives with a tantalising proposition. He offers her the chance to take part in a clever ploy to steal the inheritance of Maud Lilly, an isolated and vulnerable heiress, by posing as her maid and encouraging her to marry Gentleman.

But nothing is quite how it seems. Sue and Maud soon kindle an unlikely friendship that becomes a passionate love affair. Waters crafts an exhilarating and unforgettable journey through the Victorian underworld, filled with villains, deception, debauchery and, ultimately, love. 

Francis and Harvey in The Bird of Night by Susan Hill

Since its publication over 50 years ago, The Bird of Night has confounded readers and critics. One of Susan Hill’s most challenging and misunderstood works, which was shortlisted for the 1972 Booker Prize, it is the fictional portrait of a 20-year friendship between Francis Croft, the greatest poet of his generation, and his faithful companion Harvey Lawson. Hill’s unflinching prose renders the bouts of madness endured by Francis that stretch Harvey’s devotion to his friend almost to breaking point. This mesmerising novel plumbs the dark recesses of the human mind and asks the question: how far can one go for love? 

Anna and Sharif in The Map of Love by Ahdaf Soueif

‘How can it be that a set of the shoulders, the rhythm of a stride, the shadow of a strand of hair falling on a forehead can cause the tides of the heart to ebb and to flow?’

When Lady Anna Winterbourne travelled to Egypt in 1900 she did not expect that she would meet and fall in love with Sharif, an Egyptian Nationalist fiercely committed to the liberation of his country. Fast forward a hundred years, Anna and Sharif’s descendent, Isabel Parkman, an American divorcee, travels to Egypt with an old family trunk, inside of which are the notebooks and journals that detail Anna and Sharif’s forbidden love. Ahdaf Soueif’s 1999 Booker-shortlisted novel looks at love from the perspective of a historian, making sense of time’s effect on human bonds.