The perfect books for Valentine’s Day 💕📙
Because books are reliable and love isn’t (most of the time)!
If you’re ringing in the first Valentine’s Day of the decade without a significant other, we’ve got the solution. These are the only lovers you’ll need on February 14th. Why not make it a party and gather your fun single pals together for a V-Day book club!
Pick from the three categories of ways you can spend Valentine’s Day and find all you’ll need to get through this sometimes panic-inducing festival of love. Because the best romances are the ones we read about in books.
Getting in the spirit! 💘
If you can’t have a romantic Valentine’s Day, you may as well read about one!
Writers & Lovers by Lily King
Lily King’s Writers & Lovers follows Casey in the last days of a long youth, a time when everything – her family, her work, her relationships – comes to a crisis. Hugely moving and impossibly funny, it is a transfixing novel that explores the terrifying and exhilarating leap between the end of one phase of life and the beginning of another. It is a novel about love and creativity, and ultimately it captures the moment when a woman becomes an artist.
Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston
Alex Claremont-Diaz is the American equivalent of a young royal. Handsome, charismatic, genius-his image is pure millennial-marketing gold for the White House. There’s only one problem: Alex has a beef with the actual prince, Henry, across the pond. And when the tabloids get hold of a photo involving an Alex-Henry altercation, U.S./British relations take a turn for the worse. But is this love or hate?
Universal Love Stories by Alexandra Weinstein
Universal Love welcomes readers to a near-future world where our everyday technologies have fundamentally altered the possibilities and limits of how we love one another. In these gripping stories, a young boy tries to understand what keeps his father tethered to the drowned city they call home. A daughter gets to know her dead mother’s hologram better than she ever knew her living mother. And, at a time when unpleasant memories can be erased, a man undergoes electronic surgery to have his depression, and his past, forever removed.
Moping 💘
No judgement. A lot of us will be spiritually joining you in crying on Valentine’s Day. If you’re ready to wallow, these are the books you can read.
What is Missing: A Novel by Michael Frank
Costanza Ansaldo, a half-Italian and half-American translator, is convinced that she has made peace with her childlessness. A year after the death of her husband, an eminent writer, she returns to the pensione in Florence where she spent many happy times in her youth, and there she meets, first, Andrew Weissman, an acutely sensitive seventeen-year-old, and, soon afterward, his father, Henry Weissman, a charismatic New York physician who specializes in—as it happens—reproductive medicine.
Fairytale by Danielle Steel
Six months after losing his wife, the devastated Christophe is easy prey for a mysterious, charming Frenchwoman visiting the valley. Camille, still grieving for her mother, is shocked by the news that her father intends to remarry. Then she begins to see past the alluring looks, designer clothes, and elegant manners of the Countess, while her innocent father is trapped in her web…
The Paper Lovers by Gerard Woodward 
This is the story of two married couples and an affair. The Paper Lovers by Gerard Woodward opens with a man who suddenly develops a crush on one of his wife’s friends. As his affections deepen, he becomes aware that she too has feelings for him. Soon they transgress. But what does this mean? Is it love? Will they be caught?
Pretending it doesn’t exist 💘
This is the equivalent of watching a scary movie on Valentine’s Day. Which we also recommend.
The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave
On Christmas Eve, 1617, the sea around the remote Norwegian island of Vardø is thrown into a reckless storm. As Maren Magnusdatter watches, forty fishermen, including her father and brother, are lost to the waves, the menfolk of Vardø wiped out in an instant.
Now the women must fend for themselves.
If Cats Disappeared From the World by Genki Kawamura 
Our narrator’s days are numbered. Estranged from his family, living alone with only his cat Cabbage for company, he was unprepared for the doctor’s diagnosis that he has only months to live. But before he can set about tackling his bucket list, the Devil appears with a special offer: in exchange for making one thing in the world disappear, he can have one extra day of life. And so begins a very bizarre week
Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir 
Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth unveils a solar system of swordplay, cut-throat politics, and lesbian necromancers. Her characters leap off the page, as skillfully animated as arcane revenants. The result is a heart-pounding epic science fantasy.