What the World Needs Now is Love: A Valentine’s Reading List

It’s no surprise that love is one of the themes most frequently explored in literature. For centuries, writers have expounded on matters of the heart, and readers have sought out love stories to better understand one of the most basic human desires. In these anxious times, the world needs love more than ever. These eight books explore love, sexuality, heartbreak, and desire in their many forms.

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Queers Like Me by Michael V. Smith

Confessional and immersive, Michael V. Smith’s Queers Like Me is a broad tapestry that explores growing up queer and working class, then growing into an urban queer life.

Learned by Carellin Brooks

Set in the 90s, alternating between the storied quads of Oxford University and the dank recesses of London pubs given over to public displays of queer BDSM, Learned chronicles Carellin Brooks’s extreme explorations of mind and body.

Sugaring Off by Fanny Britt, Tr. by Susan Ouriou

Sugaring Off by Fanny Britt, translated by Susan Ouriou, probes intimacy, denial, and how we are tied to others—whether those we love or those we exploit. This eviscerating critique of privilege examines what happens when one can no longer play a role—whether in a couple, family, or social structure—and exposes the resulting friction between pleasure and consequence.

Disobedience by Daniel Sarah Karasik

Daniel Sarah Karasik’s Disobedience is a remarkable work of queer and trans speculative fiction that imagines how alternative forms of connection and power can refuse the violent institutions that engulf us.

you by Chantal Neveu, Tr. by Erín Moure

Chantal Neveu’s you, translated by Erín Moure, demonstrates with exceptional beauty how in the interval between words or verses, language can glimmer, absorb, and refract the changing realities and attractions of an all too human relationship.

No Credit River by Zoe Whittall

Riving and probing a period of six years marked by abandoned love, the pain of a lost pregnancy, and pandemic isolation, Zoe Whittall’s memoir in prose poetry, No Credit River, is a reckoning with the creative instinct itself.

These Songs I Know By Heart by Erin Brubacher

These Songs I Know By Heart weaves vignettes of everyday mythology into an absorbing and honest meditation on the connections in our lives. With razor-sharp reflection, humour, and most of all love, Erin Brubacher’s first novel reminds us that there’s no formula to life and that instead, we must celebrate what makes the small moments of our lives extraordinary.

Not Even the Sound of a River by Hélène Dorion, Tr. by Jonathan Kaplansky

Not Even the Sound of a River by Hélène Dorion, translated by Jonathan Kaplansky, is a moving tale of love’s phantom pains as shared through the relationships between three generations of mothers and daughters. Told through multiple perspectives, newspaper accounts, and historical documents, Dorion’s narrative exquisitely describes the depths of love, the reality of living when dreams have failed us, and the complex nuance of blood ties.