A book can take you away to exotic places or the town next door depending on where you want to go. When you get there, you’ll find love, deception, torrid romances, electric encounters, jealousy and sacrifice, break-ups and make-up sex, and a whole new world of fantasy and fun. Curl up in a comfy chair and take a look at some of the top romance novels since the 1920s.
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•The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton 1920
•Chéri by Sidone-Gabrille Colette 1920
•Women in Love by DH Lawrence 1920
•Crome Yellow by Aldous Huxley 1921
•The Fox, by D.H. Lawrence 1923
•A Lost Lady by Willa Cather 1923
•The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald 1925
•Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos 1925
•Ali and Nino by Kurban Said 1928
•A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway 1929
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•Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon 1932
•Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller 1934
•Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald 1934
•The Weather in the Streets by Rosamond Lehmann 1936
•Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell 1936
•Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston 1937
•Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier 1938
•The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen 1938
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•The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers 1940
•The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico 1941
•Gigi by Colette 1944
•The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford 1945
•At Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart 1945
•The Reluctant Widow by Georgette Heyer 1946
•The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen 1948
•I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith 1948
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•The End of the Affair by Graham Greene 1951
•Love for Lydia by HE Bates 1952
•The Go-Between by LP Hartley 1953
•The Echoing Grove by Rosamond Lehmann 1953
•Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan 1954
•Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov 1955
•Arturo’s Island: A Novel by Elsa Morante 1957
•Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote 1958
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•Lady Chatterley’s Lover by DH Lawrence 1960
•Diary of a Mad Old Man by Junichiro Tanizaki 1961
•Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates 1961
•The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani 1962
•Beauty and Sadness by Yasunari Kawabata 1964
•Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys 1966
•A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter 1967
•The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles 1969
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•Love Story by Erich Segal 1970
•Enemies, a Love Story by Isaac Bashevis Singer 1972
•The Princess Bride by William Goldman 1973
•The Other Side of Midnight by Sidney Sheldon 1973
•Light Years by James Salter 1975
•The Painter of Signs by RK Narayan 1976
•The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough 1977
•The Far Pavilions by MM Kaye 1978
•The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera 1978
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•So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell 1980
•A Month in the Country by JL Carr 1980
•The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard 1980
•The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera 1982
•Look at Me by Anita Brookner 1983
•The Lover by Marguerite Duras 1984
•Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie 1984
•Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel García Márquez 1985
•More Die of Heartbreak by Saul Bellow 1987
•Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami 1987
•Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey 1988
•The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro 1989
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•Possesion by AS Byatt 1990
•The Silent Duchess by Dacia Maraini 1990
•The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje 1992
•Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
•The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides 1993
•Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières
•The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald 1995
•The Reader by Bernhard Schlink 1995
•The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks 1996
•Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier
•The Map of Love by Ahdaf Soueif 1999
•Music and Silence by Rose Tremain 1999
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•Atonement by Ian McEwan 2001
•Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer 2002
•The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory 2002
•The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger 2003
•Gilead by Marilynne Robinson 2004
•Twilight by Stephenie Meyer 2005
•The Book Thief by Markus Zusak 2005
•Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen 2006
•The Pact by Jodi Picoult 2006
•Eat, PrAy, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert 2007