The best romantic love books

When renowned translator Hanne Schubert falls down a flight of stairs, she suffers a brain injury, a rare but real injury: the ability to speak only the language learned later in life—Japanese. Isolated from the English-speaking world, she goes to Japan for refuge, only to be confronted by a Japanese writer who accuses her of mangling the translation of his novel. 

Devoted to her work, Hanne seeks out the inspiration for the man’s novel to redeem her good name, an unemployed Japanese Noh actor named Moto. Through their contentious and sexually charged interactions, Moto finds his way back on stage and Hanne begins to understand how she mistranslated not only the novel, but also her daughter.

In a Washington D.C. private high school, where everyone is related to someone in power, Carter Owens is no one. Her biting sarcasm and snarky jabs make her impossible to beat in a word fight, and when words don’t work, she uses her fists.

With a Secret Service agent for a father, Carter lives each day with the fear that one night he might not come home. Between that daily fear, and a mother who walked out on both of them, Carter is convinced it’s best to keep everyone at arm’s length. That resolve is challenged when two new students decide to befriend her. Along with their friendship they bring the mystery of their true identities, a mystery Carter is determined to solve.

In The Stressless Brain, I detail the importance of building a relationship with yourself through the use of Kundalini Meditation. By incorporating yogic technology into your life, you can learn to govern your thoughts and emotions in a mindful manner. Meditation offers you the tools to view your life with clarity so that you can respond, rather than react, to stressful situations.

Bridging the worlds of yogic meditation, psychology, and science, The Stressless Brain will help you thoroughly understand stress and anxiety and how it affects your entire being: body, mind, and soul.  Whether you are experiencing mental hardships from your professional, personal, or romantic life, my objective is for you to find answers within yourself and make any necessary changes — all through the regular practice of meditation.

Paper Hearts is a novel in verse based on the true story of a group of young women who were prisoners in Auschwitz—forced to work in a munitions factory. Zlatka decided to make a birthday card for her friend Fania. She stole and bartered for paper and scissors, secretly creating an origami heart. Then she passed it to every girl at the work tables to sign with their hopes and wishes for happiness, for love, and most of all—for freedom. Fania treasured the heart—a symbol of the bond that helped them to hope for the best in the face of the worst. She kept it hidden, through the bitter days in the camp and through the death marches. She kept it always.

Beth is relatively happily married, with one daughter and one stepson. She lives beside a shadowy stretch of canal by Camden Lock in London. Troubled by her past and the mother who rejected her, she starts to see a therapist, Dr. Tamara Bywater. Dr. Bywater – soothing, skilled, quietly charismatic – appears to help her, but gradually and unexpectedly she starts insinuating herself into Beth’s mind – and into her life. She is not what she seems at all. 

1930s Shanghai could give Chicago a run for its money. In the years before the Japanese invaded, the city was a haven for outlaws from all over the world: a place where pasts could be forgotten, fascism and communism outrun, names invented, fortunes made – and lost. ‘Lucky’ Jack Riley was the most notorious of those outlaws. An ex-Navy boxing champion, he escaped from prison in the States, spotted a craze for gambling, and rose to become the Slot King of Shanghai. Ruler of the clubs in that day was ‘Dapper’ Joe Farren – a Jewish boy who fled Vienna’s ghetto with a dream of dance halls. His chorus lines rivaled Ziegfeld’s and his name was in lights above the city’s biggest casino.

In 1940 they bestrode the Shanghai Badlands like kings, while all around the Solitary Island was poverty, starvation, and genocide. They thought they ruled Shanghai; but the city had other ideas. This is the story of their rise to power, their downfall, and the trail of destruction they left in their wake.

Thirty-four years ago the Burmese people rose up against their military government. The unarmed demonstrators were cut down, leaving more than 5,000 dead. In Under the Dragon, Rory MacLean meets the victims and perpetrators of that first great national uprising, unravelling a paradox of selfless generosity and sinister greed in a country stitched together by love and fear. He exposes the tragedy of a thousand betrayals, giving voice to those too frightened to speak for themselves. Under the Dragon is an important, perceptive, historical, and heart-breaking portrayal of a golden land that remains shot through with desperation and fear, but also – in even the darkest places -- with beauty and courage.

The Tourist Trail is an environmental thriller about endangered species in the world's most remote waters and the people who put their lives on the line to protect them. Against the backdrop of the Southern Ocean, the novel weaves together the stories of Angela, a penguin researcher based in southern Argentina, Robert, an FBI agent in pursuit of an anti-whaling activist known as Aeneas; and Ethan Downes, a computer tech whose love for a passionate animal rights activist draws him into a dangerous mission among the icebergs of Antarctica.

Vonny Kwan wakes up in a Nevada hospital, the victim of a hit-and-run accident she doesn’t remember. As she struggles to recover from her injuries, she learns that she also has no memory of the past nine years, including her marriage and what she was even doing in the West. While she’s still reeling from the shock of her amnesia, two detectives visit and inform her that her husband, John, was recently murdered. As more information comes to light, Vonny grows increasingly suspicious of everyone around her.

Vonny realizes she must piece together the last decade to uncover the truth. The missing chunk of time holds secrets about the person she became, the mysterious man she fell for, and the life she never wanted.

In a dystopian future, Paris is now the walled city-state of Otpor and revelling in its latest Golden Age: an intoxicating mix of abandon and apathy made possible by the Orthodoxy. The population is engineered into four neuro-social classes, ensuring citizens exist in complete equality, fraternity, and liberty. But, not everyone is satisfied with the status quo. When forbidden murals start appearing in the city, the Government moves quickly: realigning the neural conditioning of one of their Peacekeepers, Anaiya 234, and sending her deep undercover to infiltrate the resistance. As her realigned identity fractures and the city descends into chaos around her, Anaiya is forced to confront a different truth to the one she's been conditioned to obey.