A very beautiful graphic novel about the passage of time and the creep of pedestrian routine into a romantic relationship. After 10 years, Sophie and Louis are depicted as blank ciphers, their faces reduced to smooth outlines. A moving story about the crystallization of emotions over time and how feelings become submerged to habit.

~Adèle Bernard, Intern

It may not be your traditional romance, but it is glorious, scorching, incisive. The late, great Maryse Condé reimagines Emily Brontë’s classic novel, Wuthering Heights, transposed into 20th century Guadeloupe. It is also available in English translation, under the title Windward Heights from Soho Press, although it is slightly difficult to track down. It is both like Wuthering Heights -lavish, campy, violent- and also imaginative in a way wholly specific to Condé. The fears of madness and superstition and imperial decline that undergird Brontë’s book are brought to the forefront here and the result is shattering and lush.

”What is love?” wonders one of the characters. “A bonfire of fluttering leaves that you light in the evening and in the morning is nothing more than a heap of ashes.” But the book itself belies this raw sentiment.

~Miriam Gordis, Director

Tenderness permeates L’usage de la photo. Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, lovers during the year Ernaux underwent treatment for her breast cancer, take turns describing in writing the photographs they captured of their rooms after their romantic encounters. These still life compositions are far from lurid; the omission of their bodies allows for an intimacy which more brazen exhibitionism would never achieve. Of the same photograph, she writes: “He left in the hallway the composition formed by our shoes, our clothes all mixed together and piled here and there, mostly red and black. It was very beautiful.”; And he writes: “When I first saw this puzzle made of cloth and leather, I was struck by the dazzling beauty of the scene.” What a jolt of electricity to see their narratives converge!

~Leonor Grave, Bookseller and English Book Buyer

A Couple (Un Couple) by Eliette Abécassis was published by Grasset in France in 2023 and by Simon & Schuster in Fall 2025. It follows, counter-chronologically, a great love story that could have been but that never was. We asked Eliette to tell us more about her book and what romance means to her. 

Much has been written about impossible loves, couples who separate, encounters and breakups. But who has ever written about love that lasts? And yet: isn’t it the greatest adventure of life? Their names are Alice and Jules, but they could have been called so many other names.

This novel is for lovers of couples, lovers of love, those who think it can’t last, and also those who believe in it despite everything.

They find themselves on a bench in the Luxembourg Gardens at the age of 90, their hands trembling, their memories failing. Without remembering what kind of couple they were. Without remembering the arguments, the passion, the betrayals, the bad faith, the loving or disillusioned looks, the gestures and the children, the places they traveled together.

It all begins in reverse in 2022. Over 60 years, between Venice, Algeria, and above all Paris, the city of love, this couple will travel through time and transcend it through the power of their feelings.

Their story is part of the greater history: from May 1968 to the fall of the Berlin Wall, from the World Trade Center to the election of François Mitterrand, between adultery and sexual liberation, the couple evolves through changes in morals and views on love, which influence and shape them. For sixty years, what diverse loves: the conventional love of the 1950s, the free love of the 1970s, feminist and individualistic, but always symbiotic, this couple, treated as a character, will have experienced all states of love.

From the passion of the early days to tenderness and forgetfulness, love endures: through a glance, a gesture of attention, a flame that never goes out: “By dint of being together, they have become each other’s shadow. They speak to each other in whispers, understand each other without words, console and apologize to each other, they no longer have the strength to argue or fight. They no longer feel anger. They spend all their time together.

~Eliette Abécassis

A thoughtful book of essays for anyone interested in different conceptions of identity and love…

Colonial legacies eroticize the bodies of racialized people: women as objects of fantasy and domination, and men for their hyper-masculinity. Refusing to bow to these stereotypes and rooted in his own experience as an Arab Muslim man in France, Jamal Ouazzani embarks in this much-needed essay on an intimate and political journey into the heart of a society marked by deep and systemic divisions.
Exploring and drawing inspiration from fourteen centuries of Arab and/or Muslim culture, he reveals the richness of an often overlooked heritage that offers a space for inclusion for all identities and invites us to rethink our conception of love.

A book to offer to your best friend…

Surrounded by happy, fulfilled couples, Lola feels lonely. One day, she is contacted by a mysterious company called Love Machine. On the phone, she is told that she has been selected from among France’s most desperate singles to take part in their free program, which promises to find her love in just six steps. Between dating sites and lifestyle advice, Lola, under the guidance of an uncompromising love coach, suffers a series of bitter failures and gradually finds herself trapped in the candy-colored hell of Love Machine…

A book for all the heroines in your life…

They desire, they fantasize, they enjoy themselves. In this book, women call the shots.

This is the story of Pauline, who seduces her former lover’s wife. Of an after-game party that gets out of hand between two strangers. Of Yasmine, who finds this boy ugly but wildly desirable. Of a woman who desires another woman, with a false air of James Dean. And of those fantasies we dream of fulfilling, with a bar owner or a ski instructor.

Emma Becker, Wendy Delorme, Joy Majdalani, Emmanuelle Richard, Marina Rollman, and Laurine Thizy embody a new generation of female authors who explore female desire. Free, modern, and funny, their heroines are no longer objects of desire but actors in their own pleasure. Joyful and liberating!

A book to give to your aunt…

Equal parts haunting and tender, Suzanne and Louise is a photographic reverie like no other. In this singular “photo novel,” Hervé Guibert turns his lens—and his prose—toward his two reclusive great-aunts, capturing their intimate, secluded world with sensitivity and subversive charm. Originally published in 1980 and long treasured by Guibert devotees, this English-language edition is a revelation: the portraits are exquisite, the storytelling quietly radical, and the atmosphere lingers like memory. A meditation on aging, control, devotion, and the gaze—Suzanne and Louise is as provocative as it is profound.

A play for lovers of classics…

Perdican loves Camille, Camille loves Perdican. However, if it were that simple, it would not be part of the high school curriculum.

Through a series of romantic twists and turns, each character will compete in ingenuity and cruelty to force the other to declare their feelings while feigning indifference. A drama of thwarted desire and a subtle reflection on the difficulty of love, On ne badine pas avec l’amour oscillates between comedy and tragedy to better reveal the “mal du siècle” that gnaws at its author and his contemporaries : love.

A bilingual poetry book for anyone learning French (or English)…

Inspired by the great tradition of French love poetry, New Directions presents a beautiful, small gift edition, dedicated to what makes the world go round.

Filled with devotion and lust, sensuality and eroticism, fevers and overtures, these poems showcase some of the most passionate verses in the French language. From the classic sixteenth-century love sonnets of Louise Labé and Maurice Scève to the piercing lyricism of the Romantics and the dreamlike compositions of the Surrealists, French Love Poems is the perfect, seductive gift for anyone who makes your heart flutter.

This collection includes poems by Guillaume Apollinaire, Charles Baudelaire, Claude Cahun, René Char, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Paul Éluard, Louise Labé, Stéphane Mallarmé, Anna de Noailles, Joyce Mansour, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, and many others; as well as translations by Mary Ann Caws, Robert Duncan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Denise Levertov, Ezra Pound, Kenneth Rexroth, Frederick Seidel, Richard Sieburth, and William Carlos Williams.

A book for your parents or grandparents…

This novel is less than 100 pages but it spans 50 years of a relationship that is at once ordinary and completely extraordinary. Love, when you are inside it, is continuously miraculous. To anyone outside of it, it is generally mundane. Bégaudeau captures the beauty and tenderness inside small moments of intimacy very beautifully. The couple are both universal, named generically Jacques and Jeanne, and specific. They struggle with material concerns, money, work, division of labor, which at times erode their relationship. They feel like relics of a past generation, but also close enough to be familiar.

Bégaudeau was inspired to write this by Flaubert’s Un coeur simple and it has a similar heartfelt simplicity that is both moving and absorbing.

And finally, for someone who loves reading as much as yearning, what better gift than the first volume of A la recherche du temps perdu?