14 Romance Novels Men Actually Finish (A Guy's Honest List)

Rob runs a failing record shop, has strong opinions about track order, and has just been left by Laura. So he calls up the five worst break-ups of his life to ask each woman what went wrong, which is a research project designed to avoid the actual answer. Hornby is very funny about male taste as a hiding place: the lists, the rankings, the certainty about music standing in for any certainty about yourself. Then, quietly, the book turns into a story about what growing up costs.

Don Tillman schedules his meals by weekday and treats social life as a series of solvable problems, so finding a partner becomes the Wife Project, complete with a screening questionnaire. Rosie is disorganised, a smoker, frequently late, and disqualified on the first page. Then she needs help identifying her biological father, and the project becomes something else entirely. Simsion writes Don from the inside without ever making him the joke, and the comedy comes from the gap between what Don reports and what the reader can see.

A farm girl and the boy who works for her father are separated by pirates, a kidnapping, a swamp full of unpleasant rodents and a prince who wants a war rather than a wife. Goldman wraps the adventure in a fake frame, pretending he is merely abridging a much longer classic by an author who does not exist, and keeps interrupting himself in brackets to explain what he has cut and why. That trick is the whole reason it works on people who say fairy tales are not for them. The jokes never stop and the duels are properly choreographed.

Brian is the first in his family to reach university, arrives in 1985 with a head full of general knowledge and a plan to be interesting, and works his way onto the University Challenge team largely to be near Alice, who is beautiful and posh and several postcodes out of range. Nicholls is very funny about the specific humiliations of class: the wrong clothes, the wrong records, the house at home you would rather nobody visited. Then there is Rebecca, who argues with him constantly and is obviously the point, which every reader works out well before Brian does.

Henry is a shortstop of impossible precision, spotted by a small college on a cold Wisconsin lake, and for a while everything about his life is the clean arc of a ball leaving his hand. Then one throw goes badly and the failure spreads outward. Harbach follows five people around that campus: the player who has forgotten how to do the only thing he can do, the teammate who built him, the college president who falls in love late and inconveniently, the daughter who has walked out of a marriage, and a roommate with plans of his own.

Stevens has given his life to service at Darlington Hall and to a definition of dignity that leaves no room for anything else. In 1956 he takes a motoring holiday to the West Country, ostensibly on staffing business, and the trip becomes a slow inventory of everything he chose not to say to Miss Kenton across twenty years of working beside her. The book is written entirely in his own careful, evasive voice, which means the reader sees the love story he is describing without ever naming it.

Toru Watanabe is a student in late-sixties Tokyo, orbiting Naoko, who is grieving and fragile and slipping away from him, and Midori, who is alive in a way that frightens him. Murakami keeps the campus protests in the background as noise, because this book is not about politics. It is about the specific loneliness of being twenty and unsure whether the person you love can be reached. Straighter and sadder than the surreal novels people usually mean when they say Murakami.

Zoya was born at the exact moment India lifted the 1983 World Cup, which is a family joke until the national team starts winning every match she has breakfast with. The board wants her as a mascot for the World Cup campaign. Nikhil Khoda, the captain, thinks superstition is an insult to the work. Chauhan writes Delhi English better than anyone: the family arguments, the ad agency politics, the cricket dressing room. The romance is a running argument between two people who are both right.

Lincoln works nights in IT at a newspaper in 1999, and part of the job is reading the internal email the filter has flagged. Two women on the paper write to each other all day about their work, their families and their disastrous men, and Lincoln keeps not reporting them, because he has started looking forward to it. He knows exactly how indefensible this is. Rowell writes him as a decent man in an impossible position, living at his mother's house, still rebuilding after a break-up that flattened him at nineteen, and the whole thing is funnier and kinder than the premise deserves.

Florentino Ariza loves Fermina Daza, who marries a doctor instead. So Florentino waits, for five decades, while running a river company and accumulating hundreds of affairs he counts in a private ledger. Garcia Marquez writes obsession with a completely straight face, which is what makes the book so strange and so alive: it is a comedy about a man who has confused persistence with love, and a serious novel about ageing, and it never tells you which reading is correct.

Ove is fifty-nine, recently widowed, recently made redundant, and has decided there is nothing left to stay for. His plans keep being ruined by a pregnant neighbour who needs a lift, a cat that will not leave, and a housing association he cannot stop policing. Backman tells Ove's marriage in flashback, and Sonja emerges as the one thing that ever made him legible to other people. The comedy in the present and the love story in the past are doing the same work from two directions.

Krish and Ananya meet at IIM Ahmedabad and the romance is settled early, which is the interesting choice: the actual story is the campaign for family approval. Krish moves to Chennai to win her parents, Ananya works on his mother, and the two sets of relatives are kept apart like unstable chemicals. Bhagat is a plain writer with a real ear for family comedy, and the mothers in this book are the best characters he has written. It is also, quietly, about a son and a father who cannot speak.

January writes love stories and has stopped believing in them. Augustus writes serious, miserable literary fiction and looks down on hers. Stuck next door to each other for a summer, both blocked, they make a bet: she will write something bleak, he will write something with a happy ending, and each has to teach the other how. Henry uses that setup to argue, cleverly, about what popular fiction is for, while also delivering exactly the thing being argued about.

Elio is a precocious teenager at his family's house on the Italian Riviera in 1983 when Oliver arrives for the summer as his father's research guest. Almost nothing happens for a long time: swimming, cycling, transcription, a lot of watching. Aciman writes desire as a state of constant calculation, every gesture examined for meaning, and the prose keeps pace with a mind that will not stop. The father's speech near the end is one of the few passages in modern fiction that people can quote from memory.