Sad Romance Books That Make You Cry: 16, Tissue Rated

Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew spend the night together after graduation in Edinburgh, and the book then visits them on the same date every year for two decades. She writes and waits tables. He drinks and presents late night television badly. The years accumulate in the gaps between chapters, which is exactly where the damage lives, because you can see what the two of them are wasting long before either can. Nicholls stays funny for two hundred pages so that you are completely unarmed when the tone shifts.

In 1935, on the hottest day of an English summer, Briony Tallis watches something pass between her older sister Cecilia and Robbie Turner, the housekeeper's son, and understands none of it. Then she lies to the police. The novel follows the cost of that lie through the war, a retreat to Dunkirk and a London hospital ward, before its final section quietly reframes everything you have read. The love story itself survives on a handful of letters and one meeting in a cafe, which is all McEwan needs.

Patroclus is an exiled prince, small and unimpressive, sent to the court of Peleus, where he becomes the constant companion of Achilles, the golden son everyone already knows is destined to be the greatest of the Greeks. Miller retells the war from Patroclus's side, so the fighting sits in the background and the relationship is the actual text. You already know how this ends and so does anybody who sat through the Iliad in school, which is precisely why the four hundred pages of hoping otherwise work so well.

Kathy narrates her childhood at Hailsham, a country boarding school with strange rules about art and health, and her long friendship with gentle, difficult Tommy and sharp, jealous Ruth. Slowly, and without ever raising its voice, the novel tells you what these children are for. Ishiguro keeps the tone nostalgic and polite throughout, which is what makes it unbearable, because nobody in the book rebels or runs. They simply live their allotted lives, and Kathy and Tommy work out what they mean to each other years after it could have mattered.

Louisa Clark loses her cafe job in a small English town and takes work as a companion to Will Traynor, a wealthy former adrenaline junkie who is quadriplegic after an accident and is unrecognisable to himself. She is chatty and badly dressed and completely out of her depth. He is sarcastic and unreachable. Moyes writes the class gap and the daily practicalities of care with more attention than most novels manage, and the argument at the centre of the book is about autonomy rather than romance.

Henry has a genetic disorder that yanks him out of his own timeline and drops him, without clothes or warning, into other years of his life. Clare grows up meeting him as an adult who already knows her, then marries the younger version who does not. The novel is stamped with dates and alternating voices, and the science fiction is really a machine for writing about waiting: the empty chair, the missed appointments, the loss you can see coming down the calendar towards you.

Toru Watanabe hears a Beatles song on a landing plane and drops back into his student years, when his closest friend killed himself at seventeen and left behind Naoko, the girl they had both grown up around. Toru circles her through sanatorium visits and long letters while Midori, funny and impatient and entirely alive, offers him a different future. This is Murakami at his plainest, no talking cats, just Tokyo rain, cheap apartments and the specific loneliness of your early twenties.

Elio spends the summer at his family's house on the Italian coast, where his father hosts a young academic each year. This time it is Oliver, and Elio catalogues every glance, every silence and every humiliation in obsessive detail. Aciman writes desire with an accuracy that is almost embarrassing to read, and the book does not end when the summer does. It skips forward, twice, and the final section is where most readers discover they have been holding their breath since page two hundred.

Holly loses Gerry to a brain tumour before either of them turns thirty five, and afterwards a package arrives: ten envelopes he wrote while he was dying, to be opened one a month, each carrying an instruction: buy a lamp, sing in public, take the holiday they never took. The Dublin setting keeps it grounded, the friends and family are drawn as actual people rather than a support chorus, and the comedy runs alongside the grief instead of politely waiting for it to finish.

Hazel Grace Lancaster carries an oxygen tank and attends a support group she despises, where she meets Augustus Waters, who is charming in a slightly rehearsed way and has lost a leg to the same category of bad luck. They bond over a novel with no ending and get themselves to Amsterdam to demand one from its author. Green writes teenagers who talk in paragraphs, which annoys some readers and delights others, and the book is very hard on the idea that illness makes people noble.

Ravin, a software engineer in Bangalore, meets Khushi through a matrimonial website, and the courtship happens in phone calls, chat windows and a few supervised meetings with both families involved. It is written plainly, almost like a diary, with no literary ambition anywhere in it. Then the story turns, and the last third is a man writing down something that actually happened to him. The book's power comes entirely from that fact, which is also the reason it should be handled carefully.

Connell is popular at school and poor at home, where his mother cleans Marianne's house. Marianne is rich, friendless and difficult. They start something in secret, he hides it, and at university the social order flips and the whole pattern runs again in reverse. Rooney writes with no quotation marks and almost no scenery, and the book is about how class works inside a bedroom: who is allowed to want things out loud, and who has learned to accept less than they need.

Stella runs her treatment schedule like a project manager and posts about it online. Will has given up on his and is only in the hospital because his mother enrolled him in a drug trial. Both have cystic fibrosis, which means hospital rules keep them six feet apart at all times, and the book's central act of rebellion is stealing back one of those feet. It was published alongside the film, and it reads that way, with short chapters and scenes built for the screen.

Landon Carter narrates from middle age, looking back at his final year of school, when he needed a partner for the school play and ended up with Jamie Sullivan, who carries a Bible everywhere and volunteers at the orphanage and is not remotely embarrassed about either. The romance is chaste, the town is drawn with real affection, and the faith in it is treated seriously rather than as decoration. It is short, simple and completely honest about what it wants to do to you.

In a care home, Noah reads from a notebook to Allie, whose dementia has taken most of what they built. The story inside is a summer in the 1940s when a poor mill worker and a rich girl fell for each other, were separated by her parents, and met again years later, days before her wedding to somebody else. The frame is the good half. Sparks is genuinely sharp on what it is like to lose somebody who is still in the room with you.

Oliver Barrett the fourth is Harvard money and hockey. Jenny Cavilleri is a working class music student at Radcliffe with a sharper tongue than he can handle. They marry against his father's wishes, live on very little, and then the story does the thing that made a hundred later novels possible. It is about a hundred and thirty pages long, the class comedy in the first half is better than anyone remembers, and the most quoted line in it remains genuinely bad advice.