Five of the best books about yearning

To yearn is to feel the pain and pleasure of being alive all at once. It is one of the great rites of passage of youth – wanting someone, wanting to be them, wanting to be wanted. It happens in flashes – a brief eye-lock on the street – or in great love stories that alter our basic narratives. Here are five novels that capture that lightning-struck feeling.
Taylor’s masterful look at bad timing and indecision is at once devastating and cosy, as it underlines the subtle intimacy of understated affection. Set in England in the interwar years and post-1945 peacetime, the novel traces the love and lives of Harriet and Vesey. Harriet considers herself unexceptional and wants a conventional life. Vesey has the arrogance and ambition needed to try to become an actor. The two meet as teenagers and find an overwhelming and uneasy love. Over the ensuing 20 years, Taylor interweaves their narratives as each makes potent choices about the need for comfort versus freedom while looking back at a romance that could have been.
Set against Chicago’s bohemian 1970s, Endless Love is a novel so aglow with passion it seems only natural that it opens with its protagonist, David, setting fire to his first love Jade’s house. His intention is to capture her attention and be the dousing hero. The fire consumes everything, destroying Jade’s family home and David’s life. This kicks off David’s manic quest to win Jade back. The melodrama of the novel would read as false for any other topic, but as the ultimate tale of young yearning, it feels utterly real.
A novel and not, a poem and not, a love story and not, this category-defying masterpiece forgoes the typical by showing relationships that are modern, fluid, brutal and beautiful. A fascinating look at the specific ache of needing someone to be in your thrall, Couplets traces its protagonist’s experience of finding a new life in queerness and the hurt that comes from wanting someone who can never truly be had. Each cutting couplet is a universe of desire unto itself – and the perfect exploration of present-day love in all its gorgeous, broken forms.
Another Country is everything one could want from a James Baldwin novel. Its incisive examinations of race, class and gender are filled with furious, passionate analyses of inequality. But it is the undercurrent of want in the aftermath of horrifying grief that provides the book’s engine: a web of lovers and desirers who inflict their best and worst impulses on one another.
A period piece set in Reykjavík in 1918, Sjón has written a novel about desire from the fringe. In a plague-ridden world cursed with mass death but blessed with the light of the birth of cinema, the novel’s queer main character Máni Steinn Karlsson is unfit for a bigoted society in every way. Yet his pining for a more beautiful world filled with that dissolving, projected light offers a warped, heartbreaking hope.