Valentine’s Day 2025
Valentine’s Day gives us an opportunity to celebrate romantic love, friendship and admiration.
Written by Richard Booth’s Bookshop, February 2025
This article presents Richard Booth’s Bookshop’s selection of books on love and relationships. Whether you are looking for somebody else or for yourself, there will be something here for everyone.
Click on the images below to find more information or to buy on bookshop.org

Enchanted Tales & Happily Ever Afters
We’ve all grown up with fairy tales, whether it be through children’s books, on screen or in modern retellings. Enchanted Tales & Happily Ever Afters is a very carefully and lovingly curated book that features ten of the most popular fairy stories in the world. Each story goes back to the source from which so much has sprung, from picture books and stage shows, to animated films and their live action interpretations.
For the child in us all, Enchanted Tales & Happily Ever Afters is a book to cherish forever.

Dating by The School of Life
It is so natural to want our dating days to come to an end, but we should never lose sight of the genuine merits and delights that lie closely entwined with their pains. Dating might seem like a trivial and relatively inconsequential part of love, but it is in fact key to getting into the kind of relationship that can last and help us flourish.

I Love RomComs & I Am A Feminist by Corrina Antrobus
A celebration of 100 of the best romantic comedies of all time – all with proper feminist credentials. This book will validate your love of romcoms and prove they have always had your back.
In this fascinating guide, film journalist and Bechdel Test Fest founder Corrina Antrobus reveals how romcoms reflect feminism in the modern age. These iconic, groundbreaking movies have shone a spotlight or shifted narratives on topics from body positivity to abortion, and from faking orgasms to workplace equality.

Venus & Aphrodite by Bettany Hughes
A cultural history of the goddess of love, from a New York Times bestselling and award-winning historian.
Venus & Aphrodite brings together ancient art, mythology, and archaeological revelations to tell the story of human desire. From Mesopotamia to modern-day London, from Botticelli to Beyoncé, Hughes explains why this immortal goddess continues to entrance us today — and how we trivialize her power at our peril.

How To Love by Thich Nhat Hanh
How to Love shows that when we feel closer to our loved ones, we are also more connected to the world as a whole. Nhat Hanh brings his signature clarity, compassion and humour to the thorny question of how to love and distils one of our strongest emotions down to four essentials: you can only love another when you feel true love for yourself; love is understanding; understanding brings compassion; and deep listening and loving speech are key ways of showing our love.

The Beloved Vision by Stephen Walsh
It’s an exciting, colourful, story, told with passion but also with the precision and clarity of detail for which this author is so widely admired.
Everyone loves romantic music: the sweet melody of a Schubert song, the
heroine dying for love in an Italian opera, the swooning orchestration
of a Tchaikovsky symphony. But as Stephen Walsh – author of the highly
praised Debussy: A Painter in Sound – points out in this intensely absorbing study, there is infinitely more to romantic music than meets the eye.

Want by Gillian Anderson
What do you want, when no one is watching? What do you want, when the lights are off? What do you want, when you are anonymous?
In this generation-defining book, Gillian Anderson collects and
introduces the anonymous letters of hundreds of women from around the
world (along with her own anonymous letter). Want reveals how women feel about sex when they have the freedom to be totally anonymous.

300,000 Kisses by Sean Hewitt & Luke Edward Hall
A ground-breaking anthology that changes the way we see the ancient world – and invites us to reflect on the puritanism of our own – 300,000 Kisses is a riotous celebration of desire in all its forms.
Steeped in honey, Juventius, your golden eyes, and as sweet too when I press my lips to them – three hundred thousand kisses is not close to enough. For centuries, evidence of queer love in the ancient world was ignored or suppressed. Even today, only a few, famous narratives are widely known – yet there’s a rich literary tradition of Greek and Roman love that extends far beyond this handful of stories. Here, the poet Seán Hewitt and painter Luke Edward Hall collect together, for the first time, forty of the most exhilarating queer tales in the classical canon and bring them newly to life.

Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
Profoundly moving and breathtakingly original, this rendering of the epic Trojan War is a dazzling feat of the imagination, a devastating love story, and an almighty battle between gods and kings, peace and glory, immortal fame and the human heart.
Star-crossed romance and heart-pounding historical adventure meet in Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles.

Instructions for Heartbreak by Sarah Handyside
A beautiful, razor-sharp novel by Sarah Handyside, Instructions for Heartbreak is a life-affirming story about female friendship, self-love and how to survive a broken heart.
‘A wonderfully nuanced, emotionally intelligent and insightful story of female friendships, relationships, growing up and finding your family’
“So many worlds, so much to do, so little done, such things to be”
Alfred lord tennyson