Love and Ruin

The love stories that last are mostly the ones that end in wreckage. Fiction has always trusted ruin to tell the truth about desire. Five doomed affairs, from a Tokyo dormitory to the supreme novel of a marriage coming apart.

1. 1
   Norwegian Wood

   Haruki Murakami · 1987

   Lvl 3296pp

   Murakami's gentlest book: first love shadowed by grief, and the easiest heartbreak on this path.

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2. 2
   The End of the Affair

   Graham Greene · 1951

   Lvl 5192pp

   Greene's jealous novelist investigates his own abandonment and finds God in the wreckage: love and ruin sharing a single diary.

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3. 3
   Wuthering Heights

   Emily Brontë · 1847

   Lvl 6352pp

   Heathcliff and Catherine's bond isn't romance, it's weather: the doomed love story at its most amoral and annihilating.

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4. 4
   Love in the Time of Cholera

   Gabriel García Márquez · 1985

   Lvl 4348pp

   García Márquez plays the long game: a half-century of waiting that keeps you guessing whether it's devotion or delusion.

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5. 5
   Anna Karenina

   Leo Tolstoy · 1878

   Lvl 5864pp

   The capstone: the affair that costs everything, inside fiction's most perfect big book, the ruin every love story since gets measured against.

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