Campaign for the American Reader: Ten of the finest literary romances ever told

Thursday, February 13, 2020

Ten of the finest literary romances ever told

Ceri Radford grew up in Swansea, studied English literature and French at Cambridge and started her career with Reuters. She has since written about books, TV, culture, society, male strippers and many other things besides for publications including The Daily Telegraph, the Times Literary Supplement, and Red Magazine.

Her first novel is A Surrey State of Affairs (AKA) Constance Harding’s (Rather) Startling Year.

At the Independent (UK), Radford tagged ten of the greatest love stories in literature, including:

The Rosie Project, by Graeme Simsion

Let’s start with something light: a successful relationship usually means adjusting to how someone else sees the world. This is more of a challenge when that someone is Don Tillman, who cooks exactly the same thing every week according to The Standardised Meal System, calculates everyone’s BMI on first glance, and decides to find a wife by distributing a questionnaire. Enter chaos in the form of Rosie, who meets none of the criteria but nonetheless, well, ticks his box. Beneath the fun and the fluff there is a quietly profound exploration of the assumptions around autism and what it means to have an atypical – or a typical – brain.