Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. For the rules see her blog.

The topic this week is a Love Freebie (in honour of Valentine’s Day tomorrow). I usually find it a bit difficult with this freebie as I don’t read many romantic novels, but love is not just romance. These ten books all demonstrate some sort of loving relationship. I’ve listed them in alphabetical author order. The links take you either to my post, or if I haven’t written about them either to Amazon or Goodreads (marked *).

The Girl in a Swing* by Richard Adams. A shy young man meets a beautiful woman in the company of a young girl. He finds himself swept off of his feet and married to her, bringing her with him to live in his family home. She is his erotic dream come true; she does everything she can to bind him to her and join him in his comfortable life.

Soon, however, odd things begin to happen. Things in the house are strangely damp with what looks like seawater, bodies appear under the water that aren’t really there. It all winds up to a horrifying conclusion. I read this many years ago, after reading Watership Down, which I loved.

Days Without End by Sebastian Barry – Thomas McNulty is a young Irish immigrant, aged 17, who had left Sligo, starved and destitute, for Canada and then made his way to America where he met John Cole under a hedge in a downpour and they became friends and secretly lovers for life. After signing up for the US army in the 1850s, they, fought in the Indian Wars and then in the Civil War.

Midnight in St Petersburg by Vanora Bennett beginning in 1911 in pre-revolutionary Russia with Inna Feldman travelling by train to St Petersburg to escape the pogroms in Kiev hoping to stay with her distant cousin, Yasha Kagan. She is welcomed into the Leman family where she and Yasha are apprentices in their violin-making workshop. Inna is a talented, albeit shy, violinist and she falls in love with Yasha through their shared love of music.

Oscar and Lucinda* by Peter Carey. Peter Carey’s Booker Prize winning novel imagines Australia’s youth, before its dynamic passions became dangerous habits. It is also a startling and unusual love story. Oscar is a young English clergyman who has broken with his past and developed a disturbing talent for gambling. A country girl of singular ambition, Lucinda moves to Sydney, driven by dreams of self-reliance and the building of an industrial Utopia. Together this unlikely pair create and are created by the spectacle of mid-nineteenth century Australia.

I Love the Bones of You by Christopher Eccleston about his love for his father. This is not the usual celebrity autobiography that is just all about him and his work. It is a really vivid portrait of his relationship with his family and particularly with his father who had dementia at the end of his life. 

The Glass Guardian by Linda Gillard a ghost story and a love story, with a bit of a mystery thrown in too. It’s a ‘supernatural love story‘. When Ruth prepares to put her Aunt’s old house up for sale, she’s astonished to find she’s not the only occupant. Worse, she suspects she might be falling in love again. With a man who died almost a hundred years ago.

The Remains of the Day* by Kazuo Ishiguro – I love the pathos of this novel about Stevens, an English butler, reminiscing about his service to Lord Darlington, looking back on what he regards as England’s golden age and his relationship with Miss Kenton who had been the housekeeper at Darlington Hall. This was the first of Ishiguro’s books I read.

The Four Loves* by C S Lewis. This summarises four kinds of human love–affection, friendship, erotic love, and the love of God. Masterful without being magisterial, this book’s wise, gentle, candid reflections on the virtues and dangers of love draw on sources from Jane Austen to St. Augustine. I read this along with several other books by Lewis many years ago

Atonement by Ian McEwan. As well as being a love story and a war novel this is also a mystery and a reflection on society and writing and writers. It begins on a hot day in the summer of 1935 when Briony, then aged thirteen witnesses an event between her older sister Cecelia and her childhood friend Robbie that changed all three of their lives. Most of all, though, it’s a book about love.

Fire in the Blood by Irène Némirovsky, an intense story of life and death, love and burning passion. It’s about families and their relationships – husbands and wives, young women married to old men,  lovers, mothers, daughters and stepdaughters. It’s set in a small village based on Issy-l’Eveque between the two world wars. The narrator is Silvio looking back on his life and gradually secrets that have long been hidden rise to the surface, disrupting the lives of the small community. The people are insular, concerned only with their own lives, distrusting their neighbours