25 results for "Romance"

The end of eternity

Asimov, Isaac
A spellbinding novel set in the universe of Isaac Asimov's classic Galactic Empire series and Foundation series. Due to circumstances within our control ... tomorrow will be canceled. The Eternals, the ruling class of the Future, had the power of life and death not only over every human being but over the very centuries into which they were born. Past, Present, and Future could be created or destroyed at will. You had to be special to become an Eternal. Andrew Harlan was special. Until he committed the one unforgivable sin -- falling in love. Eternals weren't supposed to have feelings. But Andrew could not deny the sensations that were struggling within him. He knew he could not keep this secret forever. And so he began to plan his escape, a plan that changed his own past ... and threatened Eternity itself.
Del Rey 2020 221 pages

An offer from a gentleman

Quinn, Julia
"Sophie Beckett never dreamed she'd be able to sneak into Lady Bridgerton's famed masquerade ball-or that "Prince Charming" would be waiting there for her! Though the daughter of an earl, Sophie has been relegated to the role of servant by her disdainful stepmother. But now, spinning in the strong arms of the debonair and devastatingly handsome Benedict Bridgerton, she feels like royalty. Alas, she knows all enchantments must end when the clock strikes midnight. Ever since that magical night, a radiant vision in silver has blinded Benedict to the attractions of any other-except, perhaps, this alluring and oddly familiar beauty dressed in housemaid's garb whom he feels compelled to rescue from a most disagreeable situation. He has sworn to find and wed his mystery miss, but this breathtaking maid makes him weak with wanting her. Yet, if he offers her his heart, will Benedict sacrifice his only chance for a fairy-tale love" -- Front jacket flap.
Avon, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 2021 453 pages

The girl with the make-believe husband

Quinn, Julia
"While you were sleeping ... With her brother Thomas injured on the battlefront in the Colonies, orphaned Cecilia Harcourt has two unbearable choices: move in with a maiden aunt or marry a scheming cousin. Instead, she chooses option three and travels across the Atlantic, determined to nurse her brother back to health. But after a week of searching, she finds not her brother but his best friend, the handsome officer Edward Rokesby. He's unconscious and in desperate need of her care, and Cecilia vows that she will save this soldier's life, even if staying by his side means telling one little lie ... I told everyone I was your wife When Edward comes to, he's more than a little confused. The blow to his head knocked out three months of his memory, but surely he would recall getting married. He knows who Cecilia Harcourt is--even if he does not recall her face--and with everyone calling her his wife, he decides it must be true, even though he'd always assumed he'd marry his neighbor back in England. If only it were true ... Cecilia risks her entire future by giving herself--completely--to the man she loves. But when the truth comes out, Edward may have a few surprises of his own for the new Mrs. Rokesby."--Provided by publisher.
Avon Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 2017-05-30 291 pages

The matzah ball

Meltzer, Jean
"Oy! to the world. Rachel Rubenstein-Goldblatt is a nice Jewish girl with a shameful secret: she loves Christmas. For a decade she’s hidden her career as a Christmas romance novelist from her family. Her talent has made her a bestseller even as her chronic illness has always kept the kind of love she writes about out of reach. But when her diversity-conscious publisher insists she write a Hanukkah romance, her well of inspiration suddenly runs dry. Hanukkah’s not magical. It’s not merry. It’s not Christmas. Desperate not to lose her contract, Rachel’s determined to find her muse at the Matzah Ball, a Jewish music celebration on the last night of Hanukkah, even if it means working with her summer camp archenemy—Jacob Greenberg. Though Rachel and Jacob haven’t seen each other since they were kids, their grudge still glows brighter than a menorah. But as they spend more time together, Rachel finds herself drawn to Hanukkah—and Jacob—in a way she never expected. Maybe this holiday of lights will be the spark she needed to set her heart ablaze" -- back cover.
Piatkus 2021-09-28 403 pages

Eight white nights

Aciman, André
A man in his late twenties goes to a large Christmas party in Manhattan where a woman introduces herself with three words: "I am Clara." Over the following seven days, they meet every evening at the same cinema. Overwhelmed yet cautious, he treads softly and won't hazard a move. The tension between them builds gradually, marked by ambivalence, hope, and distrust. They move both closer together and farther apart, culminating on New Year's Eve in a final scene charged with magic and the promise of renewal.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2010-02-02 360 pages

On Love

de Botton, Alain
"A man and a woman meet over casual conversation on a flight from Paris to London, and so begins a love story--from fist kiss to first argument, elation to heartbreak, and everything in between. Each stage of the relationship is illuminated with starling clarity, as de Botton explores emotions often felt but rarely understood. Now, in tandem with the arrival of The Course of Love--de Botton's first novel in twenty years and one about mature love--we celebrate the timeless debut about young love that serves as The Course of Love's precursor and companion."--
Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press 2006-01-06 194 pages

Kissing kosher

Meltzer, Jean
"Avital Cohen isn't wearing underpants--woefully, for unsexy reasons. Chronic pelvic pain has forced her to sideline her photography dreams and her love life. It's all she can do to manage her family's kosher bakery, Best Babka in Brooklyn, without collapsing. She needs hired help. And distractingly handsome Ethan Lippmann seems the perfect fit. Except Ethan isn't there to work--he's undercover, at the behest of his ironfisted grandfather. Though Lippmann's is a household name when it comes to mass-produced kosher baked goods, they don't have the charm of Avital's bakery. Or her grandfather's world-famous pumpkin spice babka recipe. As they bake side by side, Ethan soon finds himself more interested in Avital than in stealing family secrets, especially as he helps her find the chronic pain relief--and pleasure--she's been missing. But perfecting the recipe for romance calls for leaving out the lies...even if coming clean means risking everything"--
Mira 2023 412 pages

Closer

Marber, Patrick
New York Dram Critc's Circle Award for Best Foreign Play Evening Standard Award for Best Comedy London Critics' Circle Award for Best Play Time Out Award for Best West End Play The award-winning play of love and betrayal that was the inspiration for Mike Nichols' acclaimed film of the same name and starring Julia Roberts, Jude Law, Natalie Portman, and Clive Own. In Closer , Patrick Marber has created a brilliant exploration into the brutal anatomy of modern romance, where a quartet of strangers meet, fall in love, and become caught up in a web of sexual desire and betrayal. Closer is being hailed as one of the best new plays of the nineties, and as the London Observer noted, it "has wired itself into the cultural vocabulary in a way that few plays have ever done."
Grove Press 1999 123 pages

Mr. Perfect on paper: a novel

Meltzer, Jean
"As the creator and CEO of the popular Jewish dating app J-Mate, matchmaker Dara Rabinowitz knows the formula for lasting love--at least, for everyone else. When it comes to her own love life, she's been idling indefinitely. Until her beloved bubbe shares Dara's checklist for "The Perfect Jewish Husband" on national television and charming news anchor Chris Steadfast proposes they turn Dara's search into must-see TV. As a non-Jewish single dad, Chris doesn't check any of Dara's boxes. But her hunt for Mr. Perfect is the ratings boost his show desperately needs. If only Chris could ignore his own pesky attraction to Dara--a task much easier said than done when Dara starts questioning if "perfect on paper" can compete with how hard she's falling for Chris"--
Mira 2022 399 pages

Work mate marry love: how machines shape our human destiny

Spar, Debora L.
A crucial guide to life before—and after—Tinder, IVF, and robots. What will happen to our notions of marriage and parenthood as reproductive technologies increasingly allow for newfangled ways of creating babies? What will happen to our understanding of gender as medical advances enable individuals to transition from one set of sexual characteristics to another, or to remain happily perched in between? What will happen to love and sex and romance as our relationships migrate from the real world to the Internet? Can people fall in love with robots? Will they? In short, what will happen to our most basic notions of humanity as we entangle our lives and emotions with the machines we have created? In Work Mate Marry Love , Harvard Business School professor and former Barnard College president Debora L. Spar offers an incisive and provocative account of how technology has transformed our intimate lives in the past, and how it will do so again in the future. Surveying the course of history, she shows how marriage as we understand it resulted from the rise of agriculture, and that the nuclear family emerged with the industrial revolution. In their day, the street light, the car, and later the pill all upended courtship and sex. Now, as we enter an era of artificial intelligence and robots, how will our deepest feelings and attachments evolve? In the past, the prevailing modes of production produced a world dominated by heterosexual, mostly-monogamous, two-parent families. In the future, however, these patterns are almost certain to be reshaped, creating entirely new norms for sex and romance, and for the construction of families and the raising of children. Steering clear of both techno-euphoria and alarmism, Spar offers a bold and inclusive vision of how our lives might be changed for the better.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2021-08-17 384 pages

Write your own fairy tale: the new rules for dating, relationships, and finding love on your terms

Flicker, Siggy
"Smart and sassy relationship expert Siggy Flicker is your new fairy godmother. Having matched more than a thousand couples and embraced her own second chance at love, she knows finding a prince is no picnic. Now she's sharing the keys to building a fairy-tale romance, beginning with a honest assessment of what you really want to be happy. To help readers create the healthy, lasting relationships they deserve, Siggy is sharing her honest, empowering advice, including: Define the relationship you want. Set an intention and true love will follow. Forget what looks good "on paper." Sure he's Mr. Right, but is he right for you? Take a break from your dating rut with a Dating Detox. Step back and reevaluate your dating behavior. Learn how to make the most of the first five minutes. First impressions are important, so learn to send the right signals. Happily ever after means forever. Continue to work hard to keep your relationship strong and passionate. In Write Your Own Fairy Tale, readers will get a tried-and-true comprehensive guide to the first six months of dating and Siggy's exclusive plan to get over heartbreak ensuring you'll get from agony to over it in just six simple steps. Featuring practical exercises, real-life success stories, and lessons Siggy learned the hard way, Write Your Own Fairy Tale is a wake-up call for everyone looking for love--and a guide for making sure you get the happiness you truly deserve"--
New American Library 2015-09-29 226 pages

A courtship after marriage: sexuality and love in Mexican transnational families

Hirsch, Jennifer S.
" A Courtship After Marriage places sex and marriage at the heart of modernity's making. Hirsch's innovative study of marriage-making in transnational Mexican families offers a fascinating look at the opportunities cross-border migration provides for reconstructing gender and rediscovering pleasure. This ambitious, well-crafted book speaks to anthropologists, demographers, and public health specialists, while transcending the divides between them."—Susan Greenhalgh, author of Under the Medical Gaze: Facts and Fictions of Chronic Pain "Jennifer Hirsch is one of the new wave in demographic scholars that takes culture seriously. Her book is a model of engaged, policy-relevant scholarship that achieves its warrant through deep contextualization in the everyday experience of its subjects. Beautifully written, rigorously analyzed, and almost novelistic in its nuance and detail, this study of marriage, migration, and fertility puts the people back into demography and makes one of the most powerful contributions to policy-relevant social science that I have seen in a long time. A work of beauty, sensitivity, and scholarship that sets a new standard for all that follows."—Tom Fricke, author of Himalayan Households: Tamang Demography and Domestic Processes "In this engagingly written and keenly observed ethnography of Mexican marriages in Atlanta and in small Mexican towns, Jennifer Hirsch brings love, sex and romance to Mexican immigration scholarship, and presents a compelling case for the rise of companionate marriages and ideals of spousal intimacy. This book will appeal to anyone interested in gender studies, immigrant families and the social and cultural contexts of fertility."—Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, author of Domestica: Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence "A groundbreaking study. Gracefully written, yet at the same time rigorously argued, this book reminds us of the poetry and dignity that can be found in ordinary lives and of the dreams and aspirations that sustain human agency even in the face of severe social and economic constraints. This is a major contribution to our understanding of migration, gender, sexuality, and social change in contemporary life and a model for engaged social research at its very best."—Richard Parker, author of Bodies, Pleasures and Passions "Hirsch has written a superb, insightful, and original study of Mexican migrants and the challenges of marital devotion and separation they face across time and space. Exemplary in its detail and rigor, Courtship brings us into the lives of men and women in Georgia and Jalisco, shows us the risks they take to create modern forms of intimacy, and reconceptualizes how we should view sexualized companionship, procreation, and engendered pleasures. This book will become a gold standard ethnography in medical anthropology, public health, and transnational migration studies."—Matthew C. Gutmann, author of The Romance of Democracy: Compliant Defiance in Contemporary Mexico "Hirsch’s engaging analysis of gender relations among immigrant Mexicans in Atlanta and in the Mexican community from which they come, shows how migration affects women's and men's roles, the place of sexuality in building marital intimacy, struggles over contraceptive use, and power relations in the couple. Using detailed ethnographic examples, she examines the trend toward companionate couplehood, and demonstrates both struggles and triumphs as young Mexicans and Mexican-Americans strive to create marriages that combine the strengths of traditional respect-based bonds with the advantages of new relationships built on trust."—L.A. Rebhun, author of The Heart Is Unknown Country: Love in the Changing Economy of Northeast Brazil
University of California Press 2003-08 376 pages

Hotel Cuba: a novel

Hamburger, Aaron
Fleeing the chaos of World War I and the terror of the Soviet Revolution, practical, sensible Pearl Kahn and her lovestruck, impulsive younger sibling Frieda sail for America to join their sister in New York. But discriminatory new immigration laws bar their entry, and the young women are turned back at Ellis Island. With few options, Pearl and Frieda head for Havana, Cuba, convinced they will find a way to overcome this setback. At first, life in big-city Prohibition-era Havana is overwhelming, like nothing Pearl and Frieda have ever experienced--or could have ever imagined in the rural shtetl where they grew up. As the sisters begin to adjust, their plans for going to America together become complicated. Frieda falls for the not-so-dreamy man of her dreams while Pearl's life opens up unexpectedly, offering her a taste of freedom and heady romance, and an opportunity to build a future on her own terms. Though to do so, she must confront her past and the shame she has long carried. A heartbreaking, epic family story, Hotel Cuba explores the profound courage of two women displaced from their home who strive to create a new future in an enticing and dangerous world far different from anything they have ever known.
Harper Perennial 2023-05-02 400 pages

Sexual misconduct of the middle classes

Moscovitch, Hannah
"The archetypal student-teacher romance is cleverly turned on its head for the post-#MeToo era in this striking new play by the acclaimed author of What a Young Wife Ought to Know and Bunny. Jon, a star professor and author, is racked with self-loathing after his third marriage crumbles around him when he finds himself admiring a student--a girl in a red coat. The girl, nineteen-year-old Annie, is a big fan of his work, and also happens to live down the street. From their doorways to his office to hotel rooms, their mutual admiration and sexual tension escalates under Jon's control to a surprising conclusion that will leave you wanting to go back and question your perceptions of power as soon as you finish."--
Playwrights Canada Press 2021-06 90 pages

Poppy + George

Samuels, Diane
A romantic drama with music inspired by the days of music hall and beyond, from the author of the modern classic Kindertransport. It is 1919. The Great War is over and Poppy Wright arrives in London from the north of England to make her mark in the world. Deep in the heart of the East End she finds work in Smith's tailor and costumiers workshop, where she meets dashing chauffeur George, and falls in love. This is a time of change and opportunity, emerging from the losses of war, when all are questioning who they are and what roles they can play in forging a new, modern era. It's time to ditch the corset and discover who really wears the trousers. Poppy + George is a beguiling romance that draws on a world of female impersonators, popular song and double entendre. It was first performed at the Watford Palace Theatre in February 2016.
Nick Hern 2016 103 pages

Last call

Adler, Warren
"Eighty-three-year-old Harvey Franklin never thought he would find love again after losing his wife of more than fifty years. Spending his days walking his beloved poodle in Central Park, he has gotten used to the idea of being alone. Everything changes the morning he meets eighty-year-old Sarah Silverman. Romance blooms between the two and they quickly become entangled in a passionate love affair. When Sarah reveals her husband's battle with dementia, things become complicated"--back cover.
Stonehouse Productions 2018-09-19 201 pages

Parachutes & kisses

Jong, Erica
Married (again) and divorced (again), Isadora Wing is a single parent with an adorable daughter, an irritating ex-husband, and a startling assortment of suitors: an unorthodox rabbi, a poetic disc jockey, the son of a famous sex therapist, and WASPily handsomest of all: Berkeley Sproul III. Isadora and Berkeley meet at a health club, and he's fourteen years her junior. Of course their affair is tortuous and sexy, but is it love? Or does the stud just want a free trip to Venice, compliments of a famous author? Either way, Erica Jong wrote this romance with "a mixture of eloquence and savage wit as good as anything she has ever written," said The Wall Street Journal.
Signet 1985 478 pages

After the circus

Modiano, Patrick
One of the hallmarks of French author Patrick Modiano's writing is a singular ability to revisit particular motifs and episodes, infusing each telling with new detail and emotional nuance. In this evocative novel the internationally acclaimed author takes up one of his most compelling themes: a love affair with a woman who disappears, and a narrator grappling with the mystery of a relationship stopped short. Set in mid-sixties Paris, After the Circus traces the relationship between the narrator, a young man not quite of legal age, and the slightly older, enigmatic woman he first glimpses at a police interrogation. The two lovers make their uncertain way into each other's hearts, but the narrator soon finds himself in the unsettling, ominous presence of others. Who are these people? Are they real, or simply evoked? Part romance, part detective story, this mesmerizing book fully demonstrates Modiano's signature use of atmosphere and suggestion as he investigates the perils and the exhilaration of young love.
Yale University Press 2015 197 pages

The lifetime love and sex quiz book

Schwartz, Pepper
A Paperback Original. Who hasn't been dizzy with the prospect of romance? Now the most popular feature of Lifetimetv.com helps you put your love to the test. Do you fight fair? Should you stay, or go? Are you a flirt? These are just some of the topics covered in this quiz collection compiled by relationship guru Dr. Pepper Schwartz. The quizzes help readers analyze their feelings and actions objectively and help them improve their relationships using the solid advice offered by Dr. Schwartz. Is It Love or Lust -- Take the test! You're at a dinner party with a roomful of people when your partner tells a joke that falls flat. You: A) Turn a little red for him B) Laugh -- loudly, you don't want him to be embarrassed C) Chuckle, and remember again why you love his offbeat sense of humor (If you answered A, you're on the fence! The best answer is B. Your impulse to laugh despite the fact that your partner's funny joke tanked shows your desire to support and protect the one you love. If you answered C, you love him precisely because he's one of a kind. B & C are the answers of a woman in love, not in lust.) The 50 quizzes cover all aspects of your "love psyche" and are a fun and provocative tool for anyone who wants to be kissed by Cupid's arrow.
Hyperion 2002-06-12 225 pages