Top 5 books for aspiring lovers

Author Natasha Lunn’s latest novel, Conversations on Love, will be released on July 15 and details the author’s investigation into that complex emotion called love. For the book, the author interviews authors and experts in an attempt to pin down love with all its complexities.

Here, Lunn lists her top five books for those on a similar quest and looking for love.

01 All About Love by bell hooks

hooks reminds us love is something to be taken seriously, and this is a beautiful starting point for anyone who wants to learn about it.

01 Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed

Strayed’s life-altering Dear Sugar essays will always be on my bedside table. They make me feel hopeful about the human heart’s capacity to heal, even when it seems broken, and then to find beauty in the process.

03 Love in Colour by Bolu Babalola

If you grow up reading tumultuous will-they-won’t-they romances in which suspense revolves around anxiety, it can be easy to mistake that panicky feeling for love. That’s why I enjoyed this collection; Babalola makes you root for her couples to get together, but she does so without glorifying game-playing.

04 Olive Kitteridge and Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout

Strout’s characters remind me that our individual love stories are small pieces of a bigger whole. And that, as she wrote, “we all love imperfectly”.

05 Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

I chose a poem from this collection, I Have Just Said, as a reading at my wedding. To me, it’s about those moments when you look at someone laughing, and you know – so clearly, so deeply – that you love them. That you are grateful to be alive at the same time as them. And that, somewhere on that journey of life together, you want to remember to say “thank you”.

Conversations on Love by Natasha Lunn is out on July 15 (Viking, £14.99)