Not just for Valentine’s day: writers recommend their favourite romantic reads

Whether you’ll be celebrating Valentine’s Day with a loved one or wrapped up in a duvet Bridget Jones-style, there’s always romance to be found within the pages of a book. For this week’s newsletter, I asked writers about their favourite romantic reading. And the author of Pity, Andrew McMillan, shares what he’s been reading lately.

There’s something so satisfying about a really good romantic moment in a book – I remember racing though Pride and Prejudice for the first time as a teenager and being absolutely overjoyed when Mr Darcy finally says to Elizabeth: “You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.” In more recent years I’ve been won over by Caleb Azumah Nelson’s intoxicating account of two people falling in love over a hazy London summer, Open Water, and a 1940 poem, Meeting Point, by Louis MacNeice, that I discovered last year when I was asked to read it at a friend’s wedding. I especially like the final verse:

Time was away and she was here
And life no longer what it was,
The bell was silent in the air
And all the room one glow because
Time was away and she was here.

Time doesn’t matter! Everything is glowing! Because love!

Romantic Comedy author Curtis Sittenfeld turns to love poetry when she’s looking for a romantic read, too. “Neither of these is exactly obscure or undiscovered, but it’s hard to beat the poems Don’t Hesitate by Mary Oliver or [i carry your heart with me(i carry it in] by ee cummings,” she tells me.

“Part of the reason they’re so great, or maybe the proof of their greatness, is that to convey why I love them, nothing I can say is more powerful than just quoting from them directly,” she adds.

“Joy is not made to be a crumb,” ends Don’t Hesitate, for example, while cummings’ poem concludes with: “this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart // i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)”

“Either you have ice in your veins, or you’ll understand immediately,” Sittenfeld says.

Meanwhile for Laura Kay, author of romance novels including The Split and Wild Things, it is the love letters of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West that she turns to when she’s looking for romantic writing. Reading them “is to be privy to some of the most glorious flirting perhaps ever”, she says. “Yes, there are beautiful declarations of love but it is the drip-feed early in their correspondence, tentatively and then greedily unravelling their desire for each other,” for example, “I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia,” which is “so utterly compelling”.

When she read them for the first time, Kay remembers “feeling giddy at the prospect of such a flirtation, of such lust and excitement at my fingertips”.

Novelist and poet Joe Dunthorne goes for a depiction of a much wider concept of love for his pick. One of the Submarine author’s favourite pieces of writing about love is James Tate’s Goodtime Jesus. “This prose poem is, for me, a little joy machine, a source of constant surprise and wonder. I do not know how it successfully navigates from skinless zombies to universal love in a few short sentences,” he says, adding that he becomes “filled with warmth and awe” every time he reaches its final line: “Take a little ride on my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.”

I really enjoyed Tash Aw’s gorgeous new novel The South, full of such tenderness and longing. In a completely different way, I also loved Fair Play by Louise Hegarty, which constantly upends and subverts its own conventions. I highly recommend both. In poetry, there’s a lifetime of rereading to be rewarded in Nat Raha’s apparitions (nines) which came out last year, and I was very excited that one of our most exciting independent publishers, Pilot Press, brought out Verity Spott’s latest collection The North Road Songbook. Every two months, a copy of Ludd Gang, a fantastic pamphlet-sized poetry magazine, drops through my letterbox, and keeps my mind sharp on the cutting edge of what poetry is doing politically and linguistically. Copies also go towards helping the Poets’ Hardship Fund, a vital thing in these times.

• Pity by Andrew McMillan (Canongate) is longlisted for the Swansea University Dylan Thomas prize, and is out in paperback on 13 February. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com