Books like The Book of Love
…because the miracle of Link’s novel isn’t merely its magic; it’s how the magic enlarges grief, desire, friendship, and the bewildering work of being alive. These three novels perform comparable wonders in strikingly different ways.
If you liked The Book of Love, you’ll love these
Not lookalikes — kindred books. Each one shares something essential with The Book of Love, and we tell you exactly what.
Smoky Barnable walks to the extraordinary house called Edgewood to marry Daily Alice, entering a family whose private history may be entangled with the realm of Faerie. Crowley treats enchantment as Link does: not as a puzzle to be neatly decoded, but as something intimate, perilous, funny, and only partly visible.
A World Fantasy Award winner and enduring cult classic, Little, Big has the abundance of a family album crossed with a myth. Its characters love one another imperfectly across years and generations while some immense story gathers around them. If The Book of Love made you want to linger inside its impossible world, Crowley’s masterpiece offers an even larger house to get lost in.
This is the darker, more ferocious choice. After a woman’s death, a father and son travel through Argentina while trying to evade the occult organization that has shaped their family. Enriquez makes supernatural power brutally physical, but the novel’s true engine is protective, compromised love: what parents sacrifice, what children inherit, and how grief can become a form of captivity.
Winner of the Herralde Prize, Our Share of Night has the scale and confidence of a modern gothic epic. Like Link, Enriquez can move from domestic tenderness to cosmic terror without making either feel less real. It is harrowing, politically charged, and enormous-hearted—the rare long novel whose world continues to feel dangerously alive after you leave it.
Jimenez tells a mythic escape story through a dream, a theatrical performance, a chorus of voices, and the memories of people usually left at the edges of epics. The result is formally audacious but emotionally direct: gods and monsters matter, yet so do private jokes, sudden tenderness, family wounds, and the terrifying vulnerability of loving someone.
Readers who admired how The Book of Love changes voices and shapes without losing its emotional thread will find Jimenez exhilarating. His sentences can be brutal, ecstatic, or startlingly gentle, sometimes within a single page. The novel has already inspired unusually ardent devotion because its experimentation never becomes a display case—it makes the central love story feel larger, stranger, and more precious.