Doctor Zhivago
by Boris Pasternak
By the Nobel Prize winner Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago is an epic set during the Russian Revolution as well as a love story. A poet and surgeon, husband and lover finds his life disrupted by war. It alters the lives of many, including Tonya, the gentle woman he marries and Lara, the woman he cannot forget.

Like Water for Chocolate: a novel in monthly installments, with recipes, romances, and home remedies
by Laura Esquivel
A #1 bestseller in Mexico in 1990, this charming, imaginative, and just plain fun novel of family life in turn-of-the-century Mexico includes unique recipes at the beginning of each chapter for a variety of traditional dishes. As the youngest daughter in a matriarchial turn-of-the century Mexican family, Tia relinquishes love in order to serve her mother and finds her passion in an ingredient in the food she prepares.

Outlander
by Diana Gabaldon
First in a series that combines time travel, humor, and passionate romance. While Claire and her husband visit an ancient stone monument in 1945 England, Claire is suddenly thrust back to the year 1743--and becomes torn between two vastly different men in two irreconcilable lives. Sequels: Dragonfly in Amber, Voyager, Drums of Autumn, and The Fiery Cross.

Sundays at Tiffany's
by James Patterson
As a little girl, Jane has no one. Her mother, the powerful head of a Broadway theater company, has no time for her. She does have one friend-a handsome, comforting, funny man named Michael-but only she can see him. Years later, Jane is in her thirties and just as alone as ever. Then she meets Michael again-as handsome, smart and perfect as she remembers him to be. But not even Michael knows the reason they've really been reunited.

The Calligrapher
by Edward Docx
Two passions animate Jasper Jackson's life. The twentysomething Brit is a dedicated womanizer, unable and unwilling to ever commit, and always on the hunt. Jasper is also a talented calligrapher, hard at work these days transcribing Songs and Sonnets, by John Donne (another serial seducer), for a wealthy client. After a particularly ugly breakup with his current girlfriend, Jasper falls truly, madly, and deeply in love for the first time, with beautiful, sexy, and intelligent Madeleine, who seems to reciprocate his feelings yet is at the same time somehow elusive and evasive. The novel ends with two delicious plot twists, and Jasper, to his sorrow, learns what it's like to be the one in a relationship who loves the most.

The Eyre Affair: a novel
by Jasper Fforde
England is a virtual police state where an aunt can get lost (literally) in a Wordsworth poem, militant Baconians heckle performances of Hamlet, and forging Byronic verse is a punishable offense. All this is business as usual for Thursday Next, renowned Special Operative in literary detection, until someone begins kidnapping charactersfrom works of literature. When Jane Eyre is plucked from the pages of Bronte's novel, Thursday must track down the villain and enter the novel herself to avert a heinous act of literary homicide.

The Last Time They Met: a novel
by Anita Shreve
In a novel about love and forgiveness by the bestselling author of The Pilot's Wife and Fortune's Rocks, a man and a woman sustain a lifelong passionate relationship even though they have been together only three times.