Yearning

Wuthering Heights

Emily Brontë · 1847

Heathcliff and Catherine’s love is less a romance than a kind of weather system, destructive and inescapable, and the novel never pretends that wanting someone that much is good for either of them. It remains the gold standard for yearning written without a single ounce of restraint.

Call Me By Your Name

André Aciman · 2007

Aciman writes a single Italian summer of unspoken longing with such precision that the ache of wanting someone you haven’t yet had becomes almost unbearable to read. It is one of the more accurate accounts of desire as its own kind of suffering.

Norwegian Wood

Haruki Murakami · 1987

Murakami’s narrator spends much of the novel yearning for a woman who is only ever partly available to him, and the book’s quiet, melancholic tone never resolves that longing into anything tidier than it actually is. Some wanting, it suggests, just has to be carried.

The Time Traveler’s Wife

Audrey Niffenegger · 2003

A love story built almost entirely out of separation, in which the two leads spend more time apart, across different points in time, than they ever spend together. It turns yearning into the actual structure of the plot rather than just its emotional backdrop.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Rebecca Solnit · 2005

Solnit writes about the blue of distance — the colour of things too far away to reach — and about desire for what we cannot have as a condition rather than a problem. Essayistic and wandering, and it treats longing as something worth understanding instead of curing.

The Art of Loving

Erich Fromm · 1956

Fromm argues that most of us are preoccupied with being loved and give almost no thought to loving as a practice requiring discipline and attention. Written in 1956 and still uncomfortably accurate about what we actually want when we say we are longing for someone.