Described as a literary memoir, Shon Faye’s latest book is both a personal and collective exploration of love – in all its forms. In Love In Exile, the author shows how love is much bigger than the narrow ideals we’ve been taught throughout our lives and how we’re willing to bend and break ourselves to fit them.

Shop Love In Exile by Shon Faye at Bookshop.org, £19

Including inspiring and alternative ways to live, Sophie Rosa dives into the world of intimacy and what it means to have meaningful connections in a capitalist society. This brilliant book includes an exploration of the mental health crisis, gendered violence, family dynamics and ageing to make a case for a more caring and compassionate society.

Shop Radical Intimacy by Sophie K Rosa at Bookshop.org, £14.24

Romantic expectations can shape our lives, especially while growing up. We may envision a life of desire, romance and marriage but what happens when that doesn’t work out? Using Joni Mitchell’s album Blue – which shaped writer Amy Key’s expectations of love – as an anchor, Arrangements In Blue honours a life lived completely by – and for – oneself. Now in her 40s, she sets out to explore the realities of a life lived in the absence of romantic love.

Shop Arrangements In Blue by Amy Key at Bookshop.org, £10.44

Dating feels harder than ever. Why has making connections never felt so simple, yet keeping them has never been so complicated? Rachel Thompson has spent the past decade investigating how we seduce, perceive and treat each other in our post-dating apps era. Weaving the personal with expert research and interviews, this book is a much-needed cry for radical intimacy and paving the way for love beyond the algorithm.

Shop The Love Fix by Rachel Thompson at Bookshop.org, £18.04

After years of feeling that love was always out of reach, journalist Natasha Lunn set out to understand how relationships work and evolve over a lifetime. In Conversations On Love, she turned to authors and experts to learn about their experiences, as well as drawing on her own, asking: how do we find love? How do we sustain it? And how do we survive when we lose it?

Shop Conversations On Love by Natasha Lunn at Bookshop.org, £10.44

Friendships can be the foundation of our earliest memories and most formative moments. But why are they often seen as secondary to romantic or familial connection, something to age out of and take a back seat to other relationships? BFFs is an examination of the power of female friendship, not as something lesser, but as a site of love and intimacy.

Shop BFFs: The Radical Potential of Female Friendship by Anahit Behrooz at Bookshop.org, £7.12

In Single, Nicola Slawson explores being unpartnered in a world built for couples, and how to find the joy in the life that you’re already living. If you are newly single, long-term single, intentionally single or considering leaving your current relationship, this book is for you.

Shop Single by Nicola Slawson at Bookshop.org, £16.14

A book that has arguably shaped and comforted a generation of millennial women, Everything I Know About Love is a memoir packed with wit, heart and love. It’s a celebration of female friendships and the chaos of being in your 20s, and it’s a book I still often recommend and share with the women I’m lucky enough to call my friends.

Shop Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton at Bookshop.org, £10.44