Guest post written by Love Letters For Other People author Shaylin Gandhi
Shaylin Gandhi first fell in love with love stories when she started stealing grown-up books off her mother’s bookshelf at the age of ten. By twelve, she’d perfected the art of reading under the covers by flashlight, and in high school, she attempted her first novel. She now writes from the mountains of Golden, Colorado, where she lives with her husband and identical twin daughters. When not finagling words onto paper, Shaylin can be found hiking, scheming up ways to earn another passport stamp, or ingesting enough coffee to power a small city.
About Love Letters For Other People (released 9 December): An emotionally gripping page-turner about heartbreak, old secrets, and second chances—with an unexpected Cyrano twist. For fans of Lucy Score and Mia Sheridan.
We all have those reading experiences that knock the wind out of us—the books that blindside us with so many gut-wrenching emotions that we end up staining the pages with our tears. Yet somehow, those same stories always stitch us back together again. They leave us raw and aching and grateful for the experience.
As both a reader and an author, these deeply emotional romances are my favorite. To me, that’s the point of the genre: we read romance to feel. To be moved. To walk away changed, even if it costs us a few tears along the way.
If you, too, are craving a cathartic tearjerker this season—one that still delivers the kind of happily-ever-after that makes romance so satisfying—here’s a list of books that had me reaching for the Kleenex:
Love Letters for Other People by Shaylin Gandhi
Okay—admittedly, I wrote this one myself. But I did cry while doing it, and lots of my readers have had late-night sob sessions themselves. In Love Letters for Other People, a disgraced mathematician moves back to her rural hometown and falls for a man who gives her beautiful love letters. But what she doesn’t know is that he’s paying her high-school ex-boyfriend (who’s still hopeless for her) to write them. Love Letters for Other People earned a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly and was named an Amazon Editors’ Pick for Best Romance.
Until I Die by Deidra Duncan
This one destroyed me, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s a dark, hauntingly beautiful dystopian romance set amid the ashes of a fallen United States, in which the New American Order has seized power by silencing dissent and enslaving the vulnerable. To stop the spread of their evil, Sophia Reeves has given everything to the Defiance, but now, her general has a new command: become a contact for an enemy officer-turned-spy. For a woman, association with a Blood Colonel is a death sentence. But Lucas Scott may not be the monster Sophia believes…
When We Had Forever by Shaylin Gandhi
OK, full disclosure: I wrote this book, too. Did I cry? You betcha. And the messages in my inbox suggest a lot of other people did, too. When We Had Forever is an angsty, emotional romance about a young widow who discovers her husband was keeping secrets throughout the marriage. In the process of unraveling them, she sparks a forbidden romance with his identical twin brother. But he may be keeping secrets of his own…
Strange Familiars by Keshe Chow
You wouldn’t think a book about a magical veterinary school would tear a hole through your chest, but this book is ready to prove your assumptions wrong. In Strange Familiars, two scholars of magical veterinary science must put aside their loathing to save the world.
I laughed, I cried, I fell in love with both of these characters HARD. And that ending? I’m still trying to recover. First in a duology.
The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley
I read this book years ago and still think about it on a weekly basis. Not only because it gripped me, but because I still can’t figure out why this book works so well. You have to read it to see what I mean—it’s part historical, part time-travel-romance, part fever-dream fantasy that’s so brilliantly constructed the words sing from the page. I wept. I fell in love with the characters and never fell back out. And when it was over, I stared at the wall for approximately 5 business days. The Kingdoms is a time-twisting alternative history in which Joe Tournier, absent any memories, goes in search of his identity. His only clue to his own past? A century-old postcard of a Scottish lighthouse. Joe’s search drives him from French-ruled London to rebel-owned Scotland and finally onto the battle ships of a lost empire’s Royal Navy. In the process, Joe will remake history…and himself.
Beyond the Moon by Catherine Taylor
Not to be cliché, but this book quite literally had me in a chokehold. I couldn’t breathe during the entire ending sequence. Tears were streaming down my face, I was glued to the page, and I don’t think I took another full breath until it was over. This is an achingly beautiful timeslip romance in which a twist of fate connects a young woman in modern-day England with a British soldier fighting in the First World War in 1916.
