Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss quickly became a sensation when it was published in 2021. Her story of a marriage marred by mental illness claimed the hearts of seemingly everyone who’d read it. No surprise, really, given its wit and tender portrayal of romance, dysfunctional families and sisterly love. It got her shortlisted for the Women’s Prize – and launched the Australian author’s career here in the UK.

Her hotly anticipated new novel, , tells the story of a woman who stumbles across the work of an author she hasn’t read for years – and then forms an intense emotional attachment to her, despite never having met her. It promises to be a raw, bittersweet delve into loneliness, human connection and all the forms of love that sustain us.

But what are Mason’s favourite books about love? Here she shares the five most romantic novels she has read.

Persuasion by Jane Austen

“Since you’ve no doubt read , you don’t need reminding it’s the story of Anne Elliot, who was persuaded at 19 against marrying the young Captain Wentworth. The next eight years Anne spends not-getting over him, but when they meet again by chance, it’s clear that he got over her. Or did he? Maybe he didn’t. So goes the monologue inside Anne’s head as she reads every word and gesture for clues.

“And then that part where Anne and Wentworth are in the same room, she is talking to someone else and Wentworth quietly writes a letter? Exactly. The most romantic single scene ever written, and the reason I include the novel, just so I can remind you of it.”

Panenka by Rónán Hession

“When I started , I wasn’t expecting a love story, this 2021 novel being about a football player, Joseph, whose career came to a spectacular end after one public mistake, and now 50, he’s just found out he’s got brain cancer, to his great grief and the grief of his adult daughter.

“But then he meets a lady of his own age, Esther, a friendly hairdresser, and they become friends. The way their relationship deepens is so beautifully, poignantly told, you long for them to be together; the great peril is Joseph deciding whether to tell her that he loves her because, if she loves him too, their time together will be too short.”

Middlemarch by George Eliot

“Yes, it’s possible can’t be described as a love story since only two of the many characters get their happy ending and I’m only crowbarring it in having read it for the first time, after so many failed attempts, and I just need everyone to know.

“But if the defining element of a romance is two characters separately longing for each other, with no apparent possibility of getting together, then absolutely qualifies. And the intensity of it all is heightened by the central love story being set against two other marriages that are so gut-twistingly miserable, it’s almost funny, when it isn’t tragic.”

84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

“This one isn’t even a novel. It’s a collection of letters, between American Helene, a writer, and a London bookseller called Frank, who she first contacted in 1949 about a second-hand book. It’s also not a romance, but the way their friendship unfolds, their letters slowly moving beyond the topic of books to their own domestic lives, is a kind of falling in love, the platonic just as powerful as the romantic. After two decades, you are waiting for them to meet. Even though the book’s been out since 1970, revealing here whether they do feels like a romantic spoiler.”

This is Happiness by Niall Williams

“Sometimes, there is a line in a novel so precise and perfect, you’re willing to get out of bed and fetch a pen. The line in this 2019 novel about coming-of-age in a small Irish parish comes from the young boy, Christie, quietly observing the beautiful girl he’s in love with, who’s agreed to go to the cinema. I can’t remember if it’s with a stealthy sideways glance in the darkened theatre, but let’s say it is, as Christie thinks, ‘The cigarette and her had their own thing going.’ And this one too, from an older character who lost contact with the love of his life. When asked how long it’s been since he saw her, he says, ‘In the flesh? Near enough 50 years… But in every other way, some time every day since.’”

‘Sophie, Standing There’ by Meg Mason is published on 27 August (Bloomsbury, £20)