By Beth Goehring

Ding dong, the cherub’s dead. Good riddance to Cupid, heart-shaped boxes of chocolate, and obscenely overpriced long-stemmed red roses. Savor these exquisite, intimate investigations of complex and heartbreaking love stories and remember that every day is an opportunity to show someone you care.

Not even 40 years old…an incredible career ahead of him…a loving wife…a baby girl. But Paul Kalanithi knew that cancer was going to rob him of all that. So he set to work writing about the present: how to persevere, how to appreciate, how to nurture, and how to comfort and be comforted. His wife Lucy brought this book to life for him after he was gone, giving new meaning to the wedding vow, “to have and to hold from this day forward.” Get the book now.

Beloved radio host Diane Rehm had the pleasure of her dashing husband John’s company for more than 50 years, not every one of them in ecstatic, unquestioning love, by any means. Her honesty about their problems, her complicated feelings about their lives together, and her grief make this a bracing commentary on modern marriage. Like Lucy Kalanithi, she has kept her husband’s voice alive in the fight for death with dignity. Get the book now.

A lost classic by the renowned writer of A Wrinkle in Time, this is on my short list of books that need to be read at least every two years. The depth of Madeleine and Hugh’s partnership, the sincerity of their belief in each other’s unique talents, and their joy in the family they created is so life-affirming that you’ll close the book with a promise to yourself to love harder than ever.  Get it now.

Beth Goehring believes, with apologies to Lorelei Lee, that rather than diamonds books are a girl’s best friend…and a boy’s, a man’s and a woman’s. For more than twenty-five years, through Book-of-the-Month Club and its related clubs, she’s sold popular fiction, mysteries, romances, cookbooks, children’s books, play scripts, behind-the-scenes tales of the movies and theatre, and lifestyle books. She lives with her husband and corgi in Manhattan.