Need a great Valentine’s Day gift? Try these new novels

It might seem surprising that those seeking to become saints make better lovers. But it’s true because true love is laying down our lives self-sacrificially for those we love. Prideful lovers, on the other hand, are gripped with selfishness and refuse to make the sacrifices necessary for loving relationships to work.

These new or recent Catholic novels show the true meaning of love and make perfect gifts for St. Valentine’s Day.

We’ll Never Tell Them by Fiorella de Maria follows a young woman, Kristjana, as she flies to Jerusalem to flee from a relationship in London. Volunteering in a hospital, she befriends an old man who is terminally ill. As she listens to his stories about the troubled life of his mother, Kristjana learns the meaning of love. As the author weaves her narrative between the old man’s past and the young woman’s present, we come to see that suffering and its acceptance are at the very heart of love.

The Awakening of Miss Prim by Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera is a novel set in a village in Spain which will remind readers of the charm of Jane Austen’s England. As the young lady, Prudencia Prim, finds herself immersed, at first reluctantly, in the culture of the village, she becomes enamored of the virtue of the villagers and with the integrity of their intellectual engagement with the challenges of modern life.

Amid a backdrop of steaming cups of tea and freshly baked cakes, she enjoys convivial conversation on literature and on the very meaning of life itself with the mysterious Man in the Winged Chair to whom she find herself increasingly attracted.

Dying for Revenge, Book One in “The Lady Doc Murders” series by Barbara Golder, might not seem very suitable as a St. Valentine’s Day gift, but the romantic subplot adds a Christian heart to this gripping murder mystery. As recently widowed medical investigator Dr. Jane Wallace seeks to discover the killer, she also seeks to recover a sense of peace as she grieves the loss of her murdered husband. Is there room in her broken heart for any new love? This question keeps the reader guessing as Dr. Golder’s quest to discover the murderer becomes complicated still further by the quest for love.

If You Can Get It by Brendan Hodge follows the interlocking lives of two sisters. Jen Nilsson is a high-flying businesswoman whose job for a tech company in Silicon Valley takes her across the world in pursuit of whatever the global corporate culture can offer her. Her sister, Katie, is an aimless wanderer with no ambition and apparently no particular plans for the future. Each of them finds a deeper purpose and the fulfillment of desire in the embrace of love.

Jazz and Other Stories by Dena Hunt is made up of two parts. The first part consists of 10 short stories and the second is devoted to the novella, Jazz. Animated by the Christ-haunted spirit of the author’s native South, it is tempting to compare Dena Hunt’s stories to those of Flannery O’Connor, the latter of which would not normally be considered conducive to the romantic spirit of St. Valentine’s Day. The difference is that Miss Hunt is much softer in her approach to the perennial problems of life, lacking the hardness and harshness that characterizes the grimness and the grimace of Miss O’Connor’s gallows humor.

Yet Miss Hunt’s softness never succumbs to anything even close to schmaltz. On the contrary, she looks at life with the eyes of the Christian realist, full of the sadness and sorrow that accompanies the reality of life in this land of exile and vale of tears. As for this splendid volume’s suitability as a gift for a loved one on St. Valentine’s Day, the words on the book’s back cover will say all that needs to be said: “Not one of the stories is about love, but they are all, in their different ways, love stories.”

The final selection is Wake of Malice by Eleanor Bourg Nicholson. Set in the rural remoteness of the west of Ireland at the turn of the last century, its backdrop is romantic enough. The problem is that strange things are happening after dark on the bleak moors beyond the village. Demonic entities are unleashed by those practicing the wickedness of wicca or its older Celtic equivalent.

In the midst of this murk, we find Jesuit priests and a Dominican exorcist. What, we might well ask, has any of this to do with the spirit of St. Valentine’s Day? The answer lies in the things that the journalist Hugh Buckley and his colleague Freddie Jones discover. They find phantoms, to be sure, but they also find love.

Each of these works of recent Catholic fiction will make excellent gifts for loved ones for St. Valentine’s Day. In addition, they will also help support these Catholic authors and the Catholic cultural revival of which they are an important part.