Age-gap relationships are on everyone’s lips right now: if you’re hungry for fiction which unpacks the messy business of cross-generational relationships, here are eight novels for you to read: from harrowing narratives about abuse, control and power to more heartwarming stories which accept and embrace the irrationality of desire.
INTERMEZZO, SALLY ROONEY (2024)
Sally Rooney’s fourth novel Intermezzo is a deft exploration of how grief can derail your life, charting the inner lives of brothers 32-year-old Peter and 22-year-old Ivan in the wake of their father’s death. Both brothers are entangled in age-gap relationships: Peter is casually dating 23-year-old OnlyFans model Naomi, while Ivan is falling in love for the first time with 36-year-old Margaret after meeting her during a chess tournament. The novel tackles themes which recur throughout Rooney’s work – miscommunication, intimacy, unconventional relationship structures, the irrationality of desire, and so on – but it’s arguably her most poignant study of the complexities of love, life, and society to date.
A SIMPLE PASSION, ANNIE ERNAUX (1991)
Annie Ernaux’s A Simple Passion blurs the lines between fact and fiction as it recounts the narrator’s experience of a two-year relationship with an older, married man. She knows full well the affair is merely a dalliance that will never last – and yet she refuses to reign in her desires. It’s a powerful read about how the ways in which intense, raw passion can scramble your brain, and Ernaux resists the temptation to wax moralistic about the narrator’s exploits.
LOLITA, VLADIMIR NABOKOV (1955)
Lolita is by no means an easy breezy ‘age-gap romance’ (no matter what the TikTok coquette girls may have you believe). The novel recounts the kidnap and abuse of 12-year-old Dolores Haze, told from the perspective of her captor, Humbert Humbert. It’s a harrowing read which places the reader in the shoes of evil – it’s difficult not to let yourself get carried away with Nabokov’s lyrical prose and inadvertently find yourself sympathising with an abuser. Consequently, Lolita has often been misunderstood as a morally abhorrent defence of child abuse. But in reality, the novel is a sharp demonstration of the ways in which language – and mastery of language – can be weaponised.
VLADIMIR, JULIA MAY JONAS (2022)
Vladimir’s protagonist is an unnamed 58-year-old English professor who is married to John, a fellow academic who teaches at the same state college. The novel opens with John being hit with seven sexual misconduct allegations from former students, prompting widespread calls for his removal. The protagonist’s life is then thrown into further turmoil by the arrival of young, charming professor Vladimir, with whom she instantly feels a spark. Spurred on by the sense that, at 58, she’s losing her sexual power, the protagonist lets herself grow more and more infatuated with her new colleague with alarming consequences.
CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, ANDRÉ ACIMAN (2007)
André Aciman’s modern classic follows the fraught but passionate relationship between 17-year-old Elio Perlman and Oliver, the 24-year-old graduate student who comes to lodge with Elio’s family in Italy in the summer of 1983. The pair spend the majority of the novel tiptoeing around their mutual desire for one another – in part because of the seven-year age difference between them – before surrendering to their blatant sexual connection and embarking on an all-consuming affair which leaves them changed forever.
I’M A FAN, SHEENA PATEL (2022)
I’m A Fan follows an unnamed narrator who becomes entangled with a married, esteemed artist many years her senior after sending him a fan letter. The relationship is blatantly, painfully asymmetrical: she is under his thumb and utterly obsessed with him; he is a serial cheater and narcissist who continually keeps her at arm’s length. The novel uses the relationship as a starting point for tackling other timely themes, from social status, wealth, social media, the art world, and structural racism.
DISGRACE, JM COETZEE (1997)
It’s the fallout from the relationship between middle-aged academic David Lurie and his young student Melanie Isaacs which sets Disgrace in motion. It’s an affair which can’t be described as unequivocally abusive, but there’s still evidently a real imbalance of power in the relationship: on one occasion, David is speaking to Melanie on the phone when he reflects that she is “too young. She will not know how to deal with him; he ought to let her go. But he is in the grip of something.” The affair comes to light after Melanie complains about David’s behaviour to the university, prompting him to flee, disgraced, to his daughter’s farm in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. But Disgrace is not merely a straightforward novel about another unsavoury man getting his comeuppance: it’s also a meditation on power, shame, guilt, and colonialism.
GRETA AND VALDIN, REBECCA K REILLY (2021)
Greta and Valdin Vladisavljevic (“V for Victor, L for lanyards, A for… aneurysm”) are brother and sister: Greta an anxiety-riddled postgraduate literature student; Valdin an astrophysicist-turned-TV host with OCD. When we first meet Valdin, he’s still reeling from a breakup with his ex, Xabi, who recently moved to Argentina (and also happens to be his uncle’s husband’s brother, and many years Valdin’s senior). When the pair eventually reconnect, they’re forced to confront their differences and decide to embark on the tricky task of hashing out a way to make their unconventional relationship work. As the New York Times review put it: “If this novel shows us anything, it’s that love – of family, of romantic partners, of community – is most joyful when it’s without limits.”