I don’t really want to read about 18 year olds in love. Are there any romance adjacent books (doesn’t need to be full romance but maybe one aspect) with adult characters, like in their 40s?
As a partial answer, T.H. White’s *The Once and Future King*. I’m going to mark spoilers, but it’s a rendition of the Arthurian legends, and a fairly faithful one at that, where the draw is how the story is told, not what the story contains.
Anyway, we start with characters around 20 years of age >!falling in love in the midst of adventure and derring-do, but what the book does is follow those love affairs…that marriage and that love affair…through decades, into complacency, into forgetting that it was ever wrong, into drawing the shattering consequences, until by the end you understand why their love existed and why it mattered for so long, even though it broke a kingdom.!< I like this book because it handles maturing and aging so compassionately.
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As a partial answer, T.H. White’s *The Once and Future King*. I’m going to mark spoilers, but it’s a rendition of the Arthurian legends, and a fairly faithful one at that, where the draw is how the story is told, not what the story contains.
Anyway, we start with characters around 20 years of age >!falling in love in the midst of adventure and derring-do, but what the book does is follow those love affairs…that marriage and that love affair…through decades, into complacency, into forgetting that it was ever wrong, into drawing the shattering consequences, until by the end you understand why their love existed and why it mattered for so long, even though it broke a kingdom.!< I like this book because it handles maturing and aging so compassionately.