If the lyrical rush of Henri’s voice and Villanelle’s canal-haunted reveries drew you in, you’ll love the atmosphere of The English Patient. Ondaatje’s sentences glow as Hana tends to the burned cartographer in an Italian villa, while Kip maps danger in the countryside—echoing Henri cooking for Napoleon and the quiet aftershock of the Russian campaign. The novel’s aching love affairs (Almásy and Katharine; Cecilia and Robbie’s wartime counterparts in spirit) mirror the way The Passion braids desire with history’s wreckage, letting intimate obsessions shimmer against a devastated Europe.

If Villanelle’s webbed feet, her gambler’s luck on the lagoon, and the novel’s sly, unruled miracles captivated you, Nights at the Circus offers that same exuberant enchantment. Carter’s winged marvel, Fevvers, struts through music halls and across Europe while journalist Walser tries—and fails—to pin down her truth. Like Villanelle’s shape-shifting allure and Venice’s shifting maps, Fevvers’ legend blurs fact and fable, all in prose that dazzles and a world where desire remakes reality.

If you admired how The Passion counterpoints Henri’s devotion to Napoleon with Villanelle’s Venetian confessions, Atonement deepens that pleasure with shifting vantage points. Briony’s fateful misreading sunders Robbie and Cecilia, then the narrative tracks them through the retreat to Dunkirk and the home front—much as Winterson sets private longing against grand campaigns. The layered viewpoints and acts of storytelling resonate with Henri’s final testament from the madhouse, asking what it means to tell a life truly.

If Villanelle’s Venice—its masked nights, canals, and shifting pathways—felt like a living riddle, Invisible Cities is that sensation distilled. Marco Polo describes cities to Kublai Khan that are all, in some way, Venice: maps of memory, desire, and loss. The book’s crystalline vignettes mirror the symbolic currents of The Passion—the way a stolen heart or a frozen river stands for an inner geography—inviting you to wander meanings as you’d drift a gondola through fog.

If Henri’s obsession and Villanelle’s perilous choices at the gaming tables gripped you for their inner stakes, The Unbearable Lightness of Being offers similarly piercing introspection. Tomas, Tereza, and Sabina navigate desire and betrayal amid the Prague Spring, with philosophy braided through their most private moments—much as Winterson threads meditations on chance, courage, and fate through Napoleon’s marches and Venice’s masquerades. It’s a love story that thinks as hard as it feels.