Editors' Choices: Who Wrote the Book on the Brokenhearted?

The editors of Book World offer a dozen favorites on the pain of love :

Anna Karenina , by Leo Tolstoy. Bored and miserable in her loveless marriage, the heroine of this heartbreaking novel recklessly succumbs to a handsome count -- a suicidal act in 19th-century Russia.

Cold Mountain , by Charles Frazier. Frazier almost manages to make serving the Confederacy and deserting seem like honorable deeds in this deeply moving story of a simple soldier's arduous journey back to Ada, the woman he loves.

Doctor Zhivago , by Boris Pasternak. The good doctor loves his spouse; but even more, he loves the unforgettable Lara, a revolutionary's wife whose fate is inextricably bound to his own.

The Good Soldier , by Ford Madox Ford. This tale of adulterous love among the smart set lives up to its haunting first sentence: "This is the saddest story."

The Great Gatsby , by F. Scott Fitzgerald. In gorgeous, poetic prose, Fitzgerald raises this silly story about a lovelorn gangster into a romantic tale of undying devotion. Desperate to win back his old sweetheart, James Gatz reinvents himself as the dashing host of a glittering party palace. If only Daisy could compete with the inflated image he's been polishing so long.

Light Years , by James Salter. When a marriage ends, "it's like splitting a log. The pieces aren't even. One of them contains the core." Viri, the suave architect who lives comfortably with his family in Amagansett on the Hudson River, loses "the core" to his wife, Nedra, the light of his life who leaves him for another man and another lifestyle.

Love in the Time of Cholera , by Gabriel García Márquez. Florentino has loved Fermina all his life. At her husband's funeral, he comes to renew his pledge of love, and the reader is plunged back into a half-century of exquisite longing.

Seven Types of Ambiguity , by Elliot Perlman. A hard-drinking out-of-work teacher's 10-year obsession with his ex-girlfriend culminates in the kidnapping of her young son. The event's repercussions deeply wound each of the novel's seven narrators. A gripping tale of the terrible mistakes that love -- and what is mistaken for love -- forces people to make.

A Suitable Boy , by Vikram Seth. It's tumultuous post-colonial India, and a husband must be found for Lata. Will the young Hindu girl risk a rupture with her family to marry the Muslim boy she loves? Or will she accept her mother's more practical choice? It takes 1,488 sumptuous pages to find out.

The Sun Also Rises , by Ernest Hemingway. The only Hemingway novel that still seems truly great, this sad, restrained story follows a group of alcoholic expats around Paris and Pamplona after World War I. Can an impotent man find love with a nymphomaniac? Isn't it pretty to think so.

Their Eyes Were Watching God , by Zora Neale Hurston. If anybody deserves love it's Janie, the irrepressible heroine of Hurston's finest novel. It finally arrives in the form of Tea Cake, a rough-hewn rascal with charm to spare. But alas, it proves to be a tragically short visit.

Wuthering Heights , by Emily Brontë. Gothic romance endures in the haunting love story of stubborn, stormy Catherine and wild, dark Heathcliff. This is a classic tale of "what becomes of the brokenhearted who had love that's now departed," made all the more heartbreaking by the fact that Brontë died in 1848, just a year after the book was published.