St. Valentine is dead; long live St. Valentine. Or long live St. Valentine’s Day reading, in any case. Just because the holiday itself is behind us doesn’t mean you can’t still cuddle up with some tantalizing books. And boy howdy do we have them. Start with Lynn Comella’s study of feminism in the sex-toy business, “Vibrator Nation,” then try Erica Garza’s memoir of porn addiction and Jamie Quatro’s debut novel about faith and infidelity. Romance fans, we’ve got you covered: Alyssa Cole’s latest, “A Princess in Theory,” is “the royal fairy tale of the young year,” according to Mary Jo Murphy.

Maybe you’re agnostic on the whole question of romantic love and its place in the industrial-entertainment complex. We don’t judge, we recommend: You might enjoy “The Friend,” Sigrid Nunez’s comic novel of grief and dogs and unconventional relationships. (Dwight Garner did.) For the rest of you, pull up a blanket and settle in with Lisa Halliday’s “Asymmetry,” a smart and ambitious debut novel that opens with a particularly literary-minded love affair. As my son said the first time he saw “Titanic,” at age 13, “Things seem to be getting very kissy around here.”

Gregory Cowles

Senior Editor, Books

THE FRIEND, by Sigrid Nunez. (Riverhead, $25.) Nunez’s allusive and charming new novel is about an unnamed woman living in a small apartment who inherits, after the suicide of a friend, his Great Dane. The book is about the writing life, sex and mentorship, in addition to pets. Its tone can be comic but is mostly “mournful and resonant,” our critic Dwight Garner writes. “It sheds rosin, like the bow of a cello. The woman grieves for her friend, who was her mentor and, if only once, her lover. His dog soothes her; they sleep in the same bed; he is a constant reminder of the man she misses.”

ASYMMETRY, by Lisa Halliday. (Simon & Schuster, $26.) The first section of this debut novel follows Alice, a 20-something assistant at a publishing house who tumbles into a relationship with a man who bears a terrifically unabashed resemblance to Philip Roth (with whom Halliday had a relationship while in her 20s). The second section transports us to a holding room in London’s Heathrow Airport, where Amar, an Iraqi-American economist, has been detained. The novel is “scorchingly intelligent,” our critic Parul Sehgal writes, and it satisfies multiple appetites. “It’s a clever comedy of manners set in Manhattan as well as a slowly unspooling tragedy about an Iraqi-American family, which poses deep questions about free will, fate and freedom, the all-powerful accident of one’s birth and how life is alchemized into fiction.”