Romances that earn the swoon
15 books
Two writers in beach houses next door swap genres for the summer. The romance is the contract; the falling-in-love is what happens despite it.
A literary agent and a small-town editor — the trope where the city woman comes to the country and stays. Henry writes the sister relationship at the centre as the actual love story.
Ten years of summer trips and the year they stopped. Henry's most-of-the-novel-is-flashback structure earns every payoff.
Two assistants at a publishing house play increasingly elaborate war games against each other. Thorne wrote the modern enemies-to-lovers handbook.
The American First Son and the Prince of Wales hate each other publicly until they don't privately. McQuiston writes the secret-relationship pages with the grin still on.
An autistic econometrician hires a male escort to teach her how to be in a relationship. Hoang writes neurodivergent desire with specificity, not metaphor.
A grad student fake-dates her hot Stanford professor to convince her best friend she's moved on. Hazelwood went viral for a reason.
A forty-year-old gallerist meets the twenty-year-old lead of her daughter's favourite boy band. Lee respects every piece of the situation.
A British army nurse at the end of WWII walks into a stone circle in Scotland and out into 1743. The first marriage is in the present; the great one is in the past.
A baseball player whose marriage is failing joins a secret men's-only Regency-romance reading club to learn how to win his wife back. Adams keeps the joke and the heart at the same volume.
A chronically ill computer geek hires the building's tattooed superintendent to help her live a little. Hibbert writes desire with disability the way other writers write breakfast — like it's normal.
A small woman with brittle bones is forced into the dragon-rider war college. Romantasy that actually delivers on both halves of the word.
A human huntress is taken across the wall by a fae lord whose mask doesn't come off. Maas wrote the modern fae romance template the rest of the genre is now answering.
A grieving copywriter inherits her aunt's New York apartment and discovers the previous tenant is in 2017. A time-slip romance that earns its melancholy.
Two strangers whose partners ran off together share a Michigan apartment for a summer. Henry writes the ridiculous setup with the care of a literary novel.
