Contemporary Romance

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The Kiss Quotient

By Helen Hoang

Stella Lane is highly accomplished at finding patterns in economic data but feels far less certain about dating and physical intimacy. Convinced that she can approach the problem through structured practice, she hires Michael Phan, an escort who accepts the arrangement while carrying financial responsibilities and private ambitions of his own. Their carefully defined lessons soon become complicated by desire, affection, and the widening gap between what each person feels and what each believes they deserve. Helen Hoang’s contemporary romance uses this transactional beginning to examine consent, communication, autistic experience, cultural identity, family obligation, and shame. Alternating attention between Stella and Michael, the novel gives both partners substantial emotional obstacles rather than treating either as the other’s solution. Its central question is not whether love can be calculated, but whether two people accustomed to protecting themselves can trust what cannot be mad…

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Beach Read

By Emily Henry

January Andrews retreats to a Lake Michigan beach house after her father’s death leaves her grieving, financially strained, and unable to write the hopeful romances on which her career depends. Her summer becomes more complicated when she discovers that her neighbor is Augustus Everett, a successful literary novelist and former college rival facing his own creative impasse. To break their stalemate, the two agree to exchange fictional territory: Gus will attempt an upbeat novel, while January tackles a darker story. Their competing research trips draw them beyond easy assumptions about each other’s work—and into a relationship neither planned. Beneath its playful writerly premise, Beach Read explores what happens when familiar stories about love, family, and artistic seriousness stop feeling reliable. Emily Henry combines professional rivalry and romantic tension with a reflective account of bereavement, disillusionment, and the difficult choice to remain open to happiness.

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Seven Days in June

A Novel

By Tia Williams

Eva Mercy has built a demanding life in Brooklyn as a successful writer of supernatural erotica and the single mother of a perceptive teenager. Her carefully managed world is disrupted when Shane Hall, an acclaimed and famously private literary novelist, appears at a publishing event. To everyone else, their meeting looks like an introduction. In reality, Eva and Shane shared an intense, formative week as troubled adolescents—and have carried its emotional consequences into adulthood. Their reunion unfolds over seven summer days, while flashbacks reveal the pain, attraction, and desperate coping strategies that first drew them together. As Eva and Shane reconsider what happened between them, the novel asks whether enduring love is enough without honesty, accountability, and recovery. Tia Williams combines a second-chance romance with an exploration of chronic pain, addiction, self-harm, Black literary culture, motherhood, inherited trauma, and the ways writers transform private experi…

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The Hating Game

A Novel

By Sally Thorne

Lucy Hutton and Joshua Templeman are executive assistants at Bexley & Gamin, a publishing company created by a merger whose unresolved tensions are embodied in their shared office. Lucy is personable, colorful, and eager to be liked; Joshua is controlled, intimidating, and seemingly impossible to please. Their mutual hostility has hardened into a daily ritual of staring contests, mimicry, insults, and strategic victories. When both become candidates for the same promotion, their private contest acquires professional consequences: each refuses to work beneath the other, and losing may mean leaving the company. Yet attraction increasingly disrupts Lucy’s certainty that she understands her rival. Told through her witty, intensely subjective perspective, Sally Thorne’s debut novel turns workplace competition into an enemies-to-lovers romantic comedy about misread signals, vulnerability, ambition, and the unstable boundary between antagonism and desire.

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Red, White & Royal Blue

A Novel

By Casey McQuiston

In Casey McQuiston’s romantic comedy, Alex Claremont-Diaz, the ambitious son of the president of the United States, has long regarded Britain’s Prince Henry as an aloof rival. After a public confrontation creates an international embarrassment, their families and advisers require them to perform a carefully managed friendship. Private messages and reluctant encounters gradually overturn Alex’s assumptions, and the staged reconciliation becomes a secret romance with consequences for a presidential election and the British monarchy. The novel combines an enemies-to-lovers courtship with an optimistic alternative version of contemporary politics. Beneath its banter and public-relations crises, it examines the tension between private identity and inherited duty. Alex and Henry must decide whether protecting powerful institutions is worth concealing themselves—and whether honesty can become a form of political as well as personal courage.

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The Flatshare

By Beth O’Leary

After leaving a troubled relationship, London book editor Tiffy Moore needs an affordable home immediately. Hospice nurse Leon Twomey needs extra money to help his brother challenge a wrongful conviction. Their solution is an unusual flatshare: Tiffy occupies Leon’s one-bedroom apartment at night and on weekends, while Leon uses it during the day after his night shifts. They even share the same bed—at different times—and initially conduct the arrangement without meeting. Household notes gradually become jokes, confidences, and acts of care, allowing an intimacy to develop before face-to-face attraction complicates the agreement. Beth O’Leary’s debut uses this playful romantic-comedy premise to examine trust, friendship, economic pressure, and recovery from emotional abuse. Alternating between Tiffy’s expansive voice and Leon’s clipped narration, the novel shows two people learning that a safe home depends less on conventional rules than on respect, communication, and the freedom to be…

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Get a Life, Chloe Brown

A Novel

By Talia Hibbert

After a frightening brush with death, Chloe Brown decides that managing her fibromyalgia has allowed caution and isolation to define too much of her life. She moves out of her family home and creates a list of experiences intended to make her more adventurous. Help arrives from an unlikely source: Redford “Red” Morgan, the motorcycle-riding superintendent of her apartment building, whose warmth and artistic talent complicate Chloe’s dismissive first impression of him. Their mutually beneficial arrangement develops through sharp exchanges, physical attraction, and increasingly vulnerable conversations. Yet both characters carry wounds that affection alone cannot erase. Chloe must distinguish necessary self-protection from emotional withdrawal, while Red confronts the damage left by an abusive former relationship. Their romance becomes a story about pleasure, autonomy, disability, trust, and the difficult work of being understood without surrendering one’s boundaries.