Shelby Leigh is a food critic, blogger, and chef who has spent years tasting her way across the South developing recipes that are distinctly her own. When a career-defining opportunity arrives — a feature in a world-renowned magazine — she discovers she’s been paired with the man from her worst blind date ever. Zach Wolff makes extraordinary wine at his northern Georgia winery and has an equally extraordinary loathing of food critics. Two weeks, one assignment, and exactly zero interest in cooperation. 🍷

Kathryn Andrews writes contemporary romance with real warmth and a strong sense of place, and the Georgia wine country setting gives The Sweetness of Life a sun-drenched atmosphere that suits the slow-burn tension perfectly. Shelby and Zach are both fully realized professionals with genuine ambitions — which makes the collision of those ambitions considerably more interesting than the standard romance setup. 🍑

The food-and-wine world backdrop gives the novel a sensory richness that goes beyond genre convention, and Andrews uses it to draw smart parallels between the art of pairing flavors and the messier business of pairing people. Each chapter feels like it’s building toward something — which it is. 🌿

What makes this irresistible: A deliciously constructed Southern romance between two competitive professionals who are considerably better at their jobs than they are at ignoring each other. Perfect for fans of Kristin Higgins and Susan Mallery who want their love stories with a strong sense of place, genuine professional stakes, and enough food and wine to make you hungry on every page.

San Francisco’s Most Eligible Bachelor title is, as Alex Vaughn will tell you, deeply misleading. He’s not a bachelor. He’s a widower, a single father, and someone with absolutely no interest in dating — except that there is this one woman. Cupcake Girl. But interest and intent, he keeps reminding himself, are two very different things. 🧁

Sadie Burke has been on a self-imposed dating hiatus for reasons that feel very sound to her, even as everyone she knows — including, apparently, their grandmothers — tries to set her up. She’s firm on this. Completely committed to her romance sabbatical. Except for Mr. Smolder, who she keeps running into, and who is making the sabbatical considerably harder to maintain. 💕

Shawna Renae writes romantic comedy with a light touch and a genuine talent for the push-pull dynamic that makes this subgenre so satisfying. Both Alex and Sadie have real reasons for their walls, which gives the eventual dismantling of those walls genuine emotional weight rather than just comic obstacle energy. The San Francisco setting is warm and specific. ☀️

Why this touches the heart: A charming, funny romantic comedy about two people who have excellent reasons not to fall in love and absolutely no chance of avoiding it. Perfect for fans of Helena Hunting and Penny Reid who want their rom-coms with genuine heart, a swoony single dad, and a heroine whose commitment to her own rules is no match for the right person.

Rowley Knight, Duke of Knighton, has his life in precisely the order he prefers: his estates managed, his siblings managed, Society avoided wherever possible, and marriage nowhere on the horizon. All he needs is someone to manage his young sister and the order he has worked so hard to maintain can continue undisturbed. Enter Emma Lancaster, whose sharp tongue and considerable pride make her the last woman he’d choose to employ — except that she’s exactly what his sister needs. 🏰

Emma’s father gambled away the family fortune, and with her marriage prospects in ruins, she accepts a governess position on the recommendation of her godmother — only to discover that her charge is the sister of the man she most despises. Elizabeth Johns builds her Victorian romance on the satisfying foundation of two proud, intelligent people who are forced by circumstances into proximity and find their certainties about each other slowly dismantled. 🌹

Johns has a gift for period detail that feels lived-in rather than decorative, and her dialogue crackles with the particular energy of people who are too well-bred to say what they actually mean and too attracted to say nothing at all. The class and financial stakes give the romance genuine texture beyond the central will-they-won’t-they. 📖

What makes this special: A wonderfully crafted Victorian romance with a sharp-tongued governess, a duke who doesn’t know what’s about to hit him, and enough witty sparring to carry the whole series. Perfect for fans of Lorraine Heath and Tasha Alexander who want their historical heroines spirited, their heroes worthy of the effort, and their endings well and truly earned.

Miss Beatrice Hyde-Clare is twenty-six, orphaned, living on her relatives’ charity, and has accepted with some equanimity that her social function is to sit quietly with her needlework and not cause trouble. She attends a country house party fully intending to do exactly this. Then she finds a dead body, the magistrate rules it a suicide, and Bea knows with absolute certainty that he is wrong. The needlework will have to wait. 🔍

Lynn Messina has created one of the most charming amateur sleuths in recent historical fiction — Bea is observant, funny, self-aware about her social position, and thoroughly incapable of leaving a mystery alone even when every rule of propriety demands she do so. The Duke of Kesgrave, aggravatingly handsome and equally convinced of his own superiority, provides the series with an ongoing sparring partner whose presence complicates the investigations in all the best ways. 🕯️

The Regency cozy mystery is a crowded genre, and Messina distinguishes her series through the quality of her prose and the genuine wit of her characterization. Bea is not simply a modern woman in period clothing — she is a product of her era who is finding her way around it with intelligence and determination. 🌿

What makes this irresistible: A delightfully witty Regency mystery series opener featuring one of the genre’s most endearing heroines — a woman who knows exactly what Society expects of her and finds murder a perfectly reasonable excuse to ignore it. Perfect for fans of Deanna Raybourn and Julia Quinn who want their historical fiction with laughs, a corpse, and a slow-burn dynamic worth following for many books.

The terms are straightforward: thirty days, one contract, a fake marriage to keep the board of directors satisfied, and absolutely no catching feelings. Sinclair Sterling needs a stand-in wife. His employee needs the money to protect her family. Both of them are professionals. Both of them have been burned before. Neither of them is remotely prepared for sharing a living space with someone this infuriating — or this attractive. 💍

L. Steele writes billionaire romance with a sharp understanding of what makes the fake-relationship formula work: the contract has to feel necessary, the animosity has to feel earned, and the chemistry has to feel genuinely dangerous. All three conditions are met here. Sinclair is cold and controlled in ways that make his moments of warmth hit considerably harder, and the heroine’s determination to keep the arrangement professional makes the reader root for its inevitable failure. 💼

The one-bed trope is deployed with maximum effect, and Steele is smart enough to use the enforced proximity to reveal character rather than just generate heat. The family stakes on both sides give the thirty-day arrangement real weight — this isn’t just a game for either of them. 🔥

Why this grips from page one: A compulsively readable enemies-to-lovers billionaire romance built on a fake marriage that becomes very real very fast, with a brooding hero who doesn’t know what he’s gotten himself into and a heroine who is starting to suspect the same. Perfect for fans of CD Reiss and Penelope Ward who want their contemporary romance with maximum tension and a contract that was never going to survive contact with actual feelings.

It’s New Year’s Eve, and private eye John Justin Mallory has hit bottom. His wife left him for his partner, his business is a wreck, and the mob wants him dead. He’s deep into a bottle of whiskey when his next client walks through the door: Mürgenstürm the elf, who has misplaced his unicorn and needs it back by dawn or his guild will kill him. Mallory takes the case. Things get considerably stranger from there. 🦄

Mike Resnick was a Hugo Award-winning science fiction and fantasy writer with a gift for mixing hard-boiled noir atmosphere with gleefully absurdist world-building, and Stalking the Unicorn is one of his most beloved creations. The version of Manhattan Mallory finds himself navigating is populated by goblins, trolls, cat people, subway gnomes, and ghosts in the Stock Exchange — all rendered with the deadpan matter-of-factness of a Dashiell Hammett novel. 🗽

The result is a book that works simultaneously as a genuine mystery, a fantasy adventure, and a comedy — none of which undercuts the others. Mallory is a classic noir protagonist dropped into a world where the rules have changed entirely, and his stubborn refusal to be impressed by any of it is most of the joke. The demon Grundy makes for a memorably menacing villain. 🌙

Why this deserves your attention: A brilliantly funny fantasy noir that takes the hard-boiled detective genre and drops it wholesale into a magical Manhattan with spectacular results. Perfect for fans of Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams who want their fantasy with a genuine mystery at its center and a protagonist who has seen too much to be surprised by anything — except, apparently, elves.

A young man hangs himself in a frozen, desolate corner of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula — a place locals call Misery Bay. Alex McKnight doesn’t know him, and won’t even hear about it until two months later, when the last person he’d ever expect shows up asking questions. What begins as a simple search for answers in a lonely suicide case turns into something considerably more dangerous. ❄️

Steve Hamilton is one of the most consistently excellent writers working in American crime fiction, and the Alex McKnight series — set against the brutal winters and isolated communities of the Upper Peninsula — has a distinctive sense of place that sets it apart from every other PI series on the shelf. McKnight himself is a former Detroit cop carrying the kind of damage that accumulates over decades of proximity to violence, and Hamilton renders that weight without ever making it melodramatic. 🌲

Misery Bay builds with the patient, relentless pacing that defines Hamilton at his best — quiet and controlled until it isn’t, then suddenly very dangerous indeed. The killer here is methodical and ruthless in a way that feels genuinely unsettling rather than conventionally villainous, and the resolution earns every page that precedes it. 🔍

What makes this essential: A masterfully crafted Upper Peninsula noir from one of American crime fiction’s best practitioners, featuring a protagonist shaped by loss and a case that keeps revealing new darkness the deeper he digs. Perfect for fans of Michael Connelly and John Sandford who want their mysteries cold, atmospheric, and uncompromisingly good.

Lewis Dixon has always painted as an escape — from loneliness, from grief, from the feeling that his work doesn’t matter to anyone. Then the British Museum takes an unusual interest in his art, and Lewis discovers that the fugue-like state he enters while painting isn’t creative flow. It’s magic. Specifically, it’s the ability to enter nine very special paintings created by his great-grandfather — paintings scattered across the globe, each containing eldritch power that someone very dangerous would do anything to possess. 🎨

Kosoko Jackson builds his globe-hopping dark fantasy around a premise that is genuinely inventive: the paintings aren’t just magical objects to be collected and guarded — Lewis has been asked to destroy them all. That central mission gives the novel a propulsive urgency, and the world-building that surrounds it is richly layered without ever becoming overwhelming. The LGBTQ+ representation is organic rather than incidental to the story. 🌍

The emotional core — a recently grieving young man who has never felt particularly seen suddenly discovering he matters enormously, and that the stakes could not be higher — gives The Macabre genuine heart beneath the adventure and the darkness. Jackson has a gift for balancing the spectacular with the personal. 🖼️

What makes this irresistible: A wildly imaginative dark fantasy that combines globe-trotting adventure, gothic magic, and a hero whose journey from invisible to essential is as compelling as any spell he casts. Perfect for fans of V.E. Schwab and Tomi Adeyemi who want their fantasy with queer protagonists, haunted paintings, and genuinely high stakes.

Before Sue Monk Kidd wrote The Secret Life of Bees, she wrote this — the memoir that planted the seeds for everything that followed. When the Heart Waits is the story of a spiritual crisis: a season when life lost its meaning, when the instinct was to escape the pain as quickly as possible, and when Kidd discovered instead the discipline she calls “active waiting” — the slow, difficult, transformative work of sitting with uncertainty rather than fleeing it. 🌿

Published decades ago and still quietly finding new readers, the book has the quality of a classic: it addresses questions that don’t age. What do you do when the self you’ve been living no longer fits? How do you move through a crisis of meaning toward something more authentic? Kidd draws on her experience as a woman within traditional faith, exploring the tension between institutional religion and what she calls the Sacred Feminine with unusual candor and courage. ✨

The writing has the warmth and intimacy of Kidd’s fiction — she is a natural storyteller even in memoir — and the spiritual guidance is offered not as prescription but as honest account of one woman’s particular journey. Readers who come to it from her novels will find its themes illuminating; readers who discover it first will understand why those novels are the way they are. 🕊️

What makes this special: A timeless spiritual memoir about midlife transformation, feminine identity, and the counterintuitive wisdom of waiting — written by one of American fiction’s most beloved authors before she became famous for anything else. Essential reading for anyone in the middle of a season they don’t yet understand.

Nine American pilots were shot down over the remote Pacific island of Chichi Jima during World War II. One was rescued by a Navy submarine. The other eight were captured by Japanese soldiers — and then they disappeared. For decades, the American and Japanese governments cooperated in covering up what happened on that island, sealing the tribunal records and leaving families with nothing but silence. 🛩️

James Bradley — whose previous book Flags of Our Fathers told the story of Iwo Jima through his own father’s experience — spent years tracking down what really happened to those eight men. His investigation took him from small-town attics and classified government archives to Japan and finally to Chichi Jima itself. What he found was a story of extraordinary horror that had been deliberately erased from the historical record. ⚓

Flyboys is not simply a story of atrocity, though the truth Bradley uncovered is genuinely shocking. It is also a story of friendship, honor, and the particular courage of young men flying combat missions over the Pacific. Bradley frames the individual lives of the pilots — who they were, where they came from, what they left behind — with the same biographical intimacy that made Flags of Our Fathers so devastating. 🎖️

What makes this essential: A landmark work of WWII history that reveals a covered-up atrocity with the narrative momentum of a thriller and the moral seriousness of the best historical writing. Essential reading for anyone interested in the Pacific War — and a reminder of how much history governments work very hard to keep buried.