Nadine is a high-powered corporate executive with a demanding job, a packed schedule, and exactly zero time for romance — which makes it particularly inconvenient that she needs a fake boyfriend for her company’s marketing convention. The most available candidate: the impressively built young stripper she met at her sister’s bachelorette party. It’s not ideal. It’ll have to do. 💼
Lily Zante writes romantic comedy with a sharp sense of the comic potential in class and lifestyle mismatches, and Nadine and Ethan are a genuinely funny pairing. She sets goals; he sets hearts on fire. She manages quarterly projections; he manages to look like that. The five-years-younger dynamic adds an extra layer of comedy to an arrangement that was already operating well outside Nadine’s comfort zone. 😂
The one-weekend premise — overnight hotel stay, one convention, strictly professional — is the rom-com setup at its most efficient, and Zante squeezes every drop of awkward, charged, increasingly complicated comedy out of it. Ethan turns out to be considerably more than his job description suggests, which is its own kind of problem for a woman who had this all mapped out. 💫
Why this delights from page one: A fizzy, fast-moving romantic comedy built on the fake boyfriend premise and powered by a heroine who is spectacularly out of her depth and a hero who is enjoying every moment of it. Perfect for fans of Rachel Gibson and Victoria Dahl who want their contemporary rom-coms funny, a little bit scandalous, and absolutely impossible to read with a straight face.
Elizabeth Hanson has one plan and one deadline: find a worthy match in London before her parents force her into marriage with the deeply unsuitable Lord Dudley. She is a woman of intelligence and spirit operating in a world that prefers its women decorative and compliant, and she has no intention of accepting that arrangement quietly. Then she meets Christopher Montgomery, who is infuriating in ways she can’t quite categorize — and interesting in ways she wasn’t expecting. 🌹
Abigail Agar writes Victorian historical romance with a heroine-forward sensibility that gives the genre’s conventions fresh energy. Elizabeth is genuinely spirited rather than merely described as such, and her verbal sparring with Christopher has the snap of two equally matched intelligences who haven’t yet admitted what the sparring is actually about. The Victorian setting is rendered with enough period detail to feel authentic without overwhelming the story. 🏰
Christopher’s backstory — a widower who had concluded that his emotional life was essentially over — gives the romance a secondary layer of poignancy, and the threat from the man who arrives from his past raises the stakes precisely when the novel needs them raised. Agar paces the external and internal conflicts well, keeping both in play until the final pages. 📖
What makes this special: A warm, spirited Victorian romance featuring a heroine determined to choose her own future and a hero who had stopped believing he had one — with sharp dialogue, genuine period atmosphere, and a central relationship that earns its happy ending. Perfect for fans of Grace Burrowes and Eloisa James who want their historical heroines clever, their heroes redeemable, and their love stories worth the obstacles.
She swore she’d never go back to Witch Haven. Magic betrayed her, her reputation is in ruins, and the cursed village she grew up in holds nothing but painful history. But her wicked stepmother left behind a mess that needs cleaning up, and she’s the only one available to do it. So back she goes — powers flickering, head down, planning to sort things out and disappear. Witch Haven has other ideas. 🔮
K.E. O’Connor has built a paranormal cozy world with genuine character: the Magic Council is watching, the gnomes are sharpening their axes with specific intent, and the village itself seems to exert a kind of gravitational pull that makes leaving considerably harder than arriving. The returning-outcast premise gives the series opener a built-in emotional backstory — the lost friends, the old familiars, the history that the protagonist can’t walk back into without being changed by it. 🌙
The tone is exactly right for the subgenre: there’s genuine menace in the background, but the voice is witty and the world-building has the kind of inventive specificity — axe-wielding gnomes on a hit list is a very particular kind of threat — that makes paranormal cozy mystery so compulsively readable when it’s done well. 🧙♀️
What makes this irresistible: A fun, atmospheric paranormal cozy mystery set in a magical village that doesn’t let its prodigal daughters leave easily — with a heroine whose powers are unreliable, whose enemies are numerous, and whose past is very much still present. Perfect for fans of Molly Harper and Juliet Blackwell who want their witch fiction funny, fast-paced, and populated with the kind of magical community you’d happily spend a whole series in.
So Old, So Young
Five parties over twenty years. Six college friends who believed the friendship would hold regardless of what else changed. Grant Ginder’s new novel follows Marco and Mia, Sasha and Theo, Richie and Adam from East Village apartment parties through destination weddings, fortieth birthdays, and suburban backyard barbecues — charting the ways people grow toward each other and away, sometimes in the same motion. 🥂
Ginder, the bestselling author of The People We Hate at the Wedding, has a rare gift for writing about friendship with the same emotional complexity that most literary fiction reserves for romantic love. The party structure is elegant: each gathering captures a moment, and the accumulation of those moments over two decades creates something that feels genuinely true to how adult friendships actually work — held together by history, strained by change, occasionally broken by things no one saw coming. 🎉
The Millennial generation’s particular discontents — the gap between the lives they imagined at twenty-two and the lives they’re actually living — are handled with warmth rather than condescension, and the comedy never overwhelms the genuine sadness that runs beneath it. This is a novel that earns its moving moments precisely because it doesn’t reach for them cheaply. 💫
What makes this essential: A generation-defining novel about the friendships that shape us, the parties that mark time, and the slow, surprising ways love — platonic and otherwise — shifts into something unrecognizable and essential. Perfect for fans of Taffy Brodesser-Akner and Curtis Sittenfeld who want their literary fiction funny, honest, and genuinely heartbreaking in the best possible way.
She has always been the good girl — dutiful mafia daughter, rule-follower, peacekeeper. When her father’s dangerous entanglements put everything at risk, she goes looking for help from the one man powerful enough to provide it. Vaughn Bancroft is precisely what his reputation suggests: a demon in a three-piece suit, brilliant and brutal, completely uninterested in the concept of safe. His first advice to her is to run. She doesn’t run. 🖤
Jagger Cole writes dark romance with a confident command of the genre’s tension mechanics — the world of power and control that Vaughn inhabits is rendered with atmosphere and menace, and the dynamic between the two protagonists has the dangerous charge that makes this subgenre so compulsive. She enters his world believing she can manage the arrangement. She is wrong, and Cole takes considerable pleasure in showing exactly how wrong. 🥀
The novel’s real hook is the internal transformation — what happens to someone who believes they are fundamentally good when they discover a capacity for darkness they didn’t know they had. It gives the romance a psychological dimension beyond the standard push-pull, and the heroine’s growing self-knowledge is as interesting as the central relationship. 🕯️
What makes this irresistible: A darkly atmospheric mafia romance that pairs a ruthless, magnetic anti-hero with a heroine discovering that she may not be as different from him as she thought — with maximum tension and a slow-burn that earns every degree of heat it generates. Perfect for fans of Penelope Douglas and Ker Dukey who want their dark romance genuinely dark and psychologically complex.
She survived foster care and a high school that doubled as a gang recruitment pipeline. Now she has a full scholarship to Hannaford Prep — one of the most exclusive schools in the country — and every intention of keeping her head down, getting her education, and getting out. This plan lasts approximately no time at all before she’s attracted the wrong attention from the richest boy in school, infuriated the hottest, and been publicly humiliated in front of her favorite rock idol. 🎓
J. Bree is a wildly popular author in the new adult and why-choose romance space, and Just Drop Out delivers the formula she’s perfected: a fiercely resilient heroine whose toughness is earned rather than performed, an elite setting where the cruelty has a very specific social texture, and a group of powerful boys whose antagonism is clearly covering something considerably more complicated. The bully romance dynamics are deployed with confidence. 🔥
The series opens with maximum conflict and minimum resolution — this is a first book designed to hook readers into wanting the next one, and it does that job extremely well. Ash, Harley, and Blaise are sufficiently distinct as antagonists to make the eventual pivot feel genuinely interesting rather than merely inevitable. 💥
What makes this irresistible: A compulsively readable new adult romance that drops a scholarship girl from the wrong side of everything into the most vicious social ecosystem imaginable — with three enemies who are far too interested in her for any of this to end cleanly. Perfect for fans of Bully by Penelope Douglas and Off-Campus by Elle Kennedy who want their college romance with maximum drama and a heroine who refuses to be broken.