Love on the Brain

Ali Hazelwood's Love on the Brain centres on Bee Konigswasser, a neuroscientist who lives by a single rule: work out what Marie Curie would have done, and then do that. After years of scraping by on the margins of academia, Bee is offered the lead on a neuroengineering project by NASA, the kind of opportunity that would make those years worthwhile. The offer comes with one complication, because the project is jointly led, and her co-lead is Levi Ward, who made his opinion of her plain when they were graduate students together.

Bee arrives in the laboratory to find that her equipment is missing and that the staff are ignoring her, and she has to work out how much of her old grudge against Levi is really about the past. The novel is a workplace romance set in laboratories and research offices, and it belongs with Hazelwood's earlier fiction about women working in science.

Love on the Brain was published in 2022, following Hazelwood's earlier novel The Love Hypothesis, and it is told in Bee's first-person voice. Levi is described as having made his feelings about her very clear when they were graduate students, and the two of them are expected to run the project together from the same building.