The big romance shelf: courts and dragons, small towns and offices, and every kind of love story in between, from the established names to books published this year. 676 books so far, across 159 series, plus 428 titles with no series listed. This is page 10 of the shelf.
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Lady Freyja Bedwyn has been raised with four unruly brothers and has no patience for the conventions that are supposed to govern a woman of her rank. In Bath a stranger bursts into her room and asks her to hide him, and the stranger turns out to be the Marquess of Hallmere, whose reputation is as bad as hers.
Lord Alleyne Bedwyn is a diplomat who is thrown from his horse during a war and left for dead, and he wakes up in a bedroom of a house he does not recognise with no memory of who he is. The women who took him in have their own troubles, and the man without a past turns out to be useful to them.
Lady Morgan Bedwyn is young, independent and not looking for a husband. Gervase Ashford, Earl of Rosthorn, has other ideas: he wants her as an instrument of revenge against her family, and marriage is not part of the plan. One scandalous night leaves them both with reputations to salvage and an attraction that neither of them wanted or expected.
Lissa and Jarret have agreed to a marriage that lasts five years and no longer. He pays off her father's debts, she looks after his daughter Emma, and both of them stay out of each other's way. Then Emma disappears, and the arrangement they have both been keeping to stops being workable.
On Kacie Peters's first day in a new job, her boss suggests that she has a reputation with men and then instructs her not to make a play for him, since he has no intention of changing his bachelor status. She would have quit on the spot, except that something in Elliot Quantrell draws her to him and makes her want his good opinion. The difficulty is getting it without confirming his worst suspicions.
Maxim Seymour, Marquess of Bradbury, has been stripped of his title and lands and branded a traitor, and he wants revenge on the men responsible. His plan to take a hostage goes wrong, and he carries off Elise Radborne instead, an innocent who proves to be his equal in an argument. The Elizabethan court makes a dangerous place for two people with so much to hide.
Merit is a graduate student in Chicago until a rogue vampire attacks her and only gets a sip before another vampire drives him off and saves her life by turning her. Her rescuer is the master of Cadogan House, and her new existence at a Hyde Park mansion full of vampires means serving a house whose lord expects her gratitude, while someone is still trying to kill her.
Rachel is a Manhattan attorney who has always done the sensible thing, until her thirtieth birthday party, which her best friend Darcy throws for her. That night Rachel sleeps with Darcy's fiance, and has to live with what that means, because she likes him and Darcy's wedding in September is still going ahead. Rachel is also the person Darcy relies on for everything connected to the wedding, which leaves her managing a friendship and her own feelings at the same time. The novel follows the months between the party and the ceremony.
Blandings Castle has acquired a valuable scarab, and Lord Emsworth is not entirely clear how it came into his pocket. The American collector who owns it wants it back, and sends his son to England to steal it. Two impostors are soon in residence, each with an eye on the same prize and no idea about the other.
Alexandra Lawrence is a country girl with no interest in the rules of fashionable society, and she marries Jordan Townsende, the Duke of Hawthorne, a man whose wealth and position have never obliged him to explain himself to anyone at all. Their marriage takes her into London society, where the two of them have to work out what they actually owe each other.
Elisabeth was left at one of Austermeer's Great Libraries as a foundling and has grown up among the grimoires kept there, books that whisper on the shelves, rattle their chains and turn into monsters of ink and leather when something provokes them. She wants to train as a warden, one of the people who keep those books and the kingdom safe from each other. Everybody knows that sorcerers are evil, and that the libraries exist because of the things they made. Elisabeth's certainty holds right up until a volume is destroyed under circumstances that point at her, and the only person offering to help is a sorcerer. Sorcery of Thorns is a standalone about a girl who has learned a rule and then met the exception to it.
Jessi St. James is studying archaeology and gets more than she bargained for when she finds a mirror with an imprisoned Celtic warrior inside it. Freeing him puts her in the way of a group of men who want the mirror and of an immortal who has spent thirteen hundred years waiting for his freedom. The two of them have to stay alive and work out what they are to each other.
Stacy Thompson plans other people's weddings for a living and has seen enough of them to be wary of one of her own. When she meets Max Edwards the attraction is immediate, and both of them then have to deal with the fears and the things they have not said to each other.
Wade Magallen lived as a bachelor with no intention of settling down until Storm Roemer changed his mind, and then something he would not explain made him send her away. Years later she comes back to Laramie with no interest in being sent anywhere again, and the two of them have to decide what to do with the reason he gave her up.
Catherine Enderly is sixteen and on her way to boarding school when she is abducted and taken from England to the coast of Ireland, where she becomes the prisoner of Sean Culhane, a young and powerful man who has sworn vengeance against her family. She meets him with a defiance out of proportion to her size, and his determination to have his revenge becomes complicated by what he begins to feel for her.
Brenna Sloan values her independence above most things and does not find it easy to ask anybody for anything. Michael Donovan has spent his life taking what he wants, and what he wants when they meet is her. He talks her past her objections into a sudden marriage, and the two of them then have to learn to live with it.
Lara had been told that her husband was lost at sea, and the marriage he left behind was cold, formal and unloving, so she had made her peace with being a widow. Then a man walks into her life claiming to be Hunter, Earl of Hawksworth, and proving what he says with private details that only a husband could possibly have known.
When Brent Akerman announces that he intends to close down his chain of fashion accessory shops, somebody has to ask him to reconsider, and Crystal is elected to do it. He is open to suggestions and does not soften his answers, and it becomes clear that he likes her, respects her work and wants to hire her for other projects. It is also clear that he would not mind mixing business with pleasure.
Mack McKinley and his team of GhostWalkers treat urban warfare as a craft, and on the streets of San Francisco he comes face to face with Jaimie Fielding, a woman he was involved with years ago before she disappeared. She has come back as a spy with too many secrets, and a common enemy has brought the two of them together again on ground neither of them controls.
Simon Dure is as cynical about love as Charity Emerson is innocent of it, and neither of them pretends that the engagement is anything other than a practical arrangement. Charity is confident she can meet his expectations of a wife, and he is amused enough to let her try. Then a murder makes their conspiracy far more dangerous.
Amanda Briars is a successful novelist who has reached her thirtieth birthday without ever having been kissed, and she decides to buy herself an improper present: one night with a stranger. The man who arrives at her house turns out to be Jack Devlin, a businessman of considerable reputation, and he is willing to keep the arrangement private only for a price.
Desperate to escape a loveless marriage and the constraints of society, the heiress Sophia Hathaway abandons her groom, packs her paints and sketchbook and takes on a new identity as a governess in order to secure passage on a ship called the Aphrodite. She wants a life of her own, but facing the libertine who would take both her virtue and her gold is another matter.
She is beautiful, exasperating and, in the words of the story, a little hellcat with barnyard manners. Marshal Travis Kincaid has decided that if anybody is going to make a lady of her, it will be him, and he takes on the project even with outlaws overrunning his town. The novel is a western romance.
Samantha Elliot's father controlled her life while he was alive, and his will goes on controlling it after his death: to inherit, she has to move to New York and find out what happened to the grandmother who vanished sixty years earlier. She has never made decisions for herself and now has to make a great many.
The university student Ludwik meets Janusz at a summer agricultural camp and is fascinated yet wary of this handsome, carefree stranger. A chance meeting by a river becomes an intense affair, and after their camp duties end the two spend a few weeks in the countryside, bonding over an illicit copy of James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, before returning to a society that forbids what they are.
Brianna Munro escapes into Scotland at night to avoid the marriage her guardian has arranged for her, and travelling alone and fearing for her safety she takes shelter at Castle Glenloch. She intends to stay for a single night, and then she meets Hugh Christie, Laird Glenloch. She tells him she is a lady's maid running from a vengeful employer, and he can see that she is hiding something.
At a masquerade ball Olivia Jeffries meets a stranger and acts on an attraction she would not have allowed herself in daylight. When she finds out who he is, the problem is not his character but his name: Reginald Westmoreland is the man her father has spent years hating.
Susan Blackstone has been a widow for five years when she sees a stranger across a room and then learns his name. He is Cord Blackstone, the family's black sheep, and he has come back to the company that bears his name for one reason, which is revenge. The business is why he returned, and Susan is the complication he did not plan for.
Poppy Hathaway loves her unconventional family, though what she longs for herself is an ordinary life. Then she meets Harry Rutledge, the enigmatic owner of a hotel and an inventor with wealth, power and a dangerous hidden side to the way he lives. When their flirtation compromises her reputation and the season's gossip starts, Poppy surprises everybody by accepting his proposal of marriage, and finds that she has married a man who will share his passion but not his trust.
Riley Jenson works for an organisation created to police the supernatural races, and she trusts her superiors about as much as she trusts her enemies. Her latest job is to get inside the heavily guarded palace of a criminal who has been experimenting on the gene pool for decades. There is more than one kind of trap in the building.
Gabrielle LaFarge had resigned herself to life as a nun in a French convent, but she is told that she is to marry Philippe St. Cyr, a wealthy plantation owner from the island of Martinique instead. She resents and fears this handsome, moody man whose icy surface hides depths of passion and violence, and although he awakens her to desire she is certain he is incapable of love.
One moment Lauri had been a ballet student living quietly with her aunt in Downhollow, and the next a tall, dark ballet master had walked into her life. Carried off by Maxim di Corte to his Venetian palace, she becomes a slave to the dance, and through him she begins to understand the feeling behind real balletic expression.
To avoid a marriage she does not want, Lily Bainbridge stages her own death and goes to London dressed as a boy. Her plan to live quietly as an independent widow is spoiled by a marquis who is interested in her, and Lily has to work out how much of her invented life she is prepared to give up.
Ever since an accident turned her into a knockout vampire, Elvi Black has been catching her sleep in a coffin, staying out of the sun and giving up garlic. She knows there is more to being undead than what she saw in Dracula, but she cannot ask her mortal friends about proper biting etiquette.
Maggie Graham is the alpha of a werewolf pack living in a hidden valley near the small town of Grundy, Alaska. When a researcher arrives to investigate reports of lycanthropy in the area, her plan is to frighten him off, and the plan runs into difficulty because Nick Thatcher turns out to be considerably more attractive than she had allowed for.
The Kejari is over and almost nothing Oraya trusted survived it. She is a prisoner in the kingdom she was raised to inherit, grieving the only parent she had, and no longer certain what her own blood means. Raihn has the throne and a court that will not accept a Turned king who was once a slave. With the House of Blood pressing in from outside, his offer of a private alliance is the only route Oraya has to take her kingdom back and settle the betrayal she cannot forgive. Taking it means using an old and ruinous power tied to her father's secrets. The second Crowns of Nyaxia book is about what a person will trade for a crown, and who pays for it.
Evangeline Fox is back in a partnership she had every reason to walk away from, because a curse has been set loose and the only way to break it runs through the Prince of Hearts. Their road goes through magic, lost stories and worse company, and neither of them is honest about why they keep going. The second Once Upon a Broken Heart novel takes the bargain out of the first book's wedding and turns it into a journey, where the question is not whether the curse can be lifted but whether either of them can be trusted with the answer. It ends on a choice that the third book has to live with.
The slayers of the Lessening Society have more money, more weapons and more power than they have had in years, and the Brotherhood is preparing for a full attack. One of their number, Rhage, is fighting a battle inside himself: he cannot control the panic that has taken hold of him, and after a serious injury he has to work out what he actually wants.
In the spring of 1984, two high school students in the small town of Oriental, North Carolina, fall in love. Amanda Collier and Dawson Cole come from opposite sides of the town and the difference between their families is not something either of them can ignore, and the years that follow take the two of them into separate lives far from where they began.
Ranulf is the English conqueror known as the Black Lyon, darkly handsome and rich beyond imagining, and a man no woman has been able to win. Then he meets Lyonene, a tawny-haired beauty whose temper matches his own, and the two of them are married after a whirlwind courtship. A web of lies spread by a jealous rival drives Lyonene away from her home and across the Irish Sea, and only Ranulf can undo the plot against their marriage.
Berta grows up hearing everybody exclaim over her little sister Glenna, and somewhere along the way she decides that whatever Glenna is, she will not be. The two sisters become opposites, and the distance between them grows until it has to be faced. The novel is about what caused the rift and what it cost them both.
Khai Diep believes something is missing in him. He feels irritation when people move his belongings and satisfaction when a ledger balances, but not grief, and not love. His family reads it differently, and when he refuses relationships altogether his mother travels to Vietnam to find him a wife. Esme Tran has grown up poor in Ho Chi Minh City and cannot turn down the chance to meet a possible husband in America. She arrives to persuade a man who does not want persuading.
Lara is a princess raised in secret and trained for one job: marry into the Bridge Kingdom and open it up from inside. The bridge is the only safe crossing in a storm-damaged world, and whoever holds it gets rich while everyone else goes without, including Lara's own people. She arrives as a bride and a spy, and King Aren turns out to be nothing like the enemy she was briefed on. As she learns how the bridge actually works and who it starves, the story she was raised on stops making sense. The first Bridge Kingdom novel is a slow-burn political romance about an assassin who has to decide which kingdom deserves to survive her.
Gavin Scott is a professional baseball player with a good career and a marriage that has gone wrong: his wife, Thea, has asked for a divorce, and he is only now working out how much of it he has caused. His friends offer an unusual kind of help - an invitation to a private club in Nashville where athletes read and study romance novels for instruction - and Gavin starts applying what he reads to his own household. Thea, meanwhile, has reasons of her own for being tired of compromise.
On 22 June 1941 Tatiana Metanova turns seventeen the next day, and the morning begins with her older sister Dasha announcing that she is in love and with the radio reporting that Germany has invaded the Soviet Union. Later that day, waiting for a bus in Leningrad, Tatiana is watched by a Red Army officer. His name is Alexander Belov, and he is Dasha's new love.
Iris Scanlon runs the only daytime concierge service for vampires in Half-Moon Hollow, which means letting in plumbers and picking up chilled blood for clients who cannot go out in daylight. Her rules are strict and businesslike until she finds her newest client poisoned on his kitchen floor and has to decide how much of her ordinary life she is willing to disturb for him.
Dev Deshpande has spent his career producing a long-running reality dating show, arranging other people's love stories on camera while his own relationships fall apart. The new season casts Charlie Winshaw, a disgraced technology founder who does not believe in romantic love and has signed up to repair his reputation. On set Charlie is stiff, anxious and visibly unenthusiastic about dating twenty women on national television, and Dev is the producer responsible for making it work. The season is long, the cameras are always on and neither of them is being entirely honest.
The narrator has just moved into a house with her brother and two of his friends, one of whom is Colin Fitzgerald, a hockey-playing student who has decided that she is flighty and superficial. She is not interested in chasing anybody, but the two of them are living under the same roof with an attraction neither will admit to.
Romance is a genre here, not a mood. A book belongs on this shelf when the relationship is the spine of the story rather than a subplot, and the reader is meant to care about whether it works out. Everything else, the setting and the era and the magic, sits underneath that.
That makes this the widest shelf in the library, because romance is written into every kind of world. Two flavours get their own tag rather than their own genre: romantasy, where the romance and a fantasy world carry the book together, and contemporary romance, where the love story happens in the modern real world. Fantasy romance without the world-building weight, historical romance and romantic comedy all belong here as well; the tag is a way to narrow the shelf, not a separate shelf.
Tags are cross-cutting markers, not genres. They have their own landing pages.
Epic quests, grimdark cities, retold myths and a few very stubborn rabbits.
685 booksPrimary genreGeneration ships, dying empires, robots with opinions and one very unlucky astronaut.
536 booksPrimary genreHaunted houses, old vampires, cosmic dread and the odd very bad week.
381 booksPrimary genreDetectives, spies, locked rooms and the people who lie to the police.
599 booksPrimary genreCathedrals, courts, trenches and revolutions, all of it set in a past that is doing the work.
580 booksPrimary genreNovels where the prose carries the book: families, cities, memory and the modern self.
575 booksPrimary genreShipwrecks, expeditions, chases, frontiers and people who should have turned back.
324 books