Contemporary romance books (tag)

Contemporary romanceEnemies to lovers

Ayesha at Last

Uzma Jalaluddin · 2018

Ayesha Shamsi has put aside her plans to be a poet and taken a teaching job so that she can pay back her wealthy uncle. She lives with her large Muslim family in Toronto, where the conversation keeps returning to her younger cousin, who is about to turn down her hundredth marriage proposal, and to Ayesha, who is lonely and does not want an arranged marriage. Then Khalid arrives in her life: clever, handsome, and just as conservative and quick to judge as she had feared.

Contemporary romanceRomantic comedyEnemies to lovers

Beach Read

Emily Henry · 2020

January Andrews writes romance novels with happy endings, and the man in the next beach house, Augustus Everett, writes literary fiction and thinks very little of hers. Both are broke, blocked and spending a summer on the same stretch of coast, and they were rivals at college before either of them was published. They make a bet: each will write the other's kind of book by the end of the summer. January is also clearing out the house her late father left her, while working out what she now knows about him.

Contemporary romanceFriends to loversNew adult romance

Better Than the Movies

Lynn Painter · 2021

Liz Buxbaum has given her heart to Michael since they were children, and he never noticed her before his family moved away. Now he is back, and Liz intends to get his attention and an invitation to prom, even if that means being friendly with Wes Bennet, the neighbour she has spent years disliking. Wes is attractive and infuriating and he agrees to help, which means spending time together. Liz is also still dealing with the loss of her mother and with the way films, rather than the people around her, have shaped what she expects.

Contemporary romanceRomantic comedyWorkplace romance

Book Lovers

Emily Henry · 2022

Nora Stephens is a literary agent in New York who has been told, in effect, that she is not the kind of woman a romance novel is written about. When her pregnant younger sister asks for a month in the small town where her favourite book is set, Nora goes along with it. The town keeps producing people she did not plan to see, among them Charlie Lastra, an editor she has already clashed with in the city, who turns out to be staying nearby. The holiday was meant to be for her sister.

Contemporary romanceQueer romanceRomantic comedy

Boyfriend Material

Alexis Hall · 2020

Luc O'Donnell is the son of a famous musician who has never been part of his life, and a photograph in the tabloids has just made him a problem for the charity he works for. To repair his reputation, his colleagues decide he needs a respectable boyfriend, which is how he ends up with Oliver Blackwood, a barrister with no interest in being anyone's public relations. The arrangement has an end date, a wedding to get through and two entirely different sets of friends attached to it.

Contemporary romanceRomantic comedy

Bridget Jones's Diary

Helen Fielding · 1996

Bridget Jones is in her thirties, working in publishing in London and writing all of it down: the calories, the cigarettes, the units of alcohol and the resolutions she does not keep. Her year includes her mother's attempts to arrange her life, a difficult situation with a former boyfriend, and a new and infuriating man, Mark Darcy, who keeps turning up. The diary format keeps the reader inside her running commentary, from Christmas lunch at home to parties she would rather not be attending.

Contemporary romanceWorkplace romanceRomantic comedy

Can You Keep a Secret?

Sophie Kinsella · 2003

Emma Corrigan has a job in marketing, a boyfriend she is not sure about and a private list of things she has never told anyone. On a flight she becomes convinced the plane is going down, and she tells the whole list to the stranger in the next seat. He turns out to be the founder and chief executive of the company she works for, so she has to keep working for the man who now knows her most embarrassing secrets, and he is not above using them.

Evvie Drake Starts Over

Linda Holmes · 2019

Evvie Drake has been widowed for a year and rarely leaves her house in a small Maine town, and everyone, including her best friend, assumes it is grief. She does not correct them. Dean Tenney is a former major-league pitcher whose arm has stopped doing what he asks of it, and an invitation to spend a few months in Maine looks like a way to reset. He rents the flat attached to her house, and they strike a bargain: no questions about her husband, and none about his career.

Contemporary romanceRomantic comedy

Get a Life, Chloe Brown

Talia Hibbert · 2019

Chloe Brown lives with chronic pain and has written a list of the things she intends to do about it, starting with moving into a flat of her own. The building comes with a caretaker, Redford Morgan, an artist who keeps his distance, and the two of them get off to a bad start. Chloe needs help with parts of her list, Red has reasons of his own for keeping his life small, and the arrangement between them turns into something neither planned.

Contemporary romanceSports romanceNew adult romance

Icebreaker

Hannah Grace · 2020

Anastasia Allen has worked for years to reach a competitive figure skating team at a California university, and a facilities problem means she and her partner have to share the rink with the hockey team. Nate Hawkins is the captain, focused on keeping his players on the ice, and he and Anastasia get off to a hostile start. Across the season the two of them share a rink, a training schedule and a campus, while an injury to her skating partner leaves her season, and her plans, in the air.

It Ends with Us

Colleen Hoover · 2016

Lily Bloom leaves her Maine hometown for Boston and builds a business of her own, and meets Ryle Kincaid, a neurosurgeon who is direct about how little he wants from a relationship. Then Atlas Corrigan, the boy she knew in high school, reappears, and the choices Lily believed she had already made become harder to hold. The novel follows her through the distance between the life she set out to build and the one she is living, including the pattern in her own family that she swore she would not repeat.

Contemporary romanceSmall town romanceRomantic comedy

It Happened One Summer

Tessa Bailey · 2021

Piper Bellinger's life of fashion, parties and photographers ends when a rooftop party gets out of hand and her stepfather cuts her off. He sends her and her sister to run the dive bar their late father left them in a small fishing town in Washington, where Piper meets Brendan, a bearded sea captain who doubts she will last a week. She is determined to prove him and her stepfather wrong. The bar, the town and the man in front of her all turn out to be more interesting than the life she has left behind.

Contemporary romanceFriends to loversRomantic comedy

Josh and Hazel's Guide to Not Dating

Christina Lauren · 2018

Hazel Camille Bradford talks constantly, keeps a houseful of pets and says exactly the wrong thing at the wrong moment, and most of the men she meets leave. Josh Im has known her since college, where her chaos and his composure were plainly incompatible. By the time they meet again they are friends, and they have a plan: they will set each other up on a series of blind dates and find one another suitable partners, and they will certainly not be dating each other, however much time the project takes.

Contemporary romanceSecond chance romanceFriends to lovers

Love and Other Words

Christina Lauren · 2018

Macy Sorensen is a paediatrics resident with a wedding to plan and a habit of keeping her heart well out of the way. Then she runs into Elliot Petropoulos, the boy who was her closest friend and her first love, and who broke her heart on the night he told her how he felt. The novel moves between the present and the years when they were teenagers, spending weekends and summers reading in a house outside San Francisco. Between the two timelines it fills in what happened to them and why neither has entirely let go of it.

Contemporary romanceWorkplace romanceEnemies to lovers

Love on the Brain

Ali Hazelwood · 2022

Bee Konigswasser has built a career in neuroscience and a rule for living: work out what Marie Curie would have done, then do that. NASA offers her the lead on a neuroengineering project, the sort of work that would make years of scraping through academia worthwhile, with one complication. The project is jointly led with Levi Ward, who made his opinion of her plain when they were graduate students. Bee has a project to run and a deadline to meet, and she has to work out how much of her old grudge is about the past.

Me Before You

Jojo Moyes · 2012

Louisa Clark takes a job as a carer in the English town where she has spent her whole life, looking after Will Traynor, a former banker and sportsman who was paralysed in a road accident. Will has lost the life he had and has no patience for Louisa's cheerfulness; Louisa needs the wage and has no idea what to do with him. What builds between them begins as a working arrangement and changes both of their plans for the years ahead.

Contemporary romanceSports romanceWorkplace romance

Mile High

Liz Tomforde · 2023

Zanders is a Chicago hockey player who has built a reputation as the man opposing crowds love to hate, and he has no plans to change it. The team's new flight attendant is unimpressed by him, so he decides to make her season of road trips as difficult as he can. Stevie has been a flight attendant for years and knows how to handle difficult passengers. The two of them spend the season testing each other on flights, in hotels and at home, and the hostility becomes harder to maintain than the truce would have been.

Contemporary romanceSmall town romanceSecond chance romance

Nora Goes Off Script

Annabel Monaghan · 2022

Nora Hamilton writes romance films for television and knows exactly how the formula works, which is why she turns her own marriage's collapse into a script. It becomes the best thing she has written and is picked up to be filmed at the hundred-year-old house where she lives with her two children. The production brings Leo Vance, a former Sexiest Man Alive, to play her ex-husband, and it brings a film crew into her kitchen. When shooting ends and the crew leaves, Leo stays, offering a thousand dollars a day to keep his room for another week.

Contemporary romanceWorkplace romanceEnemies to lovers

Not in Love

Ali Hazelwood · 2024

Rue is a food scientist at Kline, a small company that has been her working home, and Eli is one of the founders of the group trying to buy it. The deal could change her job and the life of the mentor who runs the place, and Rue and Eli have to keep talking about it. The attraction goes both ways, and neither of them wants it to. What they do with it happens alongside the argument about the company.

Contemporary romanceSecond chance romanceNew adult romance

November 9

Colleen Hoover · 2015

Fallon meets Ben, a novelist, on the day before she is due to move across the country, and they spend that last day in Los Angeles together. Her life gives him the material he has been looking for, and instead of starting anything they agree to keep meeting on that date each year and compare what has happened since. The novel follows those annual meetings and the book Ben is writing, which begins to look a great deal like Fallon's life. Years in, she starts to question how much of what he has told her is invention.

Part of Your World

Abby Jimenez · 2022

Alexis Montgomery is an emergency doctor from a family of celebrated surgeons, and she is content with a career that does not impress them. A chance meeting introduces her to Daniel Grant, a carpenter ten years younger who lives in a small town and takes life as it comes, which is close to the opposite of the world she was raised in. Their time together is meant to be brief and is not. The longer it lasts, the clearer it becomes that choosing him would mean turning down the plan her parents have in mind for her.

Contemporary romanceFriends to loversRomantic comedy

People We Meet on Vacation

Emily Henry · 2021

Poppy and Alex have almost nothing in common. She is restless and ready to go anywhere; he wears khakis and would rather stay at home with a book. They became friends at college anyway, and for ten summers they took one week of holiday together while living in different cities. Two years ago they ruined it and stopped speaking. Poppy is stuck in a rut, and the last time she remembers being genuinely happy was on that final trip with Alex. So she asks him for one more holiday, and plans to use it to put things right. He agrees.

Contemporary romanceQueer romanceRomantic comedy

Red, White & Royal Blue

Casey McQuiston · 2019

Alex Claremont-Diaz is the son of the American president, Henry is a British prince, and the two of them have disliked each other for years. When a confrontation at a royal wedding becomes an international embarrassment, their handlers decide the remedy is to be seen together often and behaving impeccably. The public arrangement turns into a private one, conducted across an ocean and between two families with strong opinions about appearances. Alex is also working on his mother's re-election campaign, which gives both of them something else to lose.

Seven Days in June

Tia Williams · 2021

Eva Mercy writes best-selling erotica in Brooklyn, raises her daughter and is behind on everything. Shane Hall is a reclusive, prize-winning novelist who avoids attention, and he turns up in New York unexpectedly. They meet at a literary event and the room notices, because the city's Black literary scene knows both of them. Nobody there knows that Eva and Shane spent one week together as teenagers, twenty years earlier, or that they have been answering each other in their books ever since. The novel covers the seven days that follow.

Something Borrowed

Emily Giffin · 2004

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.

The Bride Test

Helen Hoang · 2019

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.

Contemporary romanceSports romanceSecond chance romance

The Bromance Book Club

Lyssa Kay Adams · 2019

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.

Contemporary romanceQueer romanceWorkplace romance

The Charm Offensive

Alison Cochrun · 2021

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.

Contemporary romanceFriends to loversSports romance

The Cheat Sheet

Sarah Adams · 2021

Bree Camden and Nathan Donelson have been best friends for years. Bree is in love with him and has decided that saying so would ruin the friendship, which is a complicated position to hold when he is also an NFL quarterback and the most photographed man she knows. After one drink too many she tells a reporter how she really feels, and the story is everywhere by the morning. Nathan's answer to the resulting attention is that the two of them should pretend to be together, and the pretending takes more managing than either of them expected.

Contemporary romanceWorkplace romanceRomantic comedy

The Ex Talk

Rachel Lynn Solomon · 2021

Shay Goldstein has spent close to ten years producing programmes at a public radio station in Seattle and cannot imagine working anywhere else. Her newest colleague, Dominic Yun, is fresh from a journalism master's and sure he knows how public radio should be made, and the two of them clash every day. When the station needs a new show, Shay suggests that two exes could give relationship advice live on air, and their boss decides that the pair of them, who can hardly be in a room together, should present it.

Contemporary romanceFriends to lovers

The Friend Zone

Abby Jimenez · 2019

Kristen Petersen does not do drama, fights for her friends and has no patience for men who do not understand her. She is also keeping something to herself: a medically necessary procedure that will leave her unable to have children. She is helping to plan her best friend's wedding, which is complicated enough before she meets the best man, Josh Copeland, who is funny, unbothered by her sarcasm and popular with her dog. The problem is that Josh wants a large family of his own, and Kristen has decided he would be better off with somebody else.

Contemporary romanceWorkplace romanceEnemies to lovers

The Hating Game

Sally Thorne · 2016

Lucy and Josh share an office and a job title at the publishing house that came out of a merger, and they have been at war since the day they met: small campaigns of desk tidying and pointed remarks, with one promotion available at the end of it that only one of them can take. Their colleagues treat the pair as a running joke. When work forces them into a shared project, the rules of the original battle stop being useful, and both of them have to work out what the last few years were actually about.

Contemporary romanceNew adult romance

The Kiss Quotient

Helen Hoang · 2018

Stella Lane is an econometrician who is comfortable with numbers and far less so with people, and she decides that the solution to the second problem is practice. She hires an escort to teach her how intimacy works, with terms agreed in advance and no expectations attached. The arrangement is tidy on paper and much less so in practice, and Stella has a mother with firm ideas about the kind of man her daughter should be with. Stella's work, her family and her own judgement of herself all come into it.

The Last Letter from Your Lover

Jojo Moyes · 2010

Ellie, a journalist, is hunting through her newspaper's archive for a story when she finds a letter from 1960: a man asking a woman to leave her husband for him. She follows the letter into the affair it describes and tries to find out what happened to the couple, while her own private life is complicated by a relationship with a married man. The 1960 strand and Ellie's present-day one alternate as she works out how much a set of letters can really tell her.

Contemporary romanceRomantic comedyWorkplace romance

The Love Hypothesis

Ali Hazelwood · 2021

Olive Smith is a PhD candidate at Stanford, and her best friend has developed a crush on the one man Olive has already been out with. To prove the date meant nothing, Olive kisses the first man who walks past the lab, and then has to live with it, because he is Adam Carlsen, a professor and one of the department's least forgiving supervisors. The story they invent to explain the kiss grows into an arrangement that both of them keep extending. Olive is also trying to hold her research, her funding and her own judgement together.

The Notebook

Nicholas Sparks · 1996

An older man sits with a faded notebook and reads aloud to a woman who does not understand why he comes to read to her. The story he reads is set on the North Carolina coast in 1946. Noah Calhoun is home from the war and restoring an old plantation house, still thinking about the girl he loved one summer fourteen years earlier. He could not find her afterwards and could not forget her. The reading and the story in the notebook move towards each other.

Contemporary romanceSports romance

The Proposal

Jasmine Guillory · 2018

A quiet evening at a Dodgers game turns into a proposal on the scoreboard in front of forty-five thousand people, and Nikole Paterson says no where everyone can see her do it. Getting out of the stadium is the next problem, and Carlos Ibarra and his sister, sitting nearby, are the ones who help. When the video spreads, Nik's week gets considerably worse before it improves, and Carlos, a doctor in Los Angeles, keeps appearing in it. Nik has been very clear that she is not looking for a relationship.

Contemporary romanceSports romance

The Right Move

Liz Tomforde · 2023

Ryan has just been made captain of a Chicago basketball team and cannot afford distractions, which is what his sister's best friend, Indy Ivers, becomes when she moves into his apartment. When the team's general manager questions whether Ryan has a life outside basketball, Ryan decides the simplest answer is to pretend that he and Indy are together. The arrangement is meant to be professional and temporary, and it suits Indy as well, until the two of them are sharing a flat, a calendar of family events and a story that neither of them can keep track of.

Contemporary romanceWorkplace romanceEnemies to lovers

The Spanish Love Deception

Elena Armas · 2021

Catalina Martin has told her family that she is bringing an American boyfriend to a wedding in Spain, and the invention has now been promised to everybody. She has four weeks, an ocean to cross and relatives who will spot a fake immediately. Aaron Blackford, the colleague she finds most infuriating, offers to play the part, which is the last thing she wants and the only workable answer she has. The wedding gets closer and the performance becomes harder to maintain.

Contemporary romanceEnemies to loversRomantic comedy

The Unhoneymooners

Christina Lauren · 2019

Olive has bad luck with work, with love and with most other things, and her identical twin Ami has the opposite of that, down to the wedding she has funded entirely by winning internet contests. The wedding also means a day in the company of Ethan, Ami's best man and Olive's least favourite person. Then the reception meal makes everyone else ill and leaves Olive and Ethan as the only two guests unaffected, which means an all-expenses-paid honeymoon in Hawaii is going spare.

The Wedding Date

Jasmine Guillory · 2018

Alexa Monroe gets stuck in a hotel elevator with a stranger during a wedding weekend, and by the time the doors open she has agreed to be his date for the events: he is a groomsman without a plus-one, and she is dressed and hungry. Drew Nichols is a paediatric surgeon from Los Angeles and Alexa is the mayor's chief of staff in Berkeley, which is a long way from his life. What begins as a favour for one weekend continues at a distance, while both of them insist it is casual.

Things We Never Got Over

Lucy Score · 2022

Naomi rides into Knockemout, Virginia, to rescue her estranged twin sister, and finds that Tina has taken her car and her money and left her with an eleven-year-old niece she did not know she had. With no job, no transport and no plan, she is stuck in a small town where disputes are settled with fists and beer, and where the first person she meets is Knox, the local barber and a man who does not tolerate drama. Knox prefers his own company and his dog, and the town has firm ideas about the two of them.

Contemporary romanceFriends to loversNew adult romance

To All the Boys I've Loved Before

Jenny Han · 2014

Lara Jean Covey writes letters to the boys she has loved, and she never intended any of them to be read. When her older sister leaves for Scotland, Lara Jean is left looking after their younger sister and their father, and the letters stop being private: every boy she has written to receives one. To deal with the person she minds most, she agrees to pretend to be going out with one of the others, which means keeping up the story for her family, her friends and the whole school.

Contemporary romanceNew adult romanceFriends to lovers

Twisted Love

Ana Huang · 2021

Alex Volkov has spent most of his life working, and the tragedy he carries has left him with little patience for anything else. When he is obliged to keep an eye on the younger sister of his closest friend, he finds himself feeling something he had not planned on. Ava Chen is a photographer with nightmares about a childhood she cannot fully recall and a habit of finding the good in people, including the man she has been told not to want: her brother's best friend and her next-door neighbour.

Ugly Love

Colleen Hoover · 2014

Tate Collins moves in with her brother and finds his friend Miles Archer, an airline pilot, asleep in front of the door. There is no instant romance in it; what they do have is an attraction neither of them is willing to leave alone. Miles has one condition, that they never discuss his past, and Tate has no room for a relationship between shifts and study, so the arrangement appears to suit them both. It holds until the parts of Miles's life he has kept out of the room start to matter.

Contemporary romanceRomantic comedyWorkplace romance

Weather Girl

Rachel Lynn Solomon · 2022

Ari Abrams is a television meteorologist in Seattle who loves the weather and nearly everything else about the job except the person running the newsroom. Torrance Hale is a legend in local forecasting, and her split from the station's news director has left her with no time to mentor anybody. The colleague who understands is Russell Barringer, a sports reporter with his own history of the place. After a disastrous holiday party, Ari and Russell begin a project to get their bosses back together, which means spending a great deal of time together.

When in Rome

Sarah Adams · 2022

Amelia Rose has spent years being the pop star Rae Rose for her fans and is worn out by it. On impulse she drives away in the middle of the night towards Rome, Kentucky, a small town that shares a name with the film she loves. She ends up on Noah Walker's lawn in a broken-down car, and Noah, who runs the pie shop his grandmother left him, has no patience for celebrity trouble or for neighbours who watch everything. He offers her his spare room until the car is fixed, and the town makes staying quiet difficult.