It’s the last day of the year tomorrow, and what do I have to show you? I read almost constantly all year and apart from the books I’ve worked on… pretty much all of it has been romances on my phone on the tube.
I bet I’m not alone, so at the end of 2023 I’m here to say: get into it. I mean, the state of things. Do you read romance? You should. I feel like there is a slightly old-fashioned push and pull about romance in which people say they hate it or people think it’s radical to say they like it and both positions are legitimate, probably! But mostly I take my place on the bus as a reader and a fan, and perhaps you can think of this as me shifting over to make room for you too, so you can pick up the books I’m leaving behind me.
I mean, I’ve read other things! I made Claire Ptak’s pink and yellow cake for a friend’s birthday and it was a success. I finished Caroline O’Donahue’s The Rachel Incident while walking down the road crying, and honestly it is a genuine triumph of a book and you ought to buy it. I liked that book about shipwrecks called The Wager, Simon Mason’s thriller A Killing In November was immense, and I loved Lesley Parr’s magnificent Where The River Takes Us, a middle grade novel about Wales in the Miner’s Strike. Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy has my whole heart, it’s true. Janice Hallet is fun, isn’t she?
But mostly I have been reading the sorts of books you really don’t want people to see the covers of and having an absolute ball. I have read romances by Eloisa James, Mary Baloch, Ashley Winstead, Roxie Noir, Lorraine Heath, Tessa Bailey, Tessa Dare, Courtney Milan, Loretta Chase, Meredith Duran, Harper St. George and Uzma Jalaluddin and that is not even the half of it if I’m perfectly honest.
Romance. And the romance of romance as a genre, as a fandom. Some of my absolutely heavenly moments of book-connection this year have been with women who also love romance novels. It is a sisterly joy, an often secret, beautiful thing. Shout out to the publicist who insisted, over warm white wine and cheese straws, that I read intense hockey romance Icebreaker which is literally like telling someone about the pornography you love, you might as well just send a link to a video.
Gratitude too, to the heartbroken pal who brought Kate Goldbeck’s You, Again into my life, a real millennial mess of a Harry Met Sally, a nice classy romance to recommend to all of you for your Christmas holidays. Raise the roof for Kate Young finally agreeing to send me her hot lesbian friends-to-lovers romcom Experienced which you will have to wait till 2024 to read but which is actually probably a bit life-changing. And my favourite: at a party full of highbrow academics I met a woman who revealed with a little side-eyed look of speculation that she’d read all the Julie Anne Long novels, to which I was able to swoop in from behind a pillar and murmur “I’ve read them all” a bit like a romance hero myself, I like to think.
We have a book club now where we read romance novels and drink beer and you know, it’s the best. Romance requires you to really, honestly think about what you enjoy. And when you are considering your own joy, your own pleasure, what gave you a shiver or made your heart expand or gave you a thrilling little shock, it feels so amazing! You can become a taxonomist of your own enjoyment which is pretty much always the perfect state of reading, I think. You can even use Goodreads. For non-romance books of course Goodreads is a pit of poisonous snakes all waiting to kill at the first opportunity, but the romance readers? An army of unimpeachable scholars all, the difference between a 3.73 and a 4.16 a community mitzvah. I would trust them with my life.
This won’t be the last you hear from me of Romance, I’m sure - let’s get into Regency Tropes, I’ll buy you a beer - but if you wanted to start, you could, and should, start in Regency with Julie Anne Long, the best of the bunch I think, a brilliant, funny writer with perfect touch for pacing and dialogue and VG sex (mostly, depends on what you like, play around a bit!) Her Pennyroyal Green series is about two warring families in a Sussex town but there are also pirates and politics and factories and school teachers and brothers and bonnets and so much more. She is fantastic at longing, which is basically the life-blood of Romance, but she’s also just a brilliant writer.
You could also try Eloisa James, probably the cleverest of them all, or Sarah Maclean, a joyful, bouncy writer with the best heroines. Or you could start in Modern with Kate Goldbeck’s You, Again, or Emily Henry’s Book Lovers or Tessa Bailey’s It Happened One Summer. Most of these books, by the way, were published in the last 2 years. I mean it’s a boom, it’s a gold rush of romance, and some of it is fully filthy and some of it is very chaste but somehow also hot, like Uzma Jalalludin’s Ayesha At Last, in which the protagonists only hold hands, but wow, phew!!
If you like romance you’ve probably read every single thing on this list, and if there is something that you think I would love, hit me up. If you’ve never read it, give it a try. Don’t for god’s sake start with the Curtis Sittenfield book with the serious cover which is legitimately a good romcom but there’s a bit with a wig that I couldn’t get past and it’s just not angsty enough, it won’t make a romance reader out of you.
That’s it. That’s all I have to say about 2023 in books at the end of the year. Writers I know and love have great books out. More will come in 2024. Until then, Happy New Year.
This was so brilliant, thank you for writing it! The sheer wealth of amazing romance novels is truly a boon to us all, and here's hoping folks who read it talk about what they love and enjoy more and more openly.
In terms of historicals - if you haven't read any Joanna Shupe yet, I love her New York Gilded Age-set books very, very much. And for something a bit different, Emma Barry and Genevieve Turner self-published a fantastic series of novels set around the Space Program in the early 1960s - strong Mad Men vibes without the toxic masculinity!