Get a Life, Chloe Brown

Some romances begin with a meet-cute and Get a Life, Chloe Brown begins with a near-miss: a car mounting a kerb metres from a woman who realises, in the adrenaline afterglow, that if it had hit her, her eulogy would be one sentence long. Talia Hibbert's series opener turns that jolt into the genre's best to-do list, get a life, itemised, and the desk shelves it as the modern grumpy-sunshine standard with a crucial inversion. The sunshine plays the grump's part, the grump plays the sunshine's, and neither is what the neighbourhood assumes.

Chloe Brown is a wealthy, waspish, list-keeping web designer with fibromyalgia, and Hibbert writes the chronic illness with a specificity the genre had rarely bothered with — the energy budgeting, the flare mathematics, the quiet social attrition of repeatedly cancelled plans, the armour a woman builds when her body has taught her that wanting things invites audits. Her list (ride a motorbike, do something bad, camp under stars, travel the world with hand luggage) requires a guide, and the building superintendent presents himself by accident: Redford Morgan, tattooed, motorbike-owning, professionally handy, secretly a painter, and publicly the most cheerful man on the property. The cheer, the book discloses with patience, is its own armour. Red is rebuilding after a relationship that dismantled him with gallery-opening politeness, and his golden-retriever daylight settings are a man determined never again to be made small in front of company.

What the desk admires is the negotiation of care. Chloe's illness is never cured by love and never treated as a burden nobly borne; Red learns her body's weather like a local, and she learns that accepting help is not a controlled substance. The banter runs London-dry, the heat runs high and unusually well-communicated, and the list's items get crossed off in ways that keep surprising both parties, the "something bad" entry above all.

Honest notices: content guidance for chronic pain and a past emotionally abusive relationship, both handled with care and neither played for angst-fuel. The cat is named Smudge, has opinions, and matters more than several human characters.

Who is this for? Grumpy-sunshine readers ready for the roles examined, chronic-illness readers overdue for a mirror this kind, and anyone whose eulogy currently runs a sentence short. Start the list, and the desk recommends the motorbike entry first, for morale. The remaining Brown sisters each get a book, and the trilogy's warmth compounds in order. Begin here, where the near-miss started everything, and pace yourself. Lists are meant to take a while.