Riley Locke collection
New to Romance: Start Here
Romance is the biggest fiction genre on earth and the most misunderstood, usually by people who have not read any. If you are arriving new — from literary fiction, from fantasy, from a film that sent you looking — this is the desk's honest map: eight books, each a door into a…
Editorial purpose
Why this collection exists
Romance is the biggest fiction genre on earth and the most misunderstood, usually by people who have not read any. If you are arriving new — from literary fiction, from fantasy, from a film that sent you looking — this is the desk's honest map: eight books, each a door into a different room. None of them requires an apology and all of them require tissues, one way or another.
Ordered guide
Books in this collection
The number shows editorial sequence only. It does not claim that one book is objectively better than another.
-
01
Pride and Prejudice
Pride and Prejudice
Why it belongsOpen the book guide →Start where the genre starts. Everything romance does — the sparring, the pride, the surrender — is already here, perfected, in 1813.
-
02
The Hating Game
The Hating Game
Why it belongsOpen the book guide →The contemporary gateway drug. If you want to understand why office romance owns the bestseller list, this is the two-hundred-page answer.
-
03
Beach Read
Beach Read
Why it belongsOpen the book guide →For the literary-fiction reader who suspects romance cannot be about anything. It is about grief, ambition, and craft — and it is still funny.
-
04
Red, White & Royal Blue
Red, White & Royal Blue
Why it belongsOpen the book guide →The door marked joy: a queer royal romance that runs on hope and lands every emotional beat it promises.
-
05
The Kiss Quotient
The Kiss Quotient
Why it belongsOpen the book guide →Romance's range in one book: an autistic heroine, a reverse Pretty Woman premise, and a portrait of intimacy the genre had never quite drawn before.
-
06
Fourth Wing
Fourth Wing
Why it belongsOpen the book guide →The fantasy reader's door. Dragons and death tolls, yes — but the romance is the engine, and you will understand romantasy's takeover by chapter ten.
-
07
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
Why it belongsOpen the book guide →The bridge from book-club fiction: a Hollywood epic whose true love story is the one no headline ever printed.
-
08
It Ends with Us
It Ends with Us
Why it belongsOpen the book guide →The genre at its heaviest, handled honestly: a love story that walks into the cycle of domestic abuse and refuses easy answers. It belongs on this map because romance does not look away.