Riley Locke

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.

  • Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen

    Start where the genre starts. Everything romance does — the sparring, the pride, the surrender — is already here, perfected, in 1813.

  • The Hating Game — Sally Thorne

    The contemporary gateway drug. If you want to understand why office romance owns the bestseller list, this is the two-hundred-page answer.

  • Beach Read — Emily Henry

    For the literary-fiction reader who suspects romance cannot be about anything. It is about grief, ambition, and craft — and it is still funny.

  • Red, White & Royal Blue — Casey McQuiston

    The door marked joy: a queer royal romance that runs on hope and lands every emotional beat it promises.

  • The Kiss Quotient — Helen Hoang

    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.

  • Fourth Wing — Rebecca Yarros

    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.

  • The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo — Taylor Jenkins Reid

    The bridge from book-club fiction: a Hollywood epic whose true love story is the one no headline ever printed.

  • It Ends with Us — Colleen Hoover

    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.

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