Most Read Romantic Comedy Books

As a third-year PhD candidate in biology at Stanford, Olive Smith is sure of two things: experimental data, and the idea that romantic love is a fiction people tell themselves. So when she needs to convince her best friend that her own love life is thriving, she panics and kisses the first man she sees — who happens to be Adam Carlsen, a young, brilliant, notoriously unapproachable professor. To Olive's surprise, Adam agrees to keep up the fake-dating charade; he has reasons of his own for wanting the department to believe he's settling down. What begins as a tidy arrangement grows complicated as conference travel, lab politics, and Adam's unexpected steadiness start to blur the line between performance and feeling. Ali Hazelwood's debut is a warm, funny STEM rom-com about a heroine who trusts her hypotheses more than her heart, and the grumpy academic who makes her want to revise them.

• fake dating
• grumpy sunshine

Poppy and Alex could not be more different. She is loud, restless, and happiest chasing the next adventure; he is careful, buttoned-up, and content to stay home with a book. They became unlikely best friends in college and, despite living on opposite sides of the country, kept the friendship alive with one thing: an annual summer vacation, just the two of them. For a decade the trips were perfect—until the last one, when something happened that neither of them could take back, and they stopped speaking. Two years later, Poppy has the career she always wanted and none of the happiness that was supposed to come with it. Convinced that the last time she was truly herself was on a trip with Alex, she talks him into one more vacation together, hoping to repair what broke. Told across alternating timelines—the summers that built their friendship and the present-day trip that might end or remake it—People We Meet on Vacation is a warm, funny story about the fine line between friendship and love, and the courage it takes to risk one for the other.

• friends to lovers
• grumpy sunshine
• dual timeline

Hannah Wells has worked hard to leave a painful past behind and build a steady life at Briar University. She has good grades, a plan, and a hopeless crush on a boy who barely notices her. What she does not have is any idea how to get his attention—until she winds up tangled with the last person she would ever choose. Garrett Graham is the star of the college hockey team, a golden boy whose future depends on keeping his grades up. When he fails a midterm badly enough to threaten his spot on the roster, he needs a tutor, and Hannah is the only one who can save him. She refuses, so he proposes a deal: she coaches him through the class, and in return he pretends to date her to make her crush jealous. What starts as a transaction turns into something neither planned. As fake dates blur into real feelings, Hannah has to decide whether to trust Garrett with the parts of herself she has kept hidden. The first book in the Off-Campus series, The Deal is a warm, funny new-adult sports romance about two people who agree not to fall for each other and fail spectacularly.

• fake dating

January Andrews writes happily-ever-afters for a living, but she no longer believes in them. Reeling from her father's death and the discovery of the double life he kept hidden, broke and blocked, she retreats to the lakeside Michigan cottage he secretly owned to sort through his things and, she hopes, salvage her career. The catch: her new next-door neighbor is Augustus Everett, the brooding literary-fiction star who was her rival in college and who has never written anything that ends in anything but despair. Both are stuck. So they make a bargain — over the summer, January will try to write something serious and bleak, and Gus will attempt a love story with a happy ending. To research, they trade field trips: she drags him line-dancing, he takes her to interview the survivors of a local death cult. What begins as a competitive dare turns into something neither expected, as two people who write for a living learn how hard it is to be honest about their own lives. Warm, funny, and quietly devastating in its handling of grief, Beach Read is a romance about writer's block, disillusionment, and the stubborn possibility of hope.

Nora Stephens is a cutthroat literary agent, not the sweet small-town heroine who gets swept off her feet in the novels she sells. So when her sister Libby drags her to the tiny town of Sunshine Falls, North Carolina, for a month-long escape, Nora doesn't expect a fairy-tale transformation — and she certainly doesn't expect to keep running into Charlie Lastra, a brooding big-city editor she already can't stand. But the more their paths cross, the harder it is to remember why they're supposed to be enemies. As Nora tries to give her burned-out sister the perfect getaway and untangle her own fear of being left behind, she starts to wonder whether the woman who never gets the guy might be writing her own story wrong. Emily Henry's sharp, funny, and surprisingly tender romance is a love letter to books, to sisters, and to the people who don't fit neatly into anyone else's plot.

• enemies to lovers

Daphne moved to the small lakeside town of Waning Bay, Michigan, for her fiancé, Peter — right up until he called off the wedding because he'd fallen in love with his lifelong best friend, Petra. Now Daphne is heartbroken, nearly homeless, and stuck in a town where the only person who understands exactly how she feels is Miles Nowak: Petra's dumped ex-boyfriend. With nowhere else to go, Daphne takes the spare room in Miles's apartment. They could not be more different — she's a careful, buttoned-up children's librarian; he's a warm, chaotic mess — and at first they barely speak. Then, almost by accident, they start pretending to be a couple, partly to save face and partly to needle the exes who left them. What's meant to be a performance turns into long summer days at the beach, honest late-night conversations, and a friendship that neither of them planned on. Funny Story is a warm, funny, tender romance about rebuilding a life after it falls apart, and discovering that the person who gets you might be the last one you'd expect.

• fake dating
• grumpy sunshine

Catalina Martín has a problem: she needs a date for her sister's wedding in Spain, and the American boyfriend she invented to keep her meddling family — and her smug ex — at bay has become impossible to explain away. With four weeks until the transatlantic trip, she's out of options. Enter Aaron Blackford, the tall, infuriatingly composed colleague she has spent two years despising. When he unexpectedly volunteers to fly across the ocean and pose as her devoted partner, Catalina can't imagine a worse companion — or, as the wedding draws nearer, a more convincing one. Thrown together under one roof and surrounded by her boisterous family, the line between their office rivalry and something far warmer starts to blur. The debut novel from Elena Armas and the first book in the Love Deception series, The Spanish Love Deception is a slow-burn, enemies-to-lovers romantic comedy about the stories we tell ourselves and the one person who sees straight through them.

• fake dating
• enemies to lovers
• slow burn

Sloane Sutherland and Rowan Kane are both serial killers — but they only kill other killers, the predators the law never catches. When their paths cross during a competitive, invitation-only "game" that turns vigilante murder into an annual contest, the two rivals strike up an unlikely friendship built on gallows humor, shared trauma, and a mutual appreciation for creative violence. What starts as banter and one-upmanship slowly deepens into something neither of them expected or knows how to handle. But Sloane and Rowan both carry wounds from the past, and as their bond grows, an old threat begins closing in — one tangled up in the reasons they each became what they are. The first book in Brynne Weaver's Ruinous Love Trilogy, Butcher & Blackbird is a dark romantic comedy that swings between graphic horror and genuine tenderness. Following the Kane family and the dangerous women they love, it pairs an extremely violent premise with banter-driven, slow-burn romance — squarely for readers who like their love stories pitch-black.

Alex Claremont-Diaz is the telegenic, ambitious son of the first female President of the United States — effectively American royalty. Prince Henry of Wales is his transatlantic opposite number, and, as far as Alex is concerned, his nemesis. When a very public altercation between the two at a royal wedding threatens to become an international incident, their families force them into a staged friendship for the cameras. The problem is that the staged friendship starts to feel real, and then it starts to feel like something more. What begins as damage control becomes a secret, high-stakes romance conducted across time zones, security details, and the unforgiving glare of two nations' press — with a US presidential election, and both young men's futures, hanging in the balance. Warm, funny, and unabashedly optimistic, Red, White & Royal Blue is a queer romantic comedy about first love, public duty, and the courage it takes to want something for yourself. A runaway word-of-mouth bestseller, it pairs screwball banter with a genuinely tender love story and a hopeful vision of politics and identity.

• enemies to lovers
• forbidden love

Justin Dahl seems to be under a curse: every woman he dates meets the love of her life immediately after they break up. When he jokes about it online, a stranger named Emma reaches out, because the exact same thing keeps happening to her. Emma, a traveling nurse who has spent her life moving from town to town with her unreliable mother, proposes an experiment: they should date each other and then break up, hoping the two curses cancel out and finally leave them both free. Emma takes an assignment in Justin's Minnesota town for the summer, planning a low-stakes fling in a lakeside cottage. But Justin's crowded, chaotic family and Emma's complicated relationship with her mother refuse to stay out of the way, and the arrangement starts to feel like something neither of them planned for. Abby Jimenez pairs a charming high-concept premise with the harder material she is known for, including family dysfunction and the long shadow of an unstable parent. Just for the Summer is a warm, funny romance about people who have learned not to count on staying, learning what it might mean to stay anyway.

For eight years, Harriet and Wyn were the couple everyone else measured themselves against — until, quietly, they weren't. Five months after their engagement fell apart, they still haven't told a soul. So when their tight-knit college friend group gathers for its annual week at the beloved cottage in Maine, Harriet and Wyn do the only thing that seems less painful than the truth: they pretend nothing has changed. That means sharing a room, sharing a bed, and performing a relationship they no longer have — all while the friends around them nurse secrets of their own, and the cottage that anchors every summer is quietly slipping out of reach. A surgical resident who avoids conflict at all costs, Harriet finds a week of forced proximity with the man she still loves almost unbearable, and slowly the reasons they broke up start to surface. Told across the golden week in Maine and the years that led to it, Happy Place is a tender, bittersweet romance about the difference between loving someone and being right for them — and about whether a second chance is worth the honesty it demands.

• fake dating
• second chance
• forced proximity

Lucy Hutton and Joshua Templeman are executive assistants to the two co-CEOs of a merged publishing house, and they have made a full-time occupation out of hating each other. They share an office and an ever-escalating series of games — the staring game, the mirror game, the HR game — that Lucy is determined never to lose. When a coveted promotion opens up and pits them directly against one another, the war turns white-hot. But a single unguarded moment in an elevator makes Lucy wonder whether what she feels for Joshua is really loathing at all, or just the flip side of something she's been refusing to name. Sally Thorne's debut is a sharp, funny, slow-burn enemies-to-lovers rom-com about workplace rivalry, misread signals, and the thin line between hate and want.

• enemies to lovers
• workplace romance
• slow burn

Neuroscientist Bee Königswasser lives by one rule: what would Marie Curie do? So when NASA offers her the chance to co-lead a dream neuroengineering project, she says yes — even though it means working alongside Levi Ward, the coldly gorgeous engineer who made his dislike of her plain back in grad school. On-site in Houston, Bee's equipment goes missing, her authority is undercut, and she's certain Levi is behind at least some of it. But the more time they spend together, the more she wonders whether she's been reading him wrong all along, and whether the animosity she remembers was ever the whole story. Ali Hazelwood's second STEMinist rom-com pairs sharp workplace comedy and slow-burn tension with a heroine learning to put her own heart on the line.

• enemies to lovers
• workplace romance

Olive Torres considers herself chronically unlucky, especially beside her identical twin sister Ami, whose life always falls into place. The pattern seems to flip at Ami's wedding, where nearly the entire reception is felled by food poisoning from the buffet -- everyone except Olive and Ethan Thomas, the groom's brother and the one man Olive cannot stand. With the newlyweds too sick to travel, their non-transferable, all-expenses-paid tropical honeymoon would go to waste, so Ami insists Olive take it. The catch: it is booked under the newlyweds' names, so Olive and Ethan must go together and pose as the married couple. Sworn enemies forced into close quarters, they agree to a fragile truce -- which grows more complicated when Olive runs into someone from her professional life and a small lie spirals, forcing them to fully commit to the loving-newlywed act in public. As the days pass, Olive begins to question whether her dislike of Ethan was ever the whole story. The novel pairs sharp banter with a warm, family-centered emotional core.

• enemies to lovers
• fake dating
• forced proximity

By day, Elsie Hannaway is an underpaid adjunct theoretical physicist stretched thin across too many campuses; on the side, she works as a professional fake girlfriend, becoming whatever each client needs her to be. The two worlds collide when she meets Jack Smith — the older brother of her favorite client, a celebrated experimental physicist, and, as far as Elsie is concerned, the man who once torpedoed her mentor's career. Worse, Jack sits on the hiring committee for the tenure-track MIT job that could finally change Elsie's life. As their sparring turns into something harder to categorize, she has to decide whether the person she becomes around Jack might be the truest version of herself. Ali Hazelwood's third STEM rom-com is a witty, warm story about ambition, code-switching, and the risk of letting yourself be fully known.

• enemies to lovers
• workplace romance

Lara Jean Song Covey keeps her most intense feelings locked away — literally. Whenever a crush becomes too much to bear, she writes the boy a letter pouring out everything she feels, seals it, addresses it, and hides it in a hatbox she inherited from her late mother. The letters are never meant to be sent; writing them is how she lets a crush go. Then, without warning, all five letters are mailed. Suddenly the boys Lara Jean has loved — including her older sister's ex-boyfriend and the impossibly popular Peter Kavinsky — know exactly how she once felt. To dodge the fallout with the boy next door, Lara Jean strikes a bargain with Peter to fake a relationship, each of them using the other for their own reasons. But pretending starts to feel a lot like the real thing. The first book in Jenny Han's beloved trilogy is a warm, funny coming-of-age romance about family, first love, and the terror and thrill of being truly seen.

• fake dating
• coming of age

Liz has scripted her senior-year romance with Michael Young down to the last cinematic beat — except Michael barely notices her. Enlisting her prank-loving neighbor Wes as an unlikely coach, Liz starts to wonder whether the movie-perfect ending she planned is really the one she wants.

• grumpy sunshine

Kai Young is a disciplined media heir who runs his life and his empire by the rules, with a crucial leadership vote looming that could decide his future. Isabella Valencia is chaos in human form, impulsive, vivid, and exactly the distraction he cannot afford. Their attraction is inconvenient, forbidden, and impossible to ignore, forcing the buttoned-up king of pride to confront how much of his control is really armor. The second Kings of Sin book is the series' brightest, an opposites-attract, grumpy-sunshine romance set against boardroom stakes. A standalone within Ana Huang's interconnected universe, it pairs the controlled hero with the free spirit who upends everything he thought he wanted.

• grumpy sunshine

Rowan Kane is a Kane — which means he is a billionaire, an heir to a fading amusement empire, and, by his own account, cursed to ruin every good thing he touches. When his late grandfather's will hands him a single condition — revive the family's beloved theme park, Dreamland — he throws himself into the work and leaves feelings firmly out of it. Then Zahra Gulian, a sharp, imaginative employee, pitches him an idea (badly, and a little drunk) that could change everything — and lands herself squarely under his notoriously exacting management. The closer they work, the harder Rowan's rules are to keep, and the more Zahra suspects the real project isn't the park at all. The first book in Lauren Asher's Dreamland Billionaires series, The Fine Print is a grumpy-sunshine workplace romance about inheritance, self-sabotage, and learning that the things that matter most can't be bought.

• grumpy sunshine
• workplace romance

Autistic econometrician Stella Lane hires escort Michael Phan to teach her how to date, treating intimacy as a problem to be practiced and solved. But their arrangement grows into something neither planned. Helen Hoang's warm, tender debut romance about self-acceptance and being loved as you are.

Romance writer Rosie Graham has crushing writer's block and, after her ceiling collapses, an unexpected roommate: Lucas Martín, her best friend's charming, endlessly traveling cousin. His fix for her block — a run of staged 'experimental' dates — is only supposed to be research. But he's in New York for a handful of weeks, and the line between the experiment and the real thing keeps blurring. A slow-burn romantic comedy and companion to The Spanish Love Deception.

• forced proximity
• fake dating
• slow burn

Olivia Marshall's life is falling apart, so when a vented text lands on a stranger's phone by mistake, the anonymous flirtation that follows becomes the best part of her day. The worst part is Colin Beck, her brother's insufferably perfect best friend and now her reluctant roommate, who has always treated her like an annoyance. As their bickering heats into something neither expected, Colin discovers the woman he's been secretly texting is the same one driving him crazy across the hall. A banter-heavy, steamy rom-com of mistaken identity and enemies turned something more.

• enemies to lovers
• forced proximity
• grumpy sunshine
• secret identity

Sixteen-year-old Simon Spier isn't ready to come out — but he's fallen for "Blue," an anonymous boy from his school he's been emailing. When a classmate finds the emails and threatens to out him, Simon's carefully separated worlds start colliding. Becky Albertalli's beloved, award-winning debut (adapted as Love, Simon) is a warm, funny coming-of-age romance about identity, friendship, and being seen.

• coming of age
• secret identity

Tiffy and Leon share a London flat and a bed, but never at the same time—she has it nights, he has it days—and communicate only through sticky notes. As the notes grow warmer, a romance blooms between two people who've never met, even as Tiffy works to free herself from a controlling ex. Beth O'Leary's warm, witty debut with real emotional depth.

• only one bed
• slow burn
• forced proximity
• epistolary

Twenty-three-year-old August moves to New York City jaded and self-protective, convinced that magic, romance, and belonging are things that happen to other people. She takes a room in a chaotic shared apartment, a job at an all-night pancake diner, and a long daily commute — and on that commute she keeps encountering Jane: effortlessly cool, kind, and impossibly charming, always on the Q train. Then August realises the truth about Jane: she is not just a striking stranger but a woman literally displaced in time, stranded from the 1970s and somehow bound to the subway line. Falling for her means finding a way to free her — a puzzle that pulls August out of her isolation and into the messy, generous orbit of friends, roommates, and strangers who become a family. One Last Stop blends queer romance with a touch of time-slip magic and a love letter to New York's found families and forgotten histories. Funny and warm-hearted, it is a story about connection: to a city, to a community, and to the possibility that you are worth showing up for.

• time loop
• found family

Emma Corrigan has plenty of little secrets — the kind everyone has and no one admits to. She doesn't really like her boyfriend's dog. She's never actually read the management book her company reveres. She has no idea what her job's key performance indicators even mean. And when a terrifyingly turbulent flight convinces her that the plane is about to go down, she blurts every last one of these secrets to the calm, handsome American stranger sitting beside her. The plane lands safely, of course, and Emma walks away mortified but relieved that she will never see the man again. Then she arrives at work to discover that the stranger is Jack Harper — the enigmatic founder and CEO of her own company — and that he now knows absolutely everything about her. A breezy, laugh-out-loud romantic comedy from the bestselling author of the Shopaholic series, Can You Keep a Secret? is Sophie Kinsella at her most charming: a warm, wince-inducing, feel-good story about honesty, embarrassment, and the messy business of falling for exactly the wrong — or perhaps exactly the right — person.

• workplace romance

A pediatrician gets snowbound with the tech-billionaire brother of her best friend—the man she once loved and left. Ali Hazelwood's cozy, high-heat holiday novella is a quick, one-sitting second-chance romance, first in the Under the Mistletoe Collection.

• second chance
• forced proximity

Figure skater Anastasia Allen has built her life around a single goal: a place on the U.S. Olympic team. Her training, her diet, and her tightly managed routines leave no room for distraction, least of all the university hockey team that suddenly has to share her rink after the campus arena is damaged. Nate Hawkins, the hockey captain bound for the NHL, is everything Anastasia tries to avoid: loud, easygoing, and impossible to ignore. When a prank pushes the two teams into the same practice schedule and her own skating partnership falls apart, Anastasia and Nate strike an uneasy deal that forces them together day after day. What begins as friction slowly turns into something neither of them planned for. Set at the fictional University of California, Maple Hills, this hockey romance balances competitive pressure, anxiety, and a controlling skating partner against the easy warmth Nate brings into Anastasia's carefully ordered world. The first book in the Maple Hills series, it follows two driven athletes learning to let someone in without losing sight of who they are.

• grumpy sunshine

Naomi Witt has always been the responsible twin, so when her troublemaking sister Tina summons her to the rough-around-the-edges town of Knockemout, Virginia, Naomi drops everything to help. Instead she finds herself robbed, stranded, and suddenly responsible for a niece she never knew existed — with no money, no plan, and nowhere to go. Enter Knox Morgan, the gruff, tattooed local who wants nothing to do with other people's problems and even less to do with a woman who clearly means trouble. But as Naomi digs in and refuses to run, the two of them keep colliding, and the walls Knox has built start to crack. Lucy Score's small-town romance mixes grumpy-meets-sunshine banter, found family, and a thread of danger, launching the Knockemout series with humor and heat.

• grumpy sunshine

Reeling from betrayal and the truth about the man she trusted, Poppy is taken deep into the kingdom of Atlantia — captive, bargaining chip, and something harder to name. As she navigates a court that may want her dead and a bond she can't deny, she clings to one goal: finding her brother and learning what of her old life was ever true. The second Blood and Ash book widens the world and raises the stakes.

• enemies to lovers
• forbidden love