romance

Rainbow Rowell's beloved YA novel about two misfit teenagers who fall in love on the school bus in 1986 Omaha. A tender, painful story about first love, abuse, racism, and finding someone who sees you - praised for representation but not without controversy.

Nick - the only straight member of a New York queercore band, working through his breakup with the complicated Tris by making her mix CDs she throws away - is at a Lower East Side club for a show when he sees Tris walk in with another guy, panics, and asks the nearest girl to pretend to be his girlfriend for five minutes; the girl turns out to be Norah, daughter of a well-known music producer, a classmate of Tris's at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, and the person who has been retrieving Nick's discarded mix CDs from Tris's trash and loving them without knowing he made them; the kiss they share to sell the cover is the first event in a single Manhattan night that will involve Norah's drunk friend Caroline, Norah's complicated ex Tal, and a citywide search for the secret late-night show of their favorite band, Where's Fluffy. Rachel Cohn and David Levithan's 2006 YA collaboration, with Cohn writing Norah's chapters and Levithan writing Nick's, told in alternating first-person POV over the course of a single night.

An NYPD veteran who lost a child during a hostage negotiation retreats to Morningstar Lake with his German Shepherd Quincy and his saxophone; a widow named Kristin McCarthy borrows her friend Marsha's Catskills cottage and brings her eleven-year-old daughter Ashley, a recent rape survivor who has stopped being able to be in her own house - and the music carries across the water in Linda Barrett's first Flying Solo novel.

Wedding photographer Libby McKenzie - newly home to Virginia after a divorce, multiple miscarriages, and her father's death - takes a job photographing a wedding at the Woodmont estate in the Blue Ridge Mountains, becomes drawn to its honeysuckle-overgrown greenhouse, and pulls a thread that runs back through the estate's owner Elaine, a 1940s teen named Sadie, and the closed adoption Libby has carried questions about her whole life.

Jane Austen's 1813 masterpiece follows Elizabeth Bennet through misjudgment and revelation - a Hunsford proposal that goes horribly, a letter that rearranges everything, a visit to Pemberley that changes what she thought she knew - in the great Regency comedy of manners about what we get wrong about other people and ourselves.

When two wounded souls cross paths in a small Washington town, they discover that sometimes the hardest battles are fought in the heart. A heartwarming story about finding hope and love after loss.

When a mysterious diary falls into his hands on New Year's Day, a rigid businessman embarks on a life-changing journey of tasks and self-discovery that connects him with a free-spirited woman and changes both their lives forever.