The Best Romance Books of 2024

A critic's best-of list is on some level a confession: You can deduce a lot about my year from the stories I found solace in. So in addition to the expected delights of this year's romances — lush historical eras, dazzling space battles, scenes of love triumphant — there's a resonant thread of grief running through the fractured timelines, vengeful heroines, and small-scale victories of the books below.

My favorite romance of the year, "You Should Be So Lucky," is this theory made manifest: A widowed reporter and a failing baseball player find solace together after staggering losses. This story is the gentlest kind of gallows humor — the pages overflow with that cathartic, bittersweet feeling you get when you're telling someone about the worst day of your life, and you're both laughing because the list of catastrophes just keeps going.

Not Here to Make Friends In the long and painful stretches of this year, when too many things were happening, I was drawn to romances that defy despair, like this masterly novel set behind the scenes of a reality dating show. Lily, a widow, is a ball of fury and vengeance, bouncing gloriously off the producer Murphy's cutthroat manipulation of the other contestants. They're not good people, but they're great fun to watch as they bend every rule they can.

Rules for Ghosting By Shelly Jay Shore For top-notch drama, this year's medal goes to "Rules for Ghosting." Ezra is trying to move forward with a new apartment and a new crush, but his family's needs and the ghost of his crush's dead husband keep tangling him up in the past. Funeral homes have become increasingly visible as romance settings since the pandemic; here actual ghosts haunt the quiet and tender moments, and it's the scenes at family holidays that leave you rattled and gasping.

A Love Song for Ricki Wilde We edge further into light supernatural with this not-quite time-slip romance that stretches from the Harlem Renaissance to the modern day. Charming and vibrant, this is one of those novels where the author's powers make you doubt, just a little, that the magic trick is going to work this time. That delicious bite of uncertainty makes Ricki and Ezra's final chapters so much sweeter.

Time and Tide By J.M. Frey Time travel and time-slips are coming back into vogue and two novels really stood out for me, to the point where I couldn't choose between them. "The Ministry of Time" pulls historical figures into the near future, where inevitable romantic entanglements complicate a mysterious governmental project.

"Time and Tide" sends a modern disaster bi back in time to meet an authoress bound by the homophobic social taboos of Austen's England. Bradley's book is sci-fi dystopia, while Frey's curtsies to the bonkers, bodice-ripping yarns of Johanna Lindsey and Bertrice Small. But both stories fascinate by committing to the idea that chronological dislocation is a kind of violence, and not being afraid to get a little messy about it.

The Earl Who Isn't Milan wraps up her Wedgeford Trials series with characteristic wit in this novel, in which an earl's secret son and a firebrand with a printing press grapple with long-simmering passion in a majority-Asian town in Victorian England. (I feel about Wedgeford the same way I feel about Terry Pratchett's Ankh-Morpork: I know it's not a real place, but it ought to be.) We deserve more gorgeously written books that care this much about joy, justice, community and the world.

A Shore Thing Lowell's novel, full of uncommon delights, brings us a trans painter turned bicycle mechanic, a stubborn widowed botanist in need of the painter's artistic skills and an excuse for a bicycle race down the Cornish coast. We also have conversations about the arts and sciences, and about fearing you'll never rediscover inspiration once you've let it slip through your fingers.

Marske's newest fantasy takes place in a city teeming with guild politics and competition where a wool merchant's son, Matti, hires a swordsman for his upcoming wedding, then finds himself falling for the swordsman instead of the bride. But Luca is more than a simple swordsman, and his secrets cause a surprising amount of trouble. This one's spicy and heisty and cozy in just the right balance.

Long Live Evil By Sarah Rees Brennan Finally, we have Brennan's brash and bloody "Long Live Evil." Rae, 19, leaves behind a body dying of cancer and is reborn as the villainess in her favorite fantasy series, where she proceeds to try to rewrite the narrative with shamelessly self-interested brio. Technically this isn't a finished romance — it ends on an unpulled punch of a cliffhanger, and I am happy to show off the bruise until we get Book No. 2. The gorgeous, smoldering rage at the heart of this story will keep me warm all winter.