The Best Romance Books

The best romance books of 2020 (so far) as recommended by Frannie Cassano, winner of the 2018 RWA Cathie Linz Librarian of the Year award. After nearly two decades as a librarian, she remains an avid reader of romance and picks out her favourite 'comfort reads' from across the genre.

Romance: it’s one of the bestselling and most widely-read genres, with thousands of books published each year. But where to start? And which books are at the cutting edge of the genre? We turned to Frannie Strober Cassano, the Romance Writers of America’s 2018 Librarian of the Year, for her choice of the best new romances published in the past 12 months.

From Jane Austen to James Baldwin, the best love stories in literature recommended by Jenny Davidson, novelist, historian and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.