The 7 best romance novels of summer 2024

Romance novels are all about escapism — taking you away from the troubles of this world to get lost in a good love story with a guaranteed happy ending.

As such, they're also often the stuff of fantasy, tales about wealthy dukes or wildly successful entrepreneurs. But the novels of summer 2024 travel a bit off the beaten path, telling love stories of oft-ignored subjects like those in financial precarity, working class Native Americans, 19th-century harlots and impotent earls, a worker in a pharmacy shop, and camp counselors.

It's refreshing to see these tales that emphasize the possibilities and optimism of romance no matter your financial circumstances. Here are our seven favorite romance novels of summer 2024.

01 of 07

One Last Summer by Kate Spencer

Kate Spencer returns with a book so drenched in summer you can practically smell the sunscreen and bug spray oozing from its pages. Clara Millen is in free fall, clinging to her job as a lifeline despite being in a state of complete burnout. But when her boss forces her to take a sabbatical, it clears the way for her to spend her summer with her best friends at their childhood sleepaway camp. When Clara gets there, she’s beset with challenges — her BFF is distant, her longtime frenemy (and crush) Mack has only become hotter with age, and worst of all, the camp’s beloved owners have decided to sell it to glamping developers. As the group tries to rekindle some of the magic of their teenage summers for the last time, Clara begins to realize that she’s been prioritizing all the wrong things. She reopens herself to the possibilities of life, including a relationship with Mack (and if you aren’t already feeling the summer heat, just wait for the boathouse scene). Spencer’s book is as much about friendship as it is romantic love, but that doesn’t make it any less swoony. As Clara faces her fears and luxuriates in the waters of the lake, she relearns how to listen to her heart. Spencer perfectly depicts the embers of a person’s soul when they’re in full burnout mode, while lovingly illuminating a path forward. It’s not a new concept — that reconnecting with old friends and spending time in nature will help you slow down and assess what really matters. But it is tender, emotional, and refreshing in the way she presents it. Our lives are tinged with nostalgia, a desire to cling to the way things were. Here, Spencer crafts a loving ode to honoring those memories and surrounding ourselves with the people and experiences we love while learning how to embrace the future. One Last Summer makes us long for those quiet moments and celebrates building a life that makes space for them in big ways and small.

Heat Rating: 🔥🔥🔥🔥

Grade: A

02 of 07

The Mistress Experience by Scarlett Peckham

Scarlett Peckham concludes her Society of Sirens series with her most ambitious, deeply romantic title yet. Thaïs Magadalene is a renowned courtesan in London, taking only one lover a week and never accepting the same patron twice. But when she puts an entire month with her up for auction to raise funds for women’s rights, she finds herself shipped off to the country in the company of Lord Alastair Eden, an upright earl and well-respected radical politician. Eden suffers from sexual dysfunction, including struggles with impotence and a lack of knowledge in how to satisfy a woman — so, he hires Thaïs to teach him to overcome this challenge so that he might wed a well-bred young lady. He just doesn’t count on falling in love with the notorious woman in his bed. Peckham delves into the subject of impotence and sexual dysfunction with empathy and heart, a refreshing turn of events in the romance genre where we often expect heroes to be well-endowed bedroom pros. She takes care to understand Eden’s root traumas and symptoms, so that finding a solution is a shared process of discovery between Eden and Thaïs. There’s no waving of a magic wand, where one good tumble with Thaïs solves all his issues. Instead, Peckham looks at sex as an innately complex and intimate act, while never casting judgment on Thaïs’s career and pursuit of pleasure. Like so many of Peckham’s characters, Eden and Thaïs defy expectations — it’s what fuels their connection. While her previous two books in the series have been filled with righteous female rage, The Mistress Experience is something altogether softer. Thaïs may delight in bedsport, but the thing she desires most is a husband, children, and a family. From nights making love in the garden to Eden nursing Thaïs back to health, the book bursts with moments of quiet connection and care. Here, true pleasure, open-heartedness, and emotional authenticity are as crucial in the fight for a more equal world as more overt acts of revolution. Where Peckham’s other heroines in this series raged against inequities and torched expectations, Thaïs reminds readers that love — and the courage it takes to choose it — can be its own radical act.

Heat Rating: 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

Grade: A

03 of 07

Marriage and Masti by Nisha Sharma

Nisha Sharma wraps up her Shakespeare-inspired rom-com trilogy with this fun, touching reimagining of Twelfth Night. Veera Mathur has endured everything from a shipwreck (literally) to watching her best friend and love of her life, Deepak Datta, get engaged to someone else to being fired from a job that she once thought was her family legacy. So when Deepak’s fiancee dumps him via social media video, Veera and Deepak drunkenly enter into a fake marriage that might be the answer to their career woes. Sharma writes so beautifully of familial expectations, culture and tradition. It’s a fascinating, even radical decolonization of Shakespeare, taking the values of Elizabethan England and translating them into those of contemporary Indian families. In Marriage and Masti, that comes to a head as Veera wrestles with her father’s expectations that she become a wife and nothing more. Meanwhile, Deepak sees Veera for the force of nature that she is, igniting a flame between them. Sharma expertly crafts Deepak’s gradual realization that Veera has been the one for him all along, while poignantly painting Veera’s yearning and the complications their fake relationship brings. She also knows how to write a toe-curling bedroom scene (this book isn’t inspired by Romeo and Juliet, but Sharma gives new meaning to the words “balcony scene”). Twelfth Night is a play about identity and seeing people for who they really are — Sharma takes that theme and the bones of the play to craft a swoony, heartfelt, deeply clever romance. It is Deepak and Veera who must learn to see and trust each other above all others. A scary prospect to be sure, but one that Sharma reaffirms is a risk worth taking with the right person at your side. Sharma could reimagine the entire first folio if she wanted to, with the depth and insight she brings to some of Western society’s best loved plays.

Heat Rating: 🔥🔥🔥🔥

Grade: A-

04 of 07

Pardon My Frenchie by Farrah Rochon

With Pardon My Frenchie, Farrah Rochon delivers the feel-good read of the summer. Ashanti Wright can hardly believe the monumental success of her dog boarding business, Barkingham Palace. Partly because she barely has time to sleep with the demand for her new dog treats, Duchess Delights. Things get even more complicated when Ashanti’s dog Duchess and another guest at the daycare, Puddin’, create a viral moment sharing a dog treat a la Lady and the Tramp. Soon, Ashanti is thrust into a media frenzy alongside the grumpy-but-attractive Thaddeus Sims, who is taking care of Puddin’ for his grandmother. Thad can barely stand dogs, but he does like the look of Ashanti, even if they’re after the same piece of property in New Orleans for their respective businesses. There are some deeper themes here, ranging from infidelity to guardianship rights to the struggles of veterans to adapt to civilian life, but by and large, Rochon has crafted a delight as confectionary as its cotton-candy pink cover. The antics of Duchess and Puddin’ and the various pooches in the novel are diverting and winsome, while the romance between Thad and Ashanti is easy and sexy. Rochon’s books always boast a homey quality, as if a reader could pour a glass of wine and share an evening of easy banter with any one of her characters. Pardon My Frenchie is no exception, with its tale of puppy love (for both dogs and humans).

Heat Rating: 🔥🔥🔥🔥

Grade: A-

05 of 07

The Truth According to Ember by Danica Nava

Danica Nava makes her debut with this warm, funny tale that tracks one young woman’s struggles to succeed — and the web of lies that surrounds her. When Ember Lee Cardinal hits a wall with job application rejections, she decides to take matters into her own hands and exaggerate how far along she is in her degree program (as well as to hide her Native American identity). Her tactics work and soon, she has a dream job at a tech start-up that comes with the added bonus of Danuwoa Colson, the super hot “Native Daddy” IT guy. Ember and Dan connect immediately, but her lies begin to spin out of control as she worries about their office’s no-workplace-romance rules. When a scheming colleague catches them kissing, Ember is drawn into a blackmail scheme that threatens to derail her entire life. Nava’s voice is cheeky, bursting with a distinctly personal style, and she brings Ember to life with compassion and humor. Ember could easily be “unlikable” with her penchant for fibbing and her inability to help herself, but Nava always justifies her heroine’s choices and gives readers an empathetic protagonist. Threaded throughout the novel is an acknowledgement of the racism and obstacles they have both endured as Native Americans. With Ember, Nava not only crafts a heroine who defies stereotypes, but one who must gradually realize the value and support of her community. The Truth According to Ember offers readers a modern Native American love story, one that embraces and illuminates the realities of what it is to be a Native person in the U.S., while delivering a heartfelt happy ending.

Heat Rating: 🔥🔥🔥🔥

Grade: A-

06 of 07

Ne'er Duke Well by Alexandra Vasti

All hail a new (and most welcome) voice in the historical romance space. Alexandra Vasti makes her debut with this absolute romp. Peter Kent, the newly minted Duke of Stanhope, is a stranger to British society, having been born and raised in the swamps of New Orleans. But when he wants to become the legal guardian of his half-siblings, he’s in dire need of respectability. Lady Selina Ravenscroft decides to help him by finding him a wife who’s the portrait of propriety, which is most decidedly not her since she secretly runs an erotic lending library. But between tumbles into the Serpentine in Hyde Park and being caught in a passionate embrace in the library, Selina and Peter simply cannot resist the crackle of their chemistry. Vasti writes with a warm, whimsical voice, underscoring her hysterical interludes and cutting asides with a deep well of emotions. Both Selina and Peter have endured loss, and their desire to protect each other and Peter’s siblings stems from their own loneliness and yearning to fix what can never be healed. They are deliciously amusing characters, who find themselves in hysterically compromising positions. But they also possess an abundance of heart and compassion that makes them easy to root for. Vasti’s sense of humor aligns well with the likes of Martha Waters, combining the cutting wit of Jane Austen with a slightly more unhinged sense of modern high jinks. Ne’er Duke Well left us with only one question — what’s next?

Heat Rating: 🔥🔥🔥🔥

Grade: A-

07 of 07

The Love of My Afterlife by Kirsty Greenwood

This madcap romantic comedy may just be the romance novel of the summer, with its unique, funny, and heartfelt tale. When Delphie dies choking on a burger, she ends up in the afterlife waiting room, only to meet her soulmate — Jonah, a temporary unconscious visitor. Intrigued by their connection and a hopeless romantic herself, Merritt, Delphie’s afterlife orientation counselor, sends Delphie back to Earth with instructions to get Jonah to kiss her within the next 10 days and get a second chance at life. If she fails, it’s back to the great beyond. But as Delphie begins to climb outside her introverted shell, befriending her neighbor Cooper, she starts to realize that Jonah isn’t the only reason she wants to keep living. Greenwood’s premise is slightly bonkers and all the more delightful for it, as Delphie tries to make good on a deal not unlike the one the little mermaid made. Greenwood has a screamingly delicious wit; nailing everything from the odd scenarios in which Delphie finds herself (a “from life” drawing class, for example, and a showtunes karaoke piano bar) to the crackling banter between the characters. The book is also swooningly romantic, leaning on romance tropes with a self-aware glee (and citing some of the best writers in the biz). But what really makes the book a sparkling gem is the ways in which it understands the differences between existing and truly living. Delphie’s life is a sad, closed-off existence designed by trauma and abandonment. But while trying to find her soulmate, she discovers her own soul — and the things she needs to make it gleam (companionship, friendship, kindness). Who among us hasn’t wished for a second chance at something in our lives? Delphie actually gets one, and with it, the perspective of what it means to live fully and joyfully. There’s heaps of heart here, too, as well as tear-jerking meditations on grief and the ways in which parts of ourselves die with those we lose. But above all, The Love of My Afterlife is a deliriously funny and earnest love letter to connection and the ways it gives our lives meaning.

Heat Rating: 🔥🔥🔥🔥

Grade: A