The big romance shelf: courts and dragons, small towns and offices, and every kind of love story in between, from the established names to books published this year. 676 books so far, across 159 series, plus 428 titles with no series listed. This is page 15 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonThe Concubine is the first novel by the Nigerian writer Elechi Amadi, published in 1966 in the Heinemann African Writers Series. It is set in a village in eastern Nigeria that European influence has not yet reached, and it tells of a woman of great beauty whose lovers come to grief.
Rating coming soonDarker is an erotic romance by E. L. James, published in 2017 as the fifth book in the Fifty Shades series. Where the earlier novels were told by Anastasia Steele, this one retells the second of them from the point of view of Christian Grey, and it begins with him trying to win her back.
Rating coming soonBecause of Miss Bridgerton is a Regency romance by Julia Quinn, published in 2016 and the first of her books about the Rokesby family. Billie Bridgerton is expected to marry one of the neighbouring brothers, and the one she cannot abide is the one she ends up thrown together with. The series takes place a generation before the Bridgerton novels.
Rating coming soonLucy and Gabe meet in their final year at Columbia, on an afternoon that neither of them forgets, and they agree that the years ahead should count for something. A year later they meet again, and it looks as though they might find that purpose in each other. Then Gabe takes a job as a photojournalist in the Middle East and Lucy builds a career in New York, and the next thirteen years are spent in different countries, in other relationships, and in a conversation neither of them finishes.
Romance is a genre here, not a mood. A book belongs on this shelf when the relationship is the spine of the story rather than a subplot, and the reader is meant to care about whether it works out. Everything else, the setting and the era and the magic, sits underneath that.
That makes this the widest shelf in the library, because romance is written into every kind of world. Two flavours get their own tag rather than their own genre: romantasy, where the romance and a fantasy world carry the book together, and contemporary romance, where the love story happens in the modern real world. Fantasy romance without the world-building weight, historical romance and romantic comedy all belong here as well; the tag is a way to narrow the shelf, not a separate shelf.
Tags are cross-cutting markers, not genres. They have their own landing pages.
Epic quests, grimdark cities, retold myths and a few very stubborn rabbits.
685 booksPrimary genreGeneration ships, dying empires, robots with opinions and one very unlucky astronaut.
536 booksPrimary genreHaunted houses, old vampires, cosmic dread and the odd very bad week.
381 booksPrimary genreDetectives, spies, locked rooms and the people who lie to the police.
599 booksPrimary genreCathedrals, courts, trenches and revolutions, all of it set in a past that is doing the work.
580 booksPrimary genreNovels where the prose carries the book: families, cities, memory and the modern self.
575 booksPrimary genreShipwrecks, expeditions, chases, frontiers and people who should have turned back.
324 books