The Bromance Book Club

Lyssa Kay Adams's The Bromance Book Club is built around Gavin Scott, a professional baseball player whose career is going well and whose marriage is not. Gavin discovers that his wife, Thea, has been pretending for the whole of their marriage that their physical relationship was something it was not, and he reacts badly. Thea, who is tired of adjusting herself to fit him, asks for a divorce, and Gavin finally works out how much of the trouble he has caused. He decides he will do anything to win her back, including asking his friends for advice.

What he does not expect is a cryptic invitation to a secret club. The club gathers athletes from across Nashville who spend their time reading, analysing and learning from romance novels, and Gavin's first assignment is a book about courting a countess. From that reading he assembles a plan for his own household, full of declarations and gestures, while Thea has reasons of her own for being finished with compromise.

The novel is a comic sports romance set in Nashville and was published in 2019, opening a series of books built around the members of the club and the novels they study. Gavin's strategy, drawn from the books he is given, is long on florid declarations and showy gestures, and he turns out to be considerably better with a baseball bat than he is with a bouquet of flowers.