Oh a brief chill in the air? A hot drink in one hand? A crunchy leaf on the ground to give you a boost of serotonin? It must be autumn! We need not argue over which season is the best (the fall). Instead, I’m here to discuss the romances of autumn. The autumnances if you will. I am LOVING how many books this season feel like the essence of autumn. Either by way of a books atmosphere, the tropes, or the characters. The fall romances are screaming autumn this year and I couldn’t be more happy about it. In preparation for sharing this list I read through a new romance every night for a week and a half. Lot’s of ghosts, magic, small towns, and of course, yearning to keep me happy. Typical for me, 90% of these are upcoming romances for the season so please consider preordering my recommendations or purchasing them when they hit shelves. Let the fall reading commence!
Disclosure: going forward I will be linking my Bookshop affiliate link below my reviews. I earn a small commission if you purchase books through this link and it is one way to support my reviewing! My affiliate link will simply be labeled “Bookshop.”
If It Makes You Happy by Julie Olivia
Fall goodness meets small town Vermont in If It Makes You Happy, a romance novel of 90’s nostalgia, timeless tropes, and Gilmore Girls fame. Down after her divorce, Michelle Cadell throws herself into the runnings of Bird & Breakfast, the B&B her mother ran in the (not so) quiet town of Copper Run, Vermont. Her reception from guests is less than savory, if the lack of signings in her guest book and the inedible scones she’s been serving for breakfast is any indication. A mutually beneficial deal: baked goods in exchange for babysitting puts Michelle in close quarters with her neighbor Cliff: single father and owner of the local bakery. The two become not just best friends, but true partners—that is if Michelle can see Copper Run as her forever home. Billed as perfect for Gilmore Girls fans and lovers of the autumnal slow burn, If It Makes You Happy is everything I’ve come to love about the small town romance, set in one of my favorite places on earth: Vermont. A fictitious town with a not so fictitious larger than life quality to it, I quickly fell into the happenings of Copper Run and its inhabitants. Julie Olivia paints the small town with that Hallmark-esque quality: city girl goes to a small town and falls in love with the next door neighbor while trying to succeed in running her mothers bed and breakfast. If It Makes You Happy grounds itself in familiar tropes to build a multi-faceted story of, yes, love, but also building a life where you’d least expect it. I really appreciate how much Michelle and Cliff feel like 30-somethings still figuring out life, struggling, failing, and eventually triumphing overall. This is a true friends to lovers as well, and Olivia provides this friendship unadulterated with romance because the romance is baked into their tremendous bond. Looking for love amid the falling leaves, small town coziness, and nosy neighbors? Look no further.
Buy a Copy:
Uncharmed by Lucy Jane Wood
More witchy goodness from the witchy author herself, Lucy Jane Wood, means fall is officially here. Taking readers back to an alternate London where magic thrives in spades and witches abound, Lucy Jane Wood’s, Uncharmed sees Andromeda “Annie” Wildwood, witch, bakery proprietor, best friend, and confidant’s perfectly curated life completely fall apart when her coven tasks her with training an unruly teen witch at a cabin in the middle of nowhere. Away from her routine Annie casts off the trappings of her old life—one spell in particular, to determine what is serving her, and what is ultimately serving others. Uncharmed certainly re-enlivens the magic Lucy Jane Wood first captured with her stellar debut, Rewitched, but with an entirely new, potent flavor. Its magic diluted in its strongest form upon the page and it is easy to get swept up in the spells, secret societies, and the utterly delicious confections and baked goods. While complete with a romance subplot to die for, Uncharmed focuses most of its attention on the character of Annie and her relentless people pleasing tendencies and overall perfectionism. Annie’s strive for perfection comes at the expense of her autonomy—literally, as she douses herself daily with a spell to help her meet the impossible expectations she, and others, have set for her. The spell keeps her placid, able to be what others need without her emotions and beliefs interfering. Yet, stuck in the woods with an orphaned witch is all it takes for that to come crashing down, for good this time. Lucy Jane Wood’s witchy novels find harmony with intimate character studies, cozy atmosphere, and romance perfectly mixed and baked to perfection. Uncharmed is proof that Wood is only getting better and better and this found family story with magical creatures and a cottage in the woods is heartwarming as it is magical!
Buy a Copy:
Give Me A Reason by Jayci Lee
Jayci Lee reimagines Jane Austen’s Persuasion for the modern day in when Anne, a famous K-drama star, reunites with Frederick Nam, a dedicated firefighter captain and the man she was persuaded to give up ten years ago. Frederick has every reason to hate Anne for breaking his heart a decade ago, and he has spent just as long forgetting her, but her return to his life brings forth all the feelings he buried. Ten years may have not changed their affection, but wounds are still fresh and a second chance will mean excising everything that led to their breakup and deciding if they have what it takes for a happily ever after. Jayci Lee’s reimagining of Persuasion hits all the notes for a perfect second chance romance and Austen retelling. We have family members being genuinely terrible (and some who are delightful), the meddlesome friends, longing, and characteristic melancholy of one Anne Lee. Give Me a Reason makes the Persuasion story entirely its own however, with wedding planning antics and firefighters instead of navy officers (because of course). Also in the connection between our two leads Anne and Frederick, which we learn wasn’t exactly perfect. Frederick based all of his hopes around Anne instead of his own life, and Anne still placed so much trust in her family—similar to the original novel. I love that we get Frederick’s perspective this time because I really do love seeing the torturous longing right from the source. Frederick is exactly what I want from a modernized Wentworth. He’s tortured with love for Anne, who he’s convinced has moved on, but who very much has not. Give Me a Reason is a perfect look at Austen’s greatest novel (sorry P&P), and yet another call for reimagined classics for the modern day—that keep the yearning.
Buy a Copy:
Love At First Sighting by Mallory Marlowe
The love child of the Ex Files and Men in Black, Love at First Sighting concerns a UFO sighting, a social media influencer, a government agent, and a conspiracy gone wrong and all of it is out of this world romantic. El Martin, aforementioned social media influencer, witnesses a UFO sighting that changes everything (if anyone would actually believe her). The only person who does is Carter Brody, agent for the Private Intelligence Sector tasked with keeping tabs on her. But Carter is drawn to El for more personal reasons: mainly the death of his father many years ago—who bore witness to the same object El saw careening through the sky only nights prior. With a UFO mystery afoot, Carter and El will become unlikely allies and unexpected partners and lovers, as they race to uncover the truth before it’s too late. If you like your romances served with an entire plate of chaos and absurdity (affectionate), then look no further than Mallory Marlowe’s latest, Love at First Sighting. I’m big on the unconventional duo’s and social media influencer x government agent has to be the icing on the unconventional cake. Love with a dash of the paranormal is always the right call especially for autumn and this one leans heavily into alien sightings and all the conspiracies you’ve read about. With a slower build, Love at First Sighting gives a lot to its two perspectives, El and Carter—how they are different, and what exactly makes them the best of partners even when they aren’t chasing down UFO’s and breaking and entering. Love within the quirks is something I have come to adore. Here it’s chewing gum, suspenders, and Carly Rae Jepsen songs, all of which are essential to the romance. This is a romance for those who don’t just think of extraterrestrial contact as a far off possibility, but know it’s here, and anyone craving more romance formed in the fire of the paranormal.
Buy a Copy:
Every Step She Takes by Alison Cochrun
Another year, another exemplary queer romance from author Alison Cochrun. Reupholsterer extraordinaire Sadie Wells is stuck—literally, running her grandmother’s antique furniture store after her passing while avoiding any adventure of her own. When her travel influencer sister is injured ahead of an important partnership, Sadie takes a leap and volunteers to take her place traveling the Camino de Santiago in Portugal. Except her dear sister neglected to mention it’s a tour for anyone who identifies as sapphic and Sadie is coming to the table fresh off a full blown sexual identity crisis. Additionally, the gorgeous woman she came out to on the plane is on the tour, and she’s made it clear she’s not one for anything more than a one time fling. If days and days of walking can change anything, that is. When I think of an author who not only provides unique queer love stories but leaves me constantly in my feels the person who immediately comes to mind: Alison Cochrun. Balancing a queer love story with self discovery, fraught familial relationships, and gorgeous scenery, Cochrun’s Every Step She Takes is a coming of age story with European adventure and lesbian romance all deliciously rolled together. There’s not enough words to describe how much I love this unabashedly queer book. From Sadie and her sister, Vi, to the people joining her on the Camino walk, and the tour host, an out and proud Trans woman. It’s what I needed to read right now and exactly the kind of affirmation that comes with reading this genre. Every Step She Takes is all about that: steps, the ones we take to get away, and the ones we take to reach for a new path. That change doesn’t always require a leap, but a step towards something better. Cochrun’s focus on queer adolescence as ever evolving and not contingent on time is a beautiful concept raised here. Witnessing it blossom in Sadie and even Mal, even more so.
Buy a Copy:
Once Upon a Time in Dollywood by Ashley Jordan
Playwright Eve Ambroise is running—far enough away to escape her mistakes and the failures that have broken her inside and out. To clean the slate, she breaks up with her fiance, Leo, and leaves behind her judgmental parents to travel to the Tennessee mountains under the guise of a writing retreat. In reality, she’s at the cabin formerly belonging to her grandmother, hoping to finish her next play and perhaps recover from the wounds of the past. Yet she finds unexpected company in her neighbor, Jamie, fresh off of a custody trial for his son and desperate for a break of his own. Jamie and Eve pursue a relationship on the weekends, between writing plays and raising children, but love may not outweigh their pasts or their present responsibilities. Once Upon a Time in Dollywood interrogates if two people can find healing through a romantic relationship, or if healing requires a more deliberate personal introspection and internal work on its own. As much a story of healing as it is a romance, Ashley Jordan’s debut novel is a multifaceted love story that encompasses the wonder, pain, and joy of our innate existence. Eve Ambroise is a troubled protagonist still grappling with grief of her teenage years—when her parents forced her to carry a baby to term and then put the child up for adoption. This keen sense of loss and a lack of closure follows her years on as she and her fiance try for kids and she experiences several miscarriages. Ashley Jordan focuses all of her attention on the personal growth of her two characters, Eve and Jamie, as they move out from feeling stagnant and stuck in trauma to breaking free of that cycle. Jordan’s message is clear: we don’t have to be wholly without trauma to enter into romantic connection, but there is a tremendous bravery in taking pause to pursue recovery and better serve ourselves and those we care about.
Buy a Copy:
A Waltz on the Wild Side by Erica Ridley
In Erica Ridley’s The Wild Wynchester’s the absurdity is alive and kicking and A Waltz on the Wild Side might just take the crown in that respect. A chaotic family of orphans adopted by a wealthy baron spend their lives investigating crimes, fighting injustice, and aiding the working class in regency London—finding love amidst conspiracies, heists, and castle sieges. At long last we have the book for my favorite, arguably the most chaotic Wynchester: Jacob. If you’ve ever found yourself asking: what if there was an animal with you all the time that you could train to aid in your crimes, Jacob has not only asked this, he has succeeded. With his menagerie of animals and secret famous poet lifestyle, Jacob meets his match in a playwright who carries a tarantula spider on her person for protection, can redirect flying daggers, and also has a tamed badger. Erica Ridley continues to brilliantly contrast the struggles of the working class, immigrants, and Black, queer, and disabled people in this historical romance series, and A Waltz on the Wild Side is her best by far. Vivian Henry, our heroine, is a former enslaved woman running her cousin’s household in Cheapside, writing plays in her off time. When her cousin disappears under mysterious circumstances she turns to the family everyone reveres (except for her) to bring him home. The tension between Viv, Jacob, and the rest of the Wynchester family is sublime. Ridley focuses on how our experiences shape our morality and our views on justice, enclosed within Vivian and Jacob’s romance and her views of his family’s calling. Vivian seeing herself as a product, only worth as much as she is useful is a harsh, but very real extension of her experiences in enslavement. Ridley elevates Viv’s liberation and Jacob’s personal aspirations in this gobsmackingly wild, fierce and swoonworthy historical. Wynchester’s forever!
Buy a Copy:
Soul Searching by Lyla Sage
Collins Cartwright is running from ghosts of the strictly metaphorical kind. The real ones have gone quiet. When she left Sweetwater Peak, Wyoming, to pursue photography she never expected to return on a permanent basis, but after being fired from her photography job she’s back in town, crashing in the resident upholsterer’s spare room until she figures things out. Yet with her constant companions gone quiet—the various ghosts that inhabit the town and its backwaters, her only company is the suspiciously uninteresting individual she’s currently renting from: Brady Cooper. Her solution: show him some adventure and maybe send her ghost block into the afterlife where it belongs. Only Lyla Sage could put ghost sightings, small towns, and romancing the new to town upholsterer after accidentally macing him together in one whirlwind romance novel. But Soul Searching is so perfectly Lyla Sage, centering another forgotten gem of a town and its struggling inhabitants finding their footing and reaching for love without reservation. All with a side of occasional ghost sightings. Soul Searching’s main characters Collins and Brady are the definition of slow romance. At the beginning they don’t even like each other, but intrigue wins out in the end. Soon they’re confiding in their pasts and previously mentioned ghostly abilities all while taking in the hidden spots of Sweetwater Peak side by side. Get you a man that makes nonstop Lord of the Rings references, can reupholster furniture, and is constantly in awe of you. Oh and pays no mind that you are constantly talking to the ghosts that have been ignoring you. It’s a romance with a side of paranormal the Lyla Sage way. Hot, spooky, and thrilling!
Buy a Copy:
It’s Different This Time by Joss Richard
Sometimes love is inheriting a six million dollar west village brownstone with your former friend and love of your life who looks a little bit like David Corenswet (niche people understand). That’s exactly where Joss Richard’s debut, It’s Different This Time begins. Two former best friends, Adam and June, are reunited after six years apart when they learn they’ve inherited their former apartment building after the death of the owner, their former landlord. Sell or keep, they’ll have to spend a month together before they can sign away ownership but that means facing what drove them to separate sides of the country six years ago. Ensuing your classic dual timelines where the past is flung wide, Joss Richard builds a friends to lovers saga where an aspiring chef and theatre actress/part time bookseller agreed to be roommates, but ended up becoming the best of friends. Adam and June really are that classic romance novel couple. Unlikely friends they may be, the friendship between them is unmistakable as is the support they lend each other across the years. Richard knows how to plot out an electrifying slow burn and with an entire decade since their first meeting, June and Adam are ripe for that angst and tension I need from my romances. It’s Different This Time feels like a When Harry Met Sally style story, both narratively, and in the relationship between June and Adam. Where the fall feels like a separate character—as does the city of New York. I love a dash of miscommunication in my fiction (for good health) and boy do we get that here. Really I expected nothing less from these two, but Richard grounds it in their individual pasts so it never feels overwrought, only typical of two people scared of change and scared to reach for what they want. It’s Different This Time is an impressive, nuanced love story between two people at first scared to try and then brave to start all over again. That it’s enough that it is different this time to hold onto a second chance with both hands.
Buy a Copy:
August Lane by Regina Black
Have you ever read a book that redefined romance for you? Because Regina Black’s, August Lane has done so for me. Luke Randall, a not so successful country music singer, has clung to relevancy on the back of a hit song he didn’t even write. Many years prior Luke met August Lane, daughter to a country music star, Jojo Lane. Luke and August burned fast and bright, while complicated family matters and issues in their Arkansas community pushed Luke to the outskirts where he had no choice but to leave it and August behind. Now Luke has been granted the opportunity to sing alongside Jojo Lane, but doing so will require his return to Arcadia and the person whose work he stole to make his name—August herself. When I say this book has enough angst to power a small town, I mean it. And that town is Arcadia, Arkansas. Second chance meets small town romance in Regina Black’s sophomore novel, a romance all about reconciliation and the messy, complicated side of resurrecting the past. August Lane has so much tied up in its central romance, drawing attention on Black musicians’ contributions to the country music genre, racism, grief, and the cycle of trauma—mainly women in motherhood and the impact on their children through neglect, abuse, and alcoholism. Regina Black continues to push boundaries within the romance genre with her flawed, imperfect characters who live loud and love not in spite of past wounds, but because of them. August Lane presents a melodic heart wrenching ballad between two people who find the strength to reunite and explore the chance of more—of writing their own love song together.
Buy a Copy:
To Heist and to Hold by Christina Britton
Sometimes you unexpectedly stumble upon a historical romance gem, and like the very gems our heroine seeks to recover at a scandalous gambling hell, I want to plan a heist around this entire book. New in an emerging series from Christina Britton, To Heist and to Hold has all the delightful accoutrement of the best historical romances. We have a widowed blacksmith attempting to seduce the owner of a gambling club, and we have that same stoic club owner choosing to succumb to her advances because of course you can better keep your eye on a widow you don’t trust by sleeping with her. Of course you can. But don’t let the utter hilarity fool you, To Heist and to Hold is a deeply emotional plunge into the physical and mental traumas of growing up on London’s streets, as well as the lives of widowed women socialized only to be useful and effectively cast out upon the deaths of their husbands. This book starts off with a smash as Heloise, our heroine, discharges a blade of her own invention (we love), and it really only gets better from there. Featuring a group of women—The Wimpole Street Widows, who use their position in society to solve cases, To Heist and to Hold brings an essential one: retrieve a missing ruby necklace from within a gambling hall. The plan: use the guise of a boxing event to do it—placing Heloise under the ire of Ethan Sinclaire, owner of Dionysus and the man she has been sent to seduce. What feels so refreshing about this novel isn’t just the quiet stoicism of our hero but the capable nature of our heroine, be that in a blacksmith forge, fencing, or methods of seduction. Ethan and Heloise soldier a lot of pain from their pasts, but love and an ill-timed heist force them out of the roles they’ve cloaked themselves in and into a brave, uncertain, certainly chaotic, future together.
Buy a Copy:
Sweet Heat by Bolu Babalola
Second chance romance lovers are going to feast on Bolu Babalola’s latest romance, Sweet Heat. After quitting her podcasting job, The HeartBeat, late twenty-something Kiki Banjo finds herself adrift at a time when she desperately craves control. Her relationship has stalled, her parents are selling their beloved restaurant, and her ex boyfriend is soon to be in town for the first time since their devastating breakup. Kiki decides to pour herself into planning her best friend’s wedding festivities, but the Best Man is none other than Malakai Korede, the man who broke her heart all those years ago. The chemistry is sizzling and the heat is still high, but for the sake of the wedding Kiki and Malakai will try to keep it all under wraps—or risk falling back into love and heartbreak. Bolu Babalola’s foray into the second chance romance arena is not to be outdone. From the moment Kiki and Malakai meet on page the angst is fierce and the wounds of the past are arrayed starkly upon the narrative. Babalola certainly takes her time to establish the perspective of Kikiola (our love interest Malakai does not even appear until after the first quarter) and the singular attention to this perspective is what makes the character work and the romance so strong in the later sections. The first part of this romance is all about the angst baby, and laying the foundation for the reconciliation between Kiki and Malakai which was in one word: sublime. Many have called Bolu Babalola the next great romance writer and Sweet Heat is proof she is worthy of the crown. This book bases the crux of the romance upon knowledge, the act of understanding someone at their marrow and the ache that is left in their absence. Phenomenal doesn’t even begin to cover Sweet Heat. It is a romance triumph!
Buy a Copy:
Literaryrobin 
[…] Robin always has great recommendations, so I was super excited to see her Autumn Romance Recs […]
LikeLike
[…] Lets Talk : Romances for Autumn ⇉ The Last Page […]
LikeLike
I just finished It’s Different This Time and it truly ticks all the right boxes! I just added If It Makes You Happy to my TBR and Give Me A Reason also looks good. I LOVE Persuasion ❤
LikeLike