Trending Romantic Fantasy Books
Beloved (Released: January 1987)
Author(s): Toni Morrison, A.S. Byatt (Introduction)
Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover
Rating: 3.91 (309 Ratings, 31 Reviews)
Pages: 362
Toni Morrison--author of Song of Solomon and Tar Baby--is a writer of remarkable powers: her novels, brilliantly acclaimed for their passion, their dazzling language and their lyric and emotional force, combine the unassailable truths of experience and emotion with the vision of legend and imagination. It is the story--set in post-Civil War Ohio--of Sethe, an escaped slave who has risked death in order to wrench herself from a living death; who has lost a husband and buried a child; who has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad: a woman of "iron eyes and backbone to match." Sethe lives in a small house on the edge of town with her daughter, Denver, her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, and a disturbing, mesmerizing intruder who calls herself Beloved. Sethe works at "beating back the past," but it is alive in all of them. It keeps Denver fearful of straying from the house. It fuels the sadness that has settled into Baby Suggs' "desolated center where the self that was no self made its home." And to Sethe, the past makes itself heard and felt incessantly: in memories that both haunt and soothe her...in the arrival of Paul D ("There was something blessed in his manner. Women saw him and wanted to weep"), one of her fellow slaves on the farm where she had once been kept...in the vivid and painfully cathartic stories she and Paul D tell each other of their years in captivity, of their glimpses of freedom...and, most powerfully, in the apparition of Beloved, whose eyes are expressionless at their deepest point, whose doomed childhood belongs to the hideous logic of slavery and who, as daughter, sister and seductress, has now come from the "place over there" to claim retribution for what she lost and for what was taken from her. Sethe's struggle to keep Beloved from gaining full possession of her present--and to throw off the long, dark legacy of her past--is at the center of this profoundly affecting and startling novel. But its intensity and resonance of feeling, and the boldness of its narrative, lift it beyond its particulars so that it speaks to our experience as an entire nation with a past of both abominable and ennobling circumstance. In Beloved, Toni Morrison has given us a great American novel. Toni Morrison was awarded the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in Literature for Beloved.
Genre(s): African Americans, Fiction, Classics, Women, African American women, General, Adventure, Romance, Fantasy, History
Love in the Time of Cholera (Released: January 1985)
Author(s): Gabriel García Márquez, Edith Grossman (Translator)
Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover
Rating: 3.80 (311 Ratings, 38 Reviews)
Pages: 348
De jóvenes, Florentino Ariza y Fermina Daza se enamoran apasionadamente, pero Fermina eventualmente decide casarse con un médico rico y de muy buena familia. Florentino está anonadado, pero es un romántico. Su carrera en los negocios florece, y aunque sostiene 622 pequeños romances, su corazón todavía pertenece a Fermina. Cuando al fin el esposo de ella muere, Florentino acude al funeral con toda intención. A los cincuenta años, nueve meses y cuatro días de haberle profesado amor a Fermina, lo hará una vez más. Con sagacidad humorística y depurado estilo, García Márquez traza la historia excepcional de un amor que no ha sido correspondido por medio siglo. Aunque nunca parece estar propiamente contenido, el amor fluye a través de la novela de mil maneras –alegre, melancólico, enriquecedor, siempre sorprendente-.
Genre(s): Fiction, Family, Romance, Spanish, Romance fiction, Portuguese language materials, Colombia
Fifty Shades Darker (Released: January 2011)
Author(s): E.L. James
Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover
Rating: 3.13 (263 Ratings, 20 Reviews)
Pages: 383
After a brief break-up, Anastasia and Christian change their arrangement and both wrestle with their inner demons, as Anastasia tries to make an important decision.
Genre(s): Fantasy, Fiction, Romance, Erotic stories, American fiction
Haunting Adeline (Released: January 2021)
Author(s): H. D. Carlton
Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover
Rating: 3.46 (254 Ratings, 56 Reviews)
Pages: 549
The Manipulator I can manipulate the emotions of anyone who lets me. I will make you hurt, make you cry, make you laugh and sigh. But my words don't affect him. Especially not when I plead for him to leave. He's always there, watching and waiting. And I can never look away. Not when I want him to come closer. The Shadow I didn't mean to fall in love. But now that I have, I can't stay away. I'm mesmerized by her smile, by her eyes, and the way she moves. The way she undresses... I'll keep watching and waiting. Until I can make her mine. And once she is, I'll never let her go. Not even when she begs me to.
Genre(s): Romance, Fiction, Fantasy, Erotic romance, Contemporary Romance
Butcher & Blackbird (Released: August 2023)
Author(s): Brynne Weaver
Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover
Rating: 4.00 (256 Ratings, 66 Reviews)
Pages: 355
When a chance encounter sparks an unlikely bond between rival murderers Sloane and Rowan, they find something elusive—the friendship of two like-minded, pitch-black souls who just happen to enjoy killing other serial killers. From small-town West Virginia to upscale California, and from downtown Boston to rural Texas, the two hunters collide in an annual game of blood and suffering, one that pits them against the most dangerous monsters in the country. But as their friendship develops into something more, the restless ghosts left in their wake are only a few steps behind, ready to claim more than just their newfound love. Can Rowan and Sloane dig themselves out of a game of graves? Or have they finally met their match?
Genre(s): Romance, Fiction, Fantasy
After Dark (Released: January 2004)
Author(s): Haruki Murakami, Jay Rubin (Translator)
Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover
Rating: 3.65 (264 Ratings, 31 Reviews)
Pages: 191
A short, sleek novel of encounters set in the witching hours of Tokyo between midnight and dawn, and every bit as gripping as Haruki Murakami’s masterworks The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore. At its center are two sisters: Yuri, a fashion model sleeping her way into oblivion; and Mari, a young student soon led from solitary reading at an anonymous Denny’s into lives radically alien to her own: those of a jazz trombonist who claims they’ve met before; a burly female “love hotel” manager and her maidstaff; and a Chinese prostitute savagely brutalized by a businessman. These “night people” are haunted by secrets and needs that draw them together more powerfully than the differing circumstances that might keep them apart, and it soon becomes clear that Yuri’s slumber–mysteriously tied to the businessman plagued by the mark of his crime – will either restore or annihilate her. After Dark moves from mesmerizing drama to metaphysical speculation, interweaving time and space as well as memory and perspective into a seamless exploration of human agency – the interplay between self-expression and understanding, between the power of observation and the scope of compassion and love. Murakami’s trademark humor, psychological insight, and grasp of spirit and morality are here distilled with an extraordinary, harmonious mastery.
Genre(s): Fiction, Fantasy, Romance, General, Magical Realism, Psychological, Classics, Fiction / General, Fiction / Family Life / Siblings, Fiction / City Life
Fifty Shades Freed (Released: January 2011)
Author(s): E.L. James
Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover
Rating: 3.13 (245 Ratings, 26 Reviews)
Pages: 579
Believing they've left behind the shadowy figures from the past, billionaire Christian Grey and his new wife, Anastasia, fully embrace their inextricable connection and shared life of luxury. But just as the Grey's begin to step into their new roles, sinister events come to light and jeopardize their happy ending before it even begins.
Genre(s): Fantasy, Fiction, Romance, English fiction
Sputnik Sweetheart (Released: January 1999)
Author(s): Haruki Murakami, Philip Gabriel (Translator)
Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover
Rating: 3.83 (223 Ratings, 17 Reviews)
Pages: 210
K is madly in love with his best friend, Sumire, but her devotion to a writerly life precludes her from any personal commitments. At least, that is, until she meets an older woman to whom she finds herself irresistibly drawn. When Sumire disappears from an island off the coast of Greece, K is solicited to join the search party—and finds himself drawn back into her world and beset by ominous visions.
Genre(s): Romance, Fantasy, Fiction, General, LGBTQ, Philosophical Fiction, Classics, Businesswomen, Drama, Missing persons
The Ex Hex (Released: September 2021)
Author(s): Erin Sterling
Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover
Rating: 3.51 (242 Ratings, 55 Reviews)
Pages: 308
New York Times bestselling author Rachel Hawkins, writing as Erin Sterling, casts a spell with a spine-tingling romance full of wishes, witches, and hexes gone wrong. Nine years ago, Vivienne Jones nursed her broken heart like any young witch would: vodka, weepy music, bubble baths…and a curse on the horrible boyfriend. Sure, Vivi knows she shouldn’t use her magic this way, but with only an “orchard hayride” scented candle on hand, she isn’t worried it will cause him anything more than a bad hair day or two. That is until Rhys Penhallow, descendent of the town’s ancestors, breaker of hearts, and annoyingly just as gorgeous as he always was, returns to Graves Glen, Georgia. What should be a quick trip to recharge the town’s ley lines and make an appearance at the annual fall festival turns disastrously wrong. With one calamity after another striking Rhys, Vivi realizes her silly little Ex Hex may not have been so harmless after all. Suddenly, Graves Glen is under attack from murderous wind-up toys, a pissed off ghost, and a talking cat with some interesting things to say. Vivi and Rhys have to ignore their off the charts chemistry to work together to save the town and find a way to break the break-up curse before it’s too late.
Genre(s): Fantasy, Fiction, Romance
Neon Gods (Released: June 2021)
Author(s): Katee Robert
Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover
Rating: 3.51 (220 Ratings, 35 Reviews)
Pages: 380
Society darling Persephone Dimitriou plans to flee the ultra-modern city of Olympus and start over far from the backstabbing politics of the Thirteen Houses. But all that’s ripped away when her mother ambushes her with an engagement to Zeus, the dangerous power behind their glittering city’s dark facade. With no options left, Persephone flees to the forbidden undercity and makes a devil’s bargain with a man she once believed a myth... a man who awakens her to a world she never knew existed. Hades has spent his life in the shadows, and he has no intention of stepping into the light. But when he finds that Persephone can offer a little slice of the revenge he’s spent years craving, it’s all the excuse he needs to help her—for a price. Yet every breathless night spent tangled together has given Hades a taste for Persephone, and he’ll go to war with Olympus itself to keep her close… A modern retelling of Hades and Persephone that’s as sinful as it is sweet.
Genre(s): Romance, Fantasy, Dark Romance, Retellings, LGBTQ, Fiction, Juvenile Fiction