By Pooja Makhijani May 28, 2021 New books send their romantic leads across the country and around the globe for their happily ever afters. Wander, Lust: Romance Books 2021 By Pooja Makhijani | May 28, 2021
Romance novels have always offered a portal to lands unknown or far away, and after a year plus of groundings and lockdowns, a number of forthcoming novels lean into this escapism.
In December 2019, when K.M. Jackson learned that
The Matrix 4 and
John Wick 4 were both scheduled to release on the same day in 2021, she tweeted, “Note to self & editors: don’t release your book around #KeanuDay in 2021. Unless of course it’s that How to Marry Keanu in 90 days rom-com you just thought of then go ahead and release that. (side note to self: write that because it sounds terrific!).”
Sweet, Sexy and Rebellious: Summer’s New Romance Novels
Mainstream publishers are fully embracing queer love stories, our columnist writes: “I would call it an embarrassment of riches but what it really is, of course, is pride.”
Credit.Ryan Gillett
May 27, 2021
Time was I could have covered every queer romance novel put out by mainstream publishers and still have had room to spare in this column. Small and independent presses have been nurturing L.G.B.T.Q. romance authors forever, and digital self-publishing opened up still more doors, but up until very recently, the big traditional houses had far more queer villains than queer romance leads.