Culture
Steamy Romance Books To Cozy Up With This Winter
As far as I’m concerned, there is no bad time to read a cozy book, especially a cozy romance. But winter seems particularly perfect, doesn’t it? When it’s cold out, our bodies remind us that our ancient ancestors spent the season slowing down, recharging and cocooning themselves in warmth, and a chilly night is the perfect time to curl up at home with a book that helps you do just that. Here is a list of books that warm the heart and heal the soul — and some of them are steamy!
By Talia Hibbert
We’re off to a strong start with one of my favorite novels of any genre! This is the final book in Hibbert’s trilogy of romances about the Brown sisters (you don’t have to read them in order), and I love them all, but Eve’s story has the biggest place in my heart. She is the messy baby of the family, with a sunshine soul and a lifetime of well-suppressed hurt from feeling like an outsider in her overachieving family. When her latest business venture crashes and burns, she’s desperate to prove she can stand on her own. Enter Jacob, the perfectionist owner of the Castell Cottage bed-and-breakfast, who reluctantly hires Eve as his new chef … after she accidentally runs him over and breaks his arm.
There’s a lot to love about this book — the cozy setting, the supporting cast, the incredibly hot sex scenes, the humor, every single appearance by Eve’s grandma — but what makes it so special to me is the tender and realistic way Hibbert portrays her two neurodivergent protagonists.
By Freya Marske
In this dazzling historical fantasy, Robin, a young baron saddled with his dead parents’ debts and completely unaware of the secret magical world running parallel to the Edwardian England he knows, meets Edwin, a magician with a complicated relationship with magic and an even more complicated relationship with his magical family. Adventure, mayhem and murder naturally ensue.
Alongside a beautiful, steamy and moving romance, expect a plethora of beautiful settings and delightful supporting characters (plus two sequels to dive into when you’re done). If you’ve ever wished for Georgette Heyer’s wit in a more queer, inclusive and magical story, this is the book for you.
Read our review.
By Aiden Thomas
A book about death, ghosts and a cemetery might sound like the furthest thing from cozy. But Thomas’s beautiful debut, set in a Latino community in Los Angeles, combines magical realism, teen drama, family conflict and first love into a novel that’s warm, moving and relatable.
Yadriel is a trans boy looking for acceptance from his family of brujx, or sorcerers; determined to prove himself, he taps into his ancestral power to summon a ghost. Of course, things don’t quite go according to plan, and he finds himself stuck with the specter of Julian, his school’s resident bad boy, who needs Yadriel’s help solving the mystery of his death before he can move on. But the longer the pair spend together, the less Yadriel wants Julian to go.
Read our review.
By Alyssa Cole
Frankly, all I needed to hear about this book were the words “hot mess of an heiress starts an apprenticeship with a sexy sword maker in Scotland” and I was sold. At first glance, this sounds like a historical romance, but it’s actually a delightful, sexy contemporary novel packed with Cole’s signature wit, a spirited and vulnerable heroine and a very hot and very reluctant duke.
By Evie Dunmore
Now this, on the other hand, is a historical romance. The first volume in Dunmore’s magnificent League of Extraordinary Women series, “Bringing Down the Duke” introduces readers to Annabelle, a working class young woman, and her three unapologetically political and unconventional best friends, who are in the first cohort of female university students at Oxford. Annabelle is there on a scholarship, in exchange for which she has to recruit prominent men to support the growing women’s suffrage movement. Her target: Sebastian, an icy, influential and inconveniently handsome duke.
Sebastian has a lot of privilege and prejudices to unpack over the course of the book, but his story is a joy to read, as is his and Annabelle’s growing attraction. There are a lot of laughs (and tears!), the supporting cast is absolutely stellar, and the romance is a deliciously steamy slow burn.
By Sarah Beth Durst
As much as I adore grumpy men as love interests, I have an enormous soft spot for grumpy women as protagonists. The heroine of “The Spellshop,” Kiela, is a taciturn, reclusive librarian. She’s also loyal, generous and deeply lonely.
When her city is destroyed, Kiela flees the burning wreckage with as many precious books as she can carry and finds herself in the only place she could think to hide: her late parents’ cottage. Expect slow days in a sleepy coastal village, baked goods, winged kittens, a sentient spider plant and a hot man who builds bookshelves for our heroine. I, for one, couldn’t ask for more.
By Mai Mochizuki; translated by Jesse Kirkwood
I have to admit that I’m cheating a bit here: This is not actually a romance, at least in the traditional sense. But if you’re anything like me, you read romance not only for the love stories, banter and smut, but also for that soft, joyful sense of healing a good romance gives you. And few books lately have made me feel as soft, joyful and healed as “The Full Moon Coffee Shop.”
It’s best to go into this book knowing as little as possible. All you really need to know is that it’s a charming contemporary fantasy and, as you might have guessed from the cover, it does involve cats.
Read our story on Mai Mochizuki and the rising popularity of “healing fiction.”
By Suzanne Walker; illustrated by Wendy Xu
For all the comic and graphic novel fans out there, this one is a real treat. “Mooncakes” is a cozy, adorable, casually queer and gorgeously illustrated adventure about a teen witch named Nova, her magical grandmothers, her werewolf crush, horse demons, spell books, food and family. If you were a fan of “Sabrina the Teenage Witch,” you’ll love Nova Huang.
By Diana Wynne Jones
And finally, here is another of my absolute favorite novels of all time: the whimsical and wonderful “Howl’s Moving Castle.” Fans of Studio Ghibli’s film adaptation will be familiar with the adventures of Sophie Hatter (young, feisty and cursed with the appearance of old age), the wizard Howl (adorable chaotic disaster), the fire demon Calcifer (snarky and full of secrets) and the titular moving castle (my dream home!). But believe it or not, the book is even cozier, funnier and lovelier than the screen version.
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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