Saturday, April 11, 2020

Five top literary romantic comedies

Beth O’Leary is a Sunday Times (UK) bestselling author whose books have been translated into more than 30 languages.

She wrote her debut novel, The Flatshare, on her train journey to and from her job at a children’s publisher. Her novel The Switch is due out in the US this summer.

She now lives in the Hampshire countryside and writes full time.

At the Waterstones blog, O'Leary tagged five favorite literary comedies bursting with love and optimism, including:
If I Never Met You by Mhairi McFarlane

No author makes me laugh quite like Mhairi McFarlane – though the start of this novel is actually incredibly moving, too. Laurie’s boyfriend of eighteen years has just broken her heart, and she still has to see him every day at work. The solution? One of my absolute favourite romantic tropes: the fake romance. Laurie makes a deal to stage a relationship with Jamie, the office womaniser, and it’s not long before the line between fake and real is becoming gloriously blurred. All the characters in this book will soon feel like old friends, and the writing is so fantastic I genuinely cried with laughter, which is something I thought people only did in blurbs…
Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue