12 Fake Dating Books Where the Pretending Stops Working

Olive is the unlucky twin. Her sister has just had the wedding of the year, almost entirely paid for by contest wins and freebies, including a honeymoon in Hawaii that cannot be handed to anybody else. When the seafood buffet takes out the entire wedding party, the only two guests still standing are Olive and Ethan, her new brother-in-law's brother, a man she has spent a year actively disliking. They fly to Maui as a married couple. Then they start running into people from their real lives who cannot know, which turns a free holiday into a full-time performance.

Luc is the son of two rock stars, which means the British press has been photographing his worst nights since he was a child. He works for a small charity that protects dung beetles, and the donors are getting nervous. What he needs is a boyfriend who looks like a good idea in a photograph. Oliver is a barrister, ethically vegetarian, painfully correct, and needs a date for his parents' anniversary. The arrangement is mutual and entirely fake. The book then spends four hundred pages showing you what happens when a person who has decided he is worthless is treated well by somebody consistent.

Dani is an academic who has organised her life so that nothing can interrupt her work, including feelings, which she outsources to casual arrangements. Zaf is the building's security guard, a former rugby player who runs a small programme teaching teenage boys that emotions are allowed, and who reads romance novels in private. He carries her out during a drill, somebody films it, and the clip runs away from both of them. Faking a relationship would fund his programme. Agreeing to it would cost her nothing, in theory.

Hannah is an executive protection agent, very good at her job and very bad at having a life outside it. Her assignment is a famous actor with a stalker problem who is going home to his family's ranch in Texas, where nobody is supposed to know there is a threat, because his mother is unwell and the news would break her. So Hannah goes as the girlfriend. She has to stay close, stay armed, stay convincing at the dinner table, and stay professional, which is three too many things at once.

Dev produces a long-running reality romance show and believes in it with his whole chest, which is a problem, because he is the only person on set who does. Charlie is the season's lead, a founder pushed out of his own company, anxious, uncomfortable being touched, and cast because the ratings need a redemption story. Dev's job is to coach him through the fantasy dates. The two of them spend every hour together building a romance that is meant to be performed for somebody else, which turns out to be an unstable arrangement.

Olive is a third-year doctoral student who needs her best friend to believe she is happily dating somebody, so that the friend will stop feeling guilty about the man Olive is supposed to still want. In a corridor, under time pressure, she kisses a stranger. The stranger is Adam Carlsen, a young professor known for making students cry in seminars. He agrees to keep the story going because it solves a problem of his own. What follows is the campus version of the trope, plus a lot of coffee.

Reena bakes sourdough at two in the morning because her actual job is slowly killing her. Her father, who has views about her life, installs his business associate in the flat across the hall and starts steering. When a couples cooking contest with a real cash prize appears, Reena needs a partner who is convincingly her fiance, and there is one standing in her corridor whom her family already believes she is marrying. The lie is not one she starts. It is one she inherits and then decides to use.

Daisy is a software engineer who runs her life on spreadsheets, partly by temperament and partly because her family will fill any gap she leaves with a suitable boy. Liam is her brother's old friend, the one who did not show up when he said he would, years ago. He now needs to be married to satisfy the terms of his grandfather's estate. A fake engagement solves both problems, so they write the rules down and then discover, as everybody in this genre eventually does, that rules written at the start of a book are decorative.

Stella is autistic, very good with data, and has concluded that her difficulty with sex and dating is a skills gap she can close with instruction. So she hires Michael, who does this work for reasons of his own that involve family and money. They agree on lessons. He later stands in as her boyfriend in front of people who matter to her, which is where the pretending becomes public. Hoang wrote Stella from her own experience of diagnosis, and it shows in how ordinary and unpitied Stella is allowed to be.

Lara Jean writes a letter every time she has to stop loving somebody, seals it, and hides it in a hatbox. The letters get mailed. One of them goes to her older sister's ex, which is a disaster, and another goes to Peter Kavinsky, who has just been dumped and could use a girlfriend who makes his ex jealous. They write a contract, complete with clauses. Around all this sits a house of three sisters who lost their mother, which is the part of the book people forget when they talk about the film.

Alexa is a mayor's chief of staff in Berkeley. Drew is a paediatric surgeon in Los Angeles who has flown in for a wedding where his ex is the bride and he foolishly claimed to be bringing somebody. The lift stops, they talk, she says yes. By the reception the arrangement has stopped being an arrangement, and the rest of the novel is about two careful people trying to have a long-distance relationship neither will name. Guillory writes adults with jobs, which is rarer in this genre than it should be.

Daphne is the fourth Bridgerton child and the eldest daughter, liked by everyone and desired by nobody, which is death in a marriage market. Simon has just returned to London and wants the matchmaking mothers to leave him alone. A visible, entirely fake courtship fixes both problems at once, because she becomes interesting and he becomes unavailable. This is the ancestor of every book above it, published in 2000, long before television found it, and the ballroom mechanics still work.