12 Grumpy Sunshine Romance Books, Ranked by Grump Quality

Vanessa Mazur has spent two years as personal assistant to Aiden Graves, a professional football player known as the Wall of Winnipeg, who has thanked her approximately never. She quits to work as a graphic designer. Then Aiden appears at her door with a problem: his immigration status requires a wife, and he has decided the wife is her. Zapata is the slowest of slow burn writers, this book is long, and both facts are the point. You watch a man learn to speak in full sentences to another human being across five hundred pages, and the payoff is enormous because you earned it alongside him.

Piper Bellinger is a Los Angeles socialite whose stepfather finally loses patience and ships her and her sister to Westport, Washington, to look after the bar their late father once owned. Brendan Taggart is a fishing boat captain, widowed, enormous, and immediately certain that Piper will last a week. She does not leave. Bailey writes small-town texture well and writes wanting even better, so the heat arrives early and keeps arriving. The surprise is how seriously the book takes Piper's grief for a father she never got to know.

Naomi Witt arrives in a small Virginia town looking for her twin sister and instead becomes responsible for a niece she did not know existed, with no car, no money and no plan whatsoever. Knox Morgan owns the local barbershop, wants no part of anybody's problems, and keeps turning up anyway. Score writes small-town gossip and found family with real appetite. The book is very long and mostly comfortable, apart from a crime subplot that shows up with far more teeth than the rest of it.

Chloe Brown has fibromyalgia, a family who manage her like a fragile parcel, and a list of things she intends to do before she becomes furniture: ride a motorbike, go camping, do something bad. Redford Morgan is the building superintendent, a painter, and cheerful in a way Chloe finds deeply suspicious. Hibbert writes chronic pain from the inside without turning Chloe into a lesson for anybody, and she gives Red a history that explains precisely why a large kind man might be careful about who he lets near him.

Zoya Singh Solanki was born on the day India won the World Cup in 1983, a fact that means nothing at all until one chance breakfast with the national team turns into a winning streak and a superstition the whole country adopts. Nikhil Khoda is the captain: disciplined, rational, and unwilling to let his side believe that a woman's attendance at breakfast is why they score runs. Chauhan mixes Hindi and English the way people actually do, and the advertising world, the media circus and the Delhi family scenes are all pitch perfect.

Elsie Hannaway is an adjunct physicist teaching too many classes for too little money, and her side income comes from being hired as somebody's girlfriend at other people's family events. She has spent her life becoming whichever version of herself a room wants. Then a job interview at a better university puts her across a table from Jack Smith-Turner, the experimental physicist who published the paper that ended her mentor's reputation, and who happens to be a client's brother. Hazelwood is funny about academic precarity and unusually sharp about what constant people-pleasing costs.

Poppy is loud, restless and works for a travel magazine. Alex is careful, quiet, teaches English, and owns exactly one good shirt. They met at university, worked out that they are terrible for each other and perfect together, and built a tradition of one trip a year. The book alternates ten summers of those trips with a present-day attempt to repair whatever broke two years ago in Croatia. Henry writes friendship better than almost anybody working right now, and the comedy of two people packing for the same holiday in opposite ways carries the entire first half.

January Andrews has inherited her late father's beach house along with a secret about him that has broken her ability to write happy endings. Augustus Everett writes bleak literary fiction, lives next door, and is having his own bad year. They strike a deal to swap genres for the summer: she attempts something serious, he attempts a love story, and each drags the other on research trips. Henry is very good on grief that arrives disguised as writer's block, and the book is funnier than its premise makes it sound.

Justice Laxmi Narayan Thakur has five daughters named in alphabetical order and a house on Hailey Road full of relatives, servants, dogs and opinions. Debjani, the fourth, has just started reading the English news on Doordarshan. Dylan Singh Shekhawat is an investigative journalist chasing the 1984 riots and the policemen behind them, and he thinks television news is decorative. Chauhan is writing a family comedy with a serious spine, and the Delhi of that decade, the phone lines, the neighbours, the fear, is done with real care.

Vanessa Price travels constantly and films all of it, because a disease has taken the women in her family young and she has decided not to waste whatever time she gets. Then she ends up caring for her infant niece, in one place, exhausted. Adrian Copeland is the lawyer across the hall who ends up holding the baby, and eventually rather more than the baby. Jimenez puts comedy and terminal illness in the same paragraph without either one cheapening the other, which is much harder to do than she makes it look.

Khai Diep is autistic and has decided, on the evidence of one funeral where he did not cry, that he is incapable of love. His mother disagrees and goes to Ho Chi Minh City to find him a bride. Esme Tran arrives in California with a suitcase, a plan, and a daughter she has not mentioned, and she has one summer to turn a stranger's household into a life. Hoang writes Esme's determination and her exhaustion equally well, and the book cares far more about class and immigration than the premise suggests.

Ava Chen is warm, artistic, and dealing with things she does not talk about. Alex Volkov is her brother's friend, wealthy, freezing, and single-minded about a revenge project of his own. When her brother leaves the country, Alex takes over the job of watching her, and the temperature of the book changes very fast. Huang writes wanting efficiently and the pages turn themselves, so this is the most frictionless reading experience on the list. It is also explicit throughout, with a hero whose intensity is the entire selling point.