In Love With Love by Ella Risbridger

Reading Ella Risbridger’s In Love With Love feels like a late-night gossip over wine with your cleverest friend. Intimate, playful and thought-provoking, this book is a heady exploration into the many weird and wonderful realms of romantic fiction. Risbridger takes you tenderly by the hand and pulls you into the worlds of hot billionaires, cowboys and aliens and hometown heroes to unravel what lies behind the allure of this enduring genre.

Part literary criticism, part journalistic inquiry and scattered with personal anecdotes which bring Risbridger’s telling to life, this piece of nonfiction is a must-read for die-hard romantic fiction fans. For everyone else, there’s still plenty to take away. It’s replete with kernels of wisdom and incisive meditations on topics from queerness and gender identity to why we reach for the delight and comfort of romance in socially and politically precarious times.

Although it claims not to be an exhaustive history of the romance novel, it still feels very comprehensive. Between Jane Austen and Elsie Silver, plenty of ground is covered and at times, the uninitiated may feel lost in the rose bushes of it all. But this thorough coverage also feels necessary to do justice to a genre which is often all too easily dismissed. In Love With Love will make you think more deeply, feel better about yourself, and fatten your romantic to-read list. 

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Sceptre, 6 Nov; Ella Risbridger discusses the book with our books editor Anahit Behrooz at Portobello Bookshop, Edinburgh, 11 Nov, 7pm