Olivia Dade writes contemporary romance with heart, humor, and an unapologetic love of fandom culture. Her novels—including Spoiler Alert and All the Feels—champion body positivity, celebrate nerdy passions, and build romances between characters who are messy, smart, and deeply human.
If you enjoy her books, these fifteen authors are well worth exploring:
Hibbert writes sharp, warm contemporary romance with characters who feel fully inhabited—anxiety, chronic pain, neurodivergence, and all. Get a Life, Chloe Brown follows a chronically ill woman who makes a "wild things to do" list and enlists her grumpy, tattooed building superintendent to help her check it off.
Hibbert matches Dade's talent for writing heroines who refuse to shrink themselves, wrapped in prose that's funny, steamy, and emotionally precise.
Hoang's debut The Kiss Quotient pairs an autistic econometrician with a half-Vietnamese escort in a romance that is tender, explicit, and genuinely interested in how two people learn to communicate across different emotional languages.
Like Dade, Hoang centers characters whose identities—including disability and cultural background—aren't obstacles to romance but part of what makes them lovable.
Guillory's romances unfold in a recognizable contemporary world of busy careers, group chats, and good food. The Wedding Date starts with a meet-cute in a stuck elevator and follows two professionals navigating a long-distance connection that neither planned on.
Guillory writes with easygoing charm and an eye for the small, real moments—an unanswered text, a shared dessert—that make a new relationship feel electric.
Wilsner writes queer romance with crackling tension and an assured sense of voice. Something to Talk About follows a Hollywood showrunner and her assistant after a red-carpet moment goes viral and the internet decides they're a couple—before either of them has admitted what's actually between them.
The entertainment-industry setting and slow-burn chemistry will feel instantly familiar to fans of Dade's fandom-adjacent world.
Hazelwood's The Love Hypothesis—a fake-dating romance between a PhD candidate and a notoriously tough professor—became a phenomenon for the same reasons Dade's work connects: a nerdy heroine, a brooding love interest with hidden depths, and the unmistakable feeling that the author genuinely loves the world she's writing about.
Hazelwood's STEM settings and fandom-origin story give her novels a warmth and specificity that Dade readers will recognize immediately.
McQuiston writes big, joyful queer romances that wear their politics and their pop-culture fluency proudly. Red, White & Royal Blue imagines a secret relationship between the First Son of the United States and a British prince—equal parts rom-com and wish fulfillment.
McQuiston shares Dade's gift for characters who are unashamedly themselves—loud, opinionated, and deeply worth rooting for.
Danan writes romance that cheerfully dismantles respectability politics. The Roommate follows a sheltered socialite who moves to LA, discovers her new roommate is an adult-film actor, and—when their attraction becomes undeniable—helps him start a sexual-wellness startup instead.
Danan's heroines are funny, imperfect women figuring out what they actually want, not what they were told to want. The sex-positive, body-positive energy is a direct match for Dade's sensibility.
The writing duo of Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings produces reliably witty contemporary romance. The Unhoneymooners sends two people who can't stand each other on a free honeymoon trip after the entire wedding party gets food poisoning—and forces them to pretend they're married.
Christina Lauren's banter-heavy, high-chemistry style pairs well with Dade's warmth, and their prolific output means there's always another book waiting.
Solomon writes character-driven romance with emotional depth that sneaks up on you. The Ex Talk pairs two public-radio colleagues—one who believes in love, one who doesn't—as co-hosts of a new relationship-advice show, pretending to be exes for ratings.
Solomon excels at heroines with specific, unglamorous passions and real insecurities, and her romances earn their happy endings through honest vulnerability rather than grand gestures.
DeLuca's Well Met series is set at a small-town Renaissance faire, and the fandom-culture overlap with Dade is nearly perfect. In Well Met, a reluctant volunteer clashes with the intense, uptight organizer of the faire—until costume fittings and tavern nights turn enemies into something else entirely.
DeLuca captures the specific joy of people who care deeply about niche things, and the romances are warm, funny, and rooted in community.
Dev reimagines Jane Austen's novels through the lens of an Indian American family in her Rajes series. Recipe for Persuasion reworks Persuasion as a cooking-competition romance between a chef and the soccer star she once loved and lost.
Dev writes with emotional generosity about family obligation, cultural identity, and second chances—and her food descriptions alone are worth the price of admission.
Blake writes queer romance and women's fiction with a rare emotional rawness. Delilah Green Doesn't Care follows a prickly, commitment-averse photographer forced back to her small hometown for her stepsister's wedding, where she falls for a warm, anxious single mother she was never supposed to want.
Blake's characters carry real baggage—estrangement, grief, queer self-discovery—and the romances feel earned because the emotional work is never skipped.
Thompson writes quirky, tender contemporary romance with a knack for heroines who are endearingly awkward. Love in the Time of Serial Killers follows a true-crime-obsessed PhD student who moves to Florida to settle her estranged father's estate and becomes convinced her handsome neighbor is a murderer.
The novel balances genuine grief and family estrangement with laugh-out-loud moments—a tonal mix Dade fans will appreciate.
Jimenez writes romances that hit harder emotionally than you expect going in. The Happy Ever After Playlist follows a grieving young woman whose life is upended when a stray dog leads her to a musician on the verge of fame—and a second chance she isn't sure she deserves.
Jimenez balances real heartbreak with warmth and humor, and her characters' vulnerabilities—mental health struggles, loss, fear of starting over—give the love stories genuine stakes.
Bellefleur writes queer romance with charm, heat, and an astrology-loving sensibility. Written in the Stars is a fake-dating romance between a free-spirited astrologer and a buttoned-up actuary whose brother set them up on the worst blind date of their lives.
Bellefleur shares Dade's commitment to inclusive, joyful romance—her characters are plus-size, queer, anxious, and wholly deserving of their happy endings.
