Here are 100 books that The Romantic Pact fans have personally recommended if you like
The Romantic Pact.
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I like a good steamy emotional romance just like any other romance reader, but there’s nothing I love more than reading a romance that can make me laugh so hard I cry and then turn around and have a storyline with an unexpected twist that stomps on my heart a little before putting it all back together. Romantic comedies can be crazy and convoluted but I appreciate the fun release a good rom-com can deliver. That’s what I strive to provide through my rom coms as well. Relatable characters experiencing crazy life moments while finding their happily-ever-afters.
Tara Sivec, in my mind, is like that crazy aunt who has an unfiltered mind and says what she wants and it’s funny every time! Her words make me cackle and this story is filled with crazy fun, witty banter, and a really hot rainstorm scene! Kiss My Putt is a friends-to-lovers mixed with enemies-to-lovers mixed with second chance romance. The story revolves around a cool, calm, and collected pro-golfer who is forced to take some time off after throwing a royal tantrum on television during a tournament. He goes home, to Summersweet Island, where everybody knows everybody and there’s no place to hide. Especially when he runs into his best friend, Birdie Bennett. This book is a must-read!
“Palmer ‘Pal’ Campbell has epic breakdown on the 18th hole of the Bermuda Open! Video at 11.”
After spending my entire pro golfing career being known as the quiet, controlled, no-nonsense golfer on the tour, there’s nothing more humiliating than throwing all of that down the drain—or into a water hazard—on national television. Needing some place to hide, to lick my wounds and figure out what I even want to do with my life once this blows over, I can only think of one place I need to be. Summersweet Island, where everyone treats me like one of their own,…
The House on Mountain Laurel Lane
by
Eileen Goudge,
A widow and mom of two struggles to let go of the past and embrace the future in a powerful novel about friendship, love, and taking risks by New York Times bestselling author Eileen Goudge.
Ever since her husband Sean’s death, Jo Myers just can’t move on. Until she receives…
I like a good steamy emotional romance just like any other romance reader, but there’s nothing I love more than reading a romance that can make me laugh so hard I cry and then turn around and have a storyline with an unexpected twist that stomps on my heart a little before putting it all back together. Romantic comedies can be crazy and convoluted but I appreciate the fun release a good rom-com can deliver. That’s what I strive to provide through my rom coms as well. Relatable characters experiencing crazy life moments while finding their happily-ever-afters.
There’s something about a younger sister falling for her older brother’s best friend that gets me every time and this book does not disappoint. Maybe Willis moves to the big city and her brother’s best friend vows to help make sure she finds her way. But he’s in for a surprise when she accidentally sends him a text with a proposition he doesn’t see coming. The characters in this story feel remarkably relatable which is what sucks me in every time. And I’m a sucker for a protective Hero, so there’s that.
Mabel “Maybe” Willis died a virgin at the very young age of twenty-four.She leaves behind her parents, Betty and Bruce, her brother, Evan, a laptop filled with one too many Jason Momoa memes, and a Kindle library with more books than one human being could ever finish in a lifetime.Cause of death: a text message.Okay. So, I didn’t die.But I may as well have.One minute, I’m a woman trying to find her way in the world, and the next, I’m the sender of six of the most embarrassing text messages that have ever been sent in the history of time—or…
I like a good steamy emotional romance just like any other romance reader, but there’s nothing I love more than reading a romance that can make me laugh so hard I cry and then turn around and have a storyline with an unexpected twist that stomps on my heart a little before putting it all back together. Romantic comedies can be crazy and convoluted but I appreciate the fun release a good rom-com can deliver. That’s what I strive to provide through my rom coms as well. Relatable characters experiencing crazy life moments while finding their happily-ever-afters.
I said I was a sucker for the protective Hero and this is just another shining example except that this time, the protective Hero is also the grumpy boss! This is the classic story of Grumpy guy gets girl fired from her job only to have her start working for his family’s business. The pair hate each other, but they each have internal personal struggles and when those start coming to light, their relationship shifts into an angsty, compassionate, protective, steamy love that I can’t ever stop reading! All the feels with this one!
From the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of Things We Never Got Over
Dominic was staring at me like he couldn’t decide whether he loathed me or wanted to French kiss me.
Dominic
I got her fired. Okay, so I’d had a bad day and took it out on a bystander in a pizza shop. But there’s nothing demure about Ally Morales. She proves that her first day of her new job…which just happens to be in my office….And I can’t fire her, because it’s my mother the CEO who hired her…technically, Ally doesn’t work for me,…
The Pact is a contemporary fiction novel about Australian sisters, Samantha and Annie, who are doubles tennis champions. This story amplifies the usual sibling issues and explores their professional partnership and personal relationships – similarities, differences, motivation, competition, abandonment, and grief – and how they each respond to the stress…
I like a good steamy emotional romance just like any other romance reader, but there’s nothing I love more than reading a romance that can make me laugh so hard I cry and then turn around and have a storyline with an unexpected twist that stomps on my heart a little before putting it all back together. Romantic comedies can be crazy and convoluted but I appreciate the fun release a good rom-com can deliver. That’s what I strive to provide through my rom coms as well. Relatable characters experiencing crazy life moments while finding their happily-ever-afters.
KB Cinder is totally my cup of tea and I want to be her best friend. Circle Jerk is a single mom meets neighborhood grump trope and it has all the feels! The one-liners and the laugh-out-loud scenes coupled with the romance and steam through this story make it the perfect book to kick back and relax with! Think Beauty and the Beast but with a single mom in a modern neighborhood. It’s not super long and can be read quickly.
KB Cinder is a hilarious up-and-coming author who should not be overlooked!
Moving sounded like a dream come true. New house, new job, new me, right? Not quite.
For one, I can’t totally reinvent myself with a kid in tow, so hair dye will have to do. Second, this new adventure brought Knox. You know, the neighborhood jerk and all-around A-hole, Knox Brighton? Or as my son calls him: The circle jerk. Hey, I laughed, too.
Anyway, Knox always creeps up at the worst times and leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Until one day, he didn’t. He put his tongue there instead.
When I was a kid at school, I was told that I had no imagination. I wrote a short essay on what I did at the weekend and put my heart and soul into it. I handed in my homework, and I remember waiting one day, then two, then three, when finally my teacher said: “Mr Vernon, I have a bone to pick with you.” I did not know what the expression meant, but it terrified me. It was only years later that I discovered I could, in fact, write, and that the imagination was a friend, not an enemy. I want others to know the same.
I lived in Germany as a teenager and have only warm and exciting feelings for the country.
It seemed that everything from the food to the place itself was, somehow, far more interesting than England, my homeland. That was, no doubt, largely because it was not England and I was an agitated youth.
But this book also gave depth to my feeling because of Goethe’s presence in the German imagination, who is quite as important there as Shakespeare to England or Dante to Italy.
I am appreciative of this book for opening up the life and times, ideas and art, of this massive imaginative figure, about whom I previously knew very little. He knew that imagination is truth-bearing, carrying us to the heart of life.
'Wild, brilliant and has all the intelligence to rival its subject. Five Stars.' - Frances Wilson, The Telegraph 'Exuberant and wide-ranging' - Literary Review 'Passionate' - The Times
A spellbinding recreation of Goethe's life and work from one of our greatest biographers.
Goethe was the inventor of the psychological novel, a pioneer scientist, great man of the theatre and a leading politician. As A. N. Wilson argues in this groundbreaking biography, it was his genius and insatiable curiosity that helped catapult the Western world into the modern era.
A N. Wilson tackles the life of Goethe with characteristic wit and…
My parents both fought in the Second World War – my father as a bomber pilot, my mother as a Wren. Dad often entertained us at family mealtimes with tales of his wartime adventures – of how was shot down over Germany, captured, imprisoned, but finally escaped. My interest in the period grew from there, and my first ‘wartime’ novel The Secret Letter was in fact largely based on my parents experiences. Since then, I have become increasingly fascinated by the period, with now a total of four novels set in WW2, culminating in my present book The German Mother.
I discovered this autobiography some years ago while researching another novel. As I read, I became fascinated by this account of a brave Jewish journalist who managed to escape from Germany in the mid-1930s, and move to London where she worked for the BBC’s German service. At war’s end, she returned to her homeland, where she was employed by the US Army to help with the “de-Nazification” of German women and children to try and restore a sense of decency and democratic ideals among her compatriots. It’s an extraordinary account of one woman’s bravery and served as inspiration for one of my central characters in “The German Mother”.
The remarkable story of Jella Lepman, who, having left Germany to escape the Nazi regime in the 1930s, chose to return in the aftermath of the Second World War, as 'Adviser on the Cultural and Educational Needs of Women and Children in the American Zone'. She soon decided that what Germany's war-ravaged children needed was to see a world of the imagination, beyond their landscape of bombed-out buildings and military vehicles.
Battling with bureaucracy and meeting with generals and statesmen, including Eleanor Roosevelt, she founded the International Youth Library, filling a huge void in the lives of Germany's children with…
I first went to Berlin after college, determined to write a novel about the German Resistance; I stayed a quarter of a century. Initially, the Berlin Airlift, something remembered with pride and affection, helped create common ground between me as an American and the Berliners. Later, I was commissioned to write a book about the Airlift and studied the topic in depth. My research included interviews with many participants including Gail Halvorsen. These encounters with eyewitnesses inspired me to write my current three-part fiction project, Bridge to Tomorrow. With Russian aggression again threatening Europe, the story of the airlift that defeated Soviet state terrorism has never been more topical.
Nothing epitomizes the striking success of the Berlin Airlift more than the true story of the so-called “candy bomber.”
This was a USAF pilot who on his own initiative started dropping candy tied to handcrafted mini-parachutes out of his transport plane to give the children of Berlin a little sweetness in their otherwise bleak lives. His gesture more than any transformed the “terror bombers”—responsible for so much of Berlin’s destruction—into friends in the eyes of the Berliners.
This book is an autobiographical account by the candy bomber himself, Lt. Gail Halvorsen. It is written with candid clarity and heartwarming charm. A gem!
The Berlin Candy Bomber is a love story-how two sticks of gum and one man's kindness to the children of a vanquished enemy grew into an epic of goodwill spanning the globe-touching the hearts of millions in both Germany and America.
In June 1948, Russia laid siege to Berlin, cutting off the flow of food and supplies over highways into the city. More than two million people faced economic collapse and starvation. The Americans, English, and French began a massive airlift to bring sustenance to the city and to thwart the Russian siege.
I like to write more than I like to read, but when I do read, I want to learn about other places and times besides my own. Since my own novels are contemporary fiction, it makes sense that historical fiction is my favorite category to read. Likewise, my interest in romance isn’t from unrequited love, but rather, a desire to explore the difficulties of choosing a life partner in our complicated world. (Even my detective novels contain romance!) But I don’t like sappy introspective thought processes, a variation of teen angst, and most readers of historical romance have this same aversion. So none of my recommendations will be that way.
Terry Laster, who translated this work from the German original, does a masterful job of expressing the situation in 14th-century Heidelberg when a female secretly heals patients and for her success, is accused of performing works of the devil. In their ignorance, the town council appoints her husband, a lawyer, to discover her identity. How this story resolves is a testament to the power of good works and encourages me when I face opposition from ignorant people.
In the fourteenth century, opportunities for women are limited to the home. But spirited young Madlen finds her calling as assistant to the city's trusted midwife, Clara. Working alongside Clara, Madlen develops a surprisingly soothing technique and quickly becomes a talented healer.
After Clara's tragic death, Madlen alone rushes to assist the birth of a local nobleman's child. But rather than the joy of birth, Madlen walks into an accusation of murder and witchcraft because of her extraordinary gifts. Forced to flee her own town, she establishes a new identity in the home of her aunt. Yet even though it…
As a historian at the University of Amsterdam, one of my concerns is to understand why so many Germans supported and participated in Adolf Hitler’s atrocious political project. I am equally interested in the other side: the Nazis’ political opponents and victims. In two decades of researching, writing, and teaching, I have read large numbers of official documents, newspapers, diaries, novels, and memoirs. These contemporary texts have made me vividly aware of how different people lived through the Nazi years, how they envisioned their lives, and how they remembered them after World War II. The questions they faced and the solutions they found continue to challenge and disconcert me.
Historian Mark Roseman interviewed Marianne Ellenbogen née Strauss in a suburban house near Liverpool. After she passed away, her son shared with him the diaries and letters he found in the attic. In the summer of 1943 Marianne escaped deportation and hid in various places across Germany, supported by a little-known network of unorthodox socialists. Her life under Nazism was horrible—yet strangely liberating. She flourished away from her strict parents but was still traumatized at leaving them behind. The fate of someone who repeatedly changed her German, Jewish, political, and indeed personal identity will move you emotionally as well as stimulate you intellectually. All along, Marianne struggled to maintain control over her own story—which makes A Past in Hidinga brilliant title for an outstanding book.
A heart-stopping survivor story and brilliant historical investigation that offers unprecedented insight into daily life in the Third Reich and the Holocaust and the powers and pitfalls of memory.
At the outbreak of World War II, Marianne Strauss, the sheltered daughter of well-to-do German Jews, was an ordinary girl, concerned with studies, friends, and romance. Almost overnight she was transformed into a woman of spirit and defiance, a fighter who, when the Gestapo came for her family, seized the moment and went underground. On the run for two years, Marianne traveled across Nazi Germany without papers, aided by a remarkable…
I am Professor of Classics at George Mason University. I learned about ancient Romans and Greeks in my native Germany, when I attended a humanist high school, possibly the oldest in the country. (It was founded during the reign of Charlemagne, as the eastern half of the Roman Empire was still flourishing.) My mother once informed me that I betrayed my passion for stories long before I could read because I enthusiastically used to tear pages out of books. In my teens I became fascinated with stories told in moving images. I have been a bibliophile and, em, cinemaniac ever since and have pursued both my obsessions in my publications.
Scobie presents a concise exposition of the Nazis’ inferiority complex vis-à-vis imperial Rome.
Hitler, ever a fan of grotesque gigantomania, found a soulmate in Albert Speer. Their designs for rebuilding major cities on Roman principles became reality only to a small degree.
The apex was to have been Berlin, renamed Germania, as world capital. Its most stupendous building, modeled on but dwarfing the Pantheon in Rome, was the Great Hall (also People’s Hall, Hall of Glory). It was to accommodate 180,000 standing people. Above it a copper-plated dome sixteen times the size of St. Peter’s in Rome was to have risen.
Inside, the balcony from which Hitler was to deliver his addresses would have made him appear tiny. The contrast exemplifies the essence of Kitsch: unrestrained grandiosity turns ridiculous.
Adolf Hitler admired ancient Rome as the "crystallization point of a world empire," a capital with massive public monuments that reflected the supremacy of the State and the political might of the ancient world's "master-race." He also admired the way Mussolini turned the monuments of imperial Rome into validatory symbols of Fascism. Hitler planned a Reich that would be a as durable as the Roman Empire. Its capital, Berlin, would surpass the architectural magnificence of ancient Rome before the advent of Christianity as its official religion.
This book examines Hitler's views on Roman imperialism, town planning, and architecture, and shows…
