I’m really pleased to be welcoming author Sally Malcolm to AAR today.  Back in August, her first m/m novel, Perfect Day, was published by Carina Press, and I was utterly enchanted by both the characters and her writing; the novel is a modern-day retelling of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, and yet, as I said in my review, Ms. Malcolm managed to keep to the spirit of the original while imbuing her characters with distinctive lives and personalities of their own.  […]

Are you always behind in your reading? Making a Best Books of The Year list is always a source of frustration for me, because so often, the best reads I had in any given year aren’t from that year at all. I want to celebrate them and shout about them, but if they’re not from 2018, they aren’t eligible for so many of our official posts!

I asked our staffers: what was your best belated read (BBR?) of 2018? Was it a famous book for which you’re really, really late to the party? A buried treasure you want to share with other readers?

Here’s what we came up with.

Caroline:

My BBR is Jeanne Lin’s The Jade Temptress. It’s the sequel to The Lotus Palace and contains many spoilers for that book, so I recommend starting with Lotus Palace. Lotus […]

Adam and Dina, the hero and heroine of Learning to Love, were not my typical characters, and presented challenges when I was writing them. Don’t get me wrong, I loved developing them, but they weren’t “easy” romance characters.

Adam Mandel appeared briefly in the two previous books of this series*–as a previous, brief love interest of the heroine’s in Addicted to Love, and as the best friend of the hero in Five Minutes to Love. In both stories, he was a player, a love ‘em and leave ‘em kind of guy. He wasn’t a terrible person, he just wasn’t interested in commitment. And professionally, his life was pretty easy as well. His father is the head of his own law firm, and Adam was guaranteed a spot there right out of law school. This guy’s life appeared made. […]