In Love with Love: The Persistence and Joy of Romantic Fiction

'This book is funny, wise, and joyfully obsessed with its subject'
MONICA HEISEY

'Endlessly witty, breathtakingly clever, a book you'll read in one sitting'
CAROLINE O'DONOGHUE

'A joyful and brilliant book by a joyful and brilliant writer'
JESSICA STANLEY

Smart, funny and passionate: An ode to a beloved genre and a brilliantly insightful piece of cultural criticism

Cowboys and aliens, dukes and dancers, power dynamics, death and domesticity, vampires and veterans, tradwives and single dads and sisters and small-town politics, private jets and princes and horses, hopes and dreams and fears, and so, so much kissing: this is a love letter to romantic fiction, but it's also a book about creativity and creation and the job of art in this crazy old world.

Why do we read? Why do we write? What makes some books last forever, and others vanish from memory? What is the point of everything, anything, when everything - especially romantic love - is so fleeting in the grand scheme of things? How do we love when the world is falling apart? And what does it mean that love is the one subject of which we never seem to tire?

Part literary criticism, part investigation, total passion project, In Love with Love is a wild tour from the very beginnings of kissing in books through historic trends, favourite tropes, beloved friends and brand-new loves, from Jane Austen to Jasmine Guillory, Jilly Cooper to Georgette Heyer, from the depths of the ocean to the furthest reaches of the outer galaxy . . .

'Risbridger writes about the romance novel with the care and attention of a romantic hero'
SARVAT HASIN

'I swallowed this book whole. Full of warmth and -- you guessed it -- love, this is an astute, thoughtful and literary exploration of a subject that is often regarded as the opposite... Long live kissing books, and all hail Ella'
CLAIRE DAVERLEY

'I have such a big crush on this book! Fascinating, fun and flirty -- just how I like my romances'
BILLY LINDON