Enemies to lovers only works if the enemies part is real. The books here all start with genuine hostility — professional, political or personal — rather than one mildly rude first impression.
They range from workplace comedies to books where the two of them are on opposite sides of a war, so pick your intensity.
Rebecca Yarros · 517 pages · 2023
Violet trained her whole life to be a scribe and gets sent to the war college for dragon riders instead, where the cadets who do not bond a dragon mostly do not survive the year.
Jane Austen · 435 pages · 1813
Elizabeth Bennet decides very early that Mr Darcy is insufferable, and spends the rest of the book discovering how much she enjoys being wrong.
Leigh Bardugo · 465 pages · 2015
Six criminals, one impossible break-in, and a narrator for each of them. The plot is a heist; the reason people reread it is the six of them.
Rebecca Yarros · 623 pages · 2023
The sequel picks up with second year at Basgiath, a new commandant who wants Violet gone, and a war that has stopped being theoretical.
Holly Black · 370 pages · 2018
A mortal girl raised in Faerie by the man who murdered her parents decides she would rather have power than safety. Everyone in it is lying.
Emily Henry · 377 pages · 2022
A cutthroat literary agent keeps running into the editor she cannot stand in the small town she is only visiting for her sister. Deliberately inverts the Hallmark plot.
Casey McQuiston · 421 pages · 2019
The First Son of the United States and the Prince of Wales stage a friendship for damage control after a cake incident. The email chapters are the best part.
Emily Henry · 361 pages · 2020
A romance novelist who has stopped believing in love and the literary-fiction rival next door swap genres for a summer. Much sadder than the cover suggests.
Rebecca Ross · 357 pages · 2023
Two rival journalists in a city at war, gods walking the front line, and a pair of enchanted typewriters that keep delivering letters to the wrong person.
Holly Black · 336 pages · 2019
Jude has the High King of Faerie under her control for exactly a year and a day, and every week of it costs her something she did not budget for.