Book recs based on Olivia Dean songs

This just in: Love is cool again! In the spirit of Valentine's Day, we've been listening to Olivia Dean's The Art of Loving album on repeat in the shop. It's genuinely perfection—not a single song is even close to being a dud, and I say that as someone whose limited attention span when it comes to music means I rarely listen to an album start to finish. 

Now with a Grammy under her belt, Olivia really deserves all the love and critical acclaim she's been getting. Give her MORE in my opinion #oliviadeanforprimeminster. She's not just an insanely talented musician, but is also just a fundamentally sincere, charming, and hard-working person. Oh god, not me speaking about her like we're close personal friends?? I mean, if there's any artist I'd like to be in a parasocial relationship with, it's you Olivia. 

Listening to the album so much recently has got me thinking: how could some of my favourite songs and the way they explore the depths and nuances of connection inspire specific book recommendations? Check out the list below! I hope this can help the fellow lover girls out there find their next great read!

🎵 nice to each other 🎵

Experienced by Kate Young

Bette loves Mei, but Bette and Mei are on a break, so Bette can catch-up on the decade of dating experiences she missed before she came out.

So Bette is (reluctantly) on a dating odyssey: a quest to have lots of casual sex with lots of hot women and come back to Mei more experienced and more certain about what she wants. And now she has new friend Ruth as her dating guide, she can't possibly fail. It's just three months, then she'll be back with Mei.

It's the perfect plan … isn't it? 

This Summer Will be Different by Carley Fortune

Every summer forces Felix and Lucy to be together but they shouldn’t be. Can they resist temptation? This summer they’ll keep their promise. This summer they won't give into temptation.

This summer will be different. The first time Lucy and Felix met she was on vacation on Prince Edward Island. And a tour of the beaches wasn’t the only thing he showed her. But when she discovered his true identity as her best friend, Bridget’s brother, their electric night should have become a distant memory…Each year with Lucy and Bridget’s return for a summer escape, she promises herself she won’t end up in Felix’s arms, but it’s easier said than done. Not this year though. This year it will be different.

I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself by Glynnis MacNicol 

After New York City emptied out in March 2020, Glynnis MacNicol, aged forty-six, unmarried with no children, spent sixteen months alone in her tiny Manhattan apartment. The isolation was punishing.

A year without touch. Women are warned of invisibility as they age, but this was an extreme loneliness no one can prepare you for. When the opportunity to sublet a friend's apartment in Paris arose, MacNicol jumped on it.

Leaving felt less like a risk than a necessity. What follows is a decadent, joyful, unexpected journey into one woman's pursuit of radical enjoyment. The weeks in Paris are filled with friendship and food and sex. There is dancing on the Seine; a plethora of gooey cheese; midnight bike rides through empty Paris; handsome men; afternoons wandering through the empty Louvre; nighttime swimming in the ocean off a French island. And yes, plenty of nudity. 

🎵 Man I Need 🎵

Annie Knows Everything by Rachel Wood

COMING 7TH MAY, 2026

This is the perfect fun and flirty romcom to match the song that instantly puts you in a good mood. Connor really IS the man we need.

After losing her job and learning her sister is engaged to the worst man alive, Annie needs a win. Thanks to her best friend and her own inability to take no for an answer, she manages to talk her way into an opening on another team working on data strategy - whatever that means. So what if she doesn't know how to write code? How hard can it be?

Surely Connor - the team's overworked, aggravating, and distractingly hot leader - will soon realise how capable Annie is and be delighted to have her on board.

Annie sets her sights on nailing it at her new job... even if it means ignoring the chemistry building between her and Connor. Also on her to do list is trying to (gently! supportively!) convince her sister to reconsider her engagement, not to mention trying to figure out why her roommate and best friend are acting weird. But with sparks flying at work and at home, she begins to see how complicated taking matters into her own hands can be. Annie thinks she knows it all, but does she really know everything?

Take a Hint, Dani Brown by Talia Hibbert

Danika Brown knows what she wants: professional success, academic renown and an occasional roll in the hay to relive all that career-driven tension. But romance? Been there, done that, burned the T-shirt. So Dani asks the universe for the perfect friend-with-benefits.

When brooding security guard Zafir Ansari rescues her from a workplace fire drill gone wrong, it's an obvious sign: PhD student Dani and ex-rugby player Zaf are destined to sleep together. But before she can explain that fact, a video of the heroic rescue goes viral. Now half the internet is shipping #DrRugbae - and Zaf is begging Dani to play along.

Dani's plan is simple: fake a relationship in public, seduce Zaf behind the scenes. But grumpy Zaf is secretly a romantic - and he's determined to corrupt Dani's stone-cold realism. With every fake date and midnight meeting, Dani's easy lay becomes more complex than her thesis. Has her wish backfired? Or is the universe waiting for her to take a hint?

🎵 Baby Steps 🎵

All This Could be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews 

Graduating into a recession, Sneha tries on adulthood like an ill-fitting suit. Moving to a new city, she embraces all that it has to offer: friends that feel like family, gay bars, house parties and new romances. But when painful secrets rear their heads, corporate jobs go off the rails and evictions loom, Sneha and her community find themselves looking for a new way to live.

All This Could Be Different is a novel about being young in the twenty-first century. About work, precarity, distant parents, found family, activism, queer love, sex and hope. About knowing that all this could be different.

Heartsick by Jessie Stephens 

Heartbreak does not seem to be a brand of grief we respect. And so we are left in the middle of the ocean, floating in a dinghy with no anchor, while the world waits for us to be okay again.

Claire is excited to bring her partner Maggie back home, but even as they build a new life together, she fears a distance is growing between them. Patrick is a lonely university student, until he meets Caitlin – but does she feel as connected as he does? Ana is happily married with three children. Then, one night, she falls in love with someone else.

Based on three true stories, Heartsick by Jessie Stephens is a compelling narrative non-fiction account of the many lows and occasional surprising highs of heartbreak. Bruising, beautiful, achingly specific but wholeheartedly universal, it reminds us that emotional pain can make us as it breaks us, and that storytelling has the ultimate healing power.

🎵 close up 🎵

A love song for ricki wilde by Tia Williams

Ricki Wilde has many talents, but being a Wilde isn't one of them. As the impulsive, artistic daughter of a powerful Atlanta dynasty, she's the opposite of her famous socialite sisters. In her bones, Ricki knows that somewhere, a more exciting life awaits her.

So, when she is invited to rent the bottom floor of a Harlem brownstone, Ricki jumps at the chance for a fresh start. She leaves behind her wealth and chaotic romantic decisions to realize her dream of opening a flower shop. Then one evening in February, as the heady scent of night-blooming jasmine fills the air, Ricki encounters a handsome stranger who knocks her world off balance in the most unexpected way.

Set against the backdrop of modern Harlem and Renaissance glamour, A Love Song for Ricki Wilde is a swoon-worthy love story of two passionate artists drawn to the magic, romance, and opportunity of New York. 

Rootless by Krystle Zara Appiah 

Teenagers Efe and Sam first meet in London in the 1990s. Years later the best friends are married. Their love story couldn't seem more perfect.

But Sam wants to start a family. Efe wants to be free from children to focus on her dreams. When an unplanned pregnancy forces them to confront their differences, Efe and Sam must discover if what they really want is still each other.

A poignant, heart-breaking debut about a British-Ghanaian marriage in crisis, Rootless is a story of friendship, family, societal obligation and motherhood. But above all, it's a story of love.

Heart the lover by lily king 

'You knew I'd write a book about you someday.' Our narrator understands good love stories - their secrets, their highs and free falls.

But her greatest love story, the one she lived, never followed the rules. She was in her senior year of college when star students Sam and Yash swept her into an intoxicating world of academic fervour, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games.

Their lives became quickly intertwined - with friendship but also with unpredictable passions and the intimations of first love. Decades later, she is a successful writer, living a comfortable life with her husband and children, when a surprise visit brings the past crashing into the present, forcing her to confront the decisions and deceptions of her youth. Written with the precision of poetry and the emotional tide of an epic, Heart the Lover is a celebration of literature and the life-long echoes of young love.

🎵 a couple minutes 🎵

Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley 

The first time Joe plays Percy one of his songs in his college room in 2000, she instantly realises three things: One, she is watching a star in the making. Two, she can shape his music into something extraordinary. Three, she will always be on the sidelines.

She swallows her jealousy and throws herself into collaboration, transforming Joe’s songs into indie hits with her blistering critiques. But there’s an undercurrent to the music they’re making – something undeniably electric, hurtling towards love. And then, almost inevitably, towards heartbreak.

As Joe steps into the spotlight, can Percy bear to watch on in silence? And can he exist there without her? Deep Cuts is an irresistible novel about passion and obsession, love and longing and, above all, our need to be heard. 

People we meet on vacation by emily henry 

Two friends. Ten summer trips. Their last chance to fall in love.

12 summers ago: Poppy and Alex meet. They hate each other, and are pretty confident they'll never speak again.

11 summers ago: They're forced to share a ride home from college and by the end of it a friendship is formed. And a pact: every year, one vacation together.

10 summers ago: Alex discovers his fear of flying on the way to Vancouver. Poppy holds his hand the whole way.

7 summers ago: They get far too drunk and narrowly avoid getting matching tattoos in New Orleans.

2 summers ago: It all goes wrong.

This summer: Poppy asks Alex to join her on one last trip. A trip that will determine the rest of their lives.

Seven days in june by tia williams

Seven days to fall in love, fifteen years to forget, and seven days to get it all back again... When Eva Mercy, a single mother and bestselling erotica writer, and the enigmatic, award-winning novelist Shane Hall meet at a literary event in New York, sparks fly. But what no one knows is that fifteen years earlier, teenage Eva and Shane spent one week together, madly in love.

While they may pretend to be strangers, they can't deny their chemistry. Over the next seven days, amidst a steamy Brooklyn summer, Eva and Shane reconnect. But Eva is wary of the man who broke her heart and wants Shane out of the city so her life can return to normal.

Before he disappears, though, she needs a few questions answered...With its keen observations of creative life in America today, as well as the joys and complications of being a mother and a daughter, Seven Days in June is a hilarious, romantic, and sexy-as-hell story of two writers discovering their second chance at love.

🎵 I've seen it 🎵

all about love by bell hooks

'The word "love" is most often defined as a noun, yet...we would all love better if we used it as a verb,' writes bell hooks as she comes out fighting and on fire in All About Love.

Here, at her most provocative and intensely personal, the renowned scholar, cultural critic, and feminist skewers our view of love as romance. In its place she offers a proactive new ethic for a people and a society bereft with lovelessness.

As bell hooks uses her incisive mind and razor-sharp pen to explore the question 'What is love?' her answers strike at both the mind and heart. In thirteen concise chapters, hooks examines her own search for emotional connection and society's failure to provide a model for learning to love. Razing the cultural paradigm that the ideal love is infused with sex and desire, she provides a new path to love that is sacred, redemptive, and healing for the individuals and for a nation.

Love in Exile by Shon Faye

Shon Faye grew up quietly obsessed with the feeling that love was not for her. Not just romantic love: the secret fear of her own unworthiness penetrated every aspect and corner of her life.

It was a fear that would erupt in destructive, counterfeit versions of the real love she craved: addictions and short-lived romances that were either euphoric and fantastical, or excruciatingly painful and unhinged, often both. Faye’s experience of the world as a trans woman, who grew up visibly queer, exacerbated her fears. But, as she confronted her damaging ideas about love and lovelessness, she came to realize that this sense of exclusion is symptomatic of a much larger problem in our culture.

Love, she argues, is as much a collective question as a personal one. Yet our collective ideals of love have developed in a society which is itself profoundly sick and loveless; in which consumer capitalism sells us ever new, engrossing fantasies of becoming more loved or lovable. In this highly politicized terrain, boundaries are purposefully drawn to keep some in and to keep others out. Those who exist outside them are ignored, denigrated, exiled.

Conversations on Love by Natasha Lunn

After years of feeling that love was always out of reach, journalist Natasha Lunn set out to understand how relationships work and evolve over a lifetime.

She turned to authors and experts to learn about their experiences, as well as drawing on her own, asking: How do we find love? How do we sustain it? And how do we survive when we lose it?

In Conversations on Love she began to find the answers:

• Philippa Perry on falling in love slowly
  
• Dolly Alderton on vulnerability
  
• Candice Carty-Williams on friendship
  
• Lisa Taddeo on the loneliness of loss
  
• Diana Evans on parenthood
  
• Emily Nagoski on the science of sex
  
• Esther Perel on unrealistic expectations
  
• Roxane Gay on redefining romance