New York Times Best Books Of 2017

For seven years, Elena Vale loved her husband quietly. She waited through missed anniversaries, cold conversations, public humiliation, and the endless shadow of the woman he could never forget. Everyone called her lucky to be married to Adrian Laurent, the untouchable billionaire whose name opened every door in the city. But they never saw what happened behind closed doors. The silence. The loneliness. The way he looked through her instead of at her. Until one night, something inside Elena finally broke. Not loudly. Not dramatically. She simply stopped waiting. And that was when Adrian began noticing everything. The untouched side of the bed. The missing messages. The absence of the woman who had loved him more faithfully than anyone ever had. But the more Elena pulled away, the more dangerous Adrian became. Because for the first time in years, he was terrified. Terrified that the only woman who had ever truly belonged to him no longer wanted to stay. And by the time he realized what he was losing… someone else had already noticed her too.

She married him knowing one thing clearly: love was never part of the agreement. Their marriage was built on terms, not promises. A shared home. A shared bed. A public image to maintain. Nothing more. He was distant, controlled, and never cruel — but never warm either. To him, she was a wife in name, a solution to a problem, a role that needed to be filled. What neither of them expected was how silence could become dangerous. How intimacy without love could still leave marks. How wanting someone could come long before admitting it. As the line between obligation and desire begins to blur, she must decide how long she can stay where she isn’t truly chosen — and he must face the truth he never planned for. Because sometimes, the most dangerous thing isn’t loving someone too much… It’s realizing you never meant to love them at all.

At seventeen, love feels infinite and endings feel impossible. Arielle never planned to fall in love during her final year of high school. Noah never planned to let his guard down. But when quiet glances turn into late conversations and unspoken feelings surface, they find themselves caught in a connection neither of them is ready to name or walk away from. Set against the fragile edge of senior year, Promises We Made at Seventeen is a slow-burn, dual-POV romance about first love, fear, and the weight of choices made too young to fully understand, yet too deep to ignore. As expectations, rumors, and the future press in, Arielle and Noah must decide whether honesty is worth the risk and whether promises made before adulthood can survive what comes after. Tender, dramatic, and emotionally raw, this story explores what it means to love someone while still learning who you are, and how some promises no matter how small can change the course of a lifetime.

When American engineer Evan Hart arrives in Rome, he expects worn stones, ancient architecture, and a chance to quietly rethink his failing marriage. He doesn’t expect Livia Moretti—the enigmatic archivist whose fragile intensity pulls him into a slow-burning, dangerous affair he never meant to start. Livia is brilliant, secretive, and a little broken… and Evan can’t stay away. But when he finally tells his wife Leah he wants a separation, she collapses, claiming she’s been diagnosed with a devastating neurological disease. Overnight, Evan’s guilt becomes a trap. Then Livia disappears without a trace. Anonymous photographs of him and Livia arrive in the mail. A stranger begins watching his apartment. And Leah—sweet, steady Leah—starts behaving in ways he can’t explain. When Evan finds hidden documents and photographs connecting the two women in his life, he follows a clue to a remote coastal village, where he learns Livia once lived under a different name… and may have been running from something far darker than heartbreak. As Evan digs deeper, he uncovers the edge of a conspiracy built on identity, memory, and manipulation—one determined to keep its secrets buried. Someone is pulling strings. Someone is rewriting the truth. And someone wants Evan to stop asking questions. Caught between a wife he no longer understands and a lover who may not be who she claimed to be, Evan is forced to confront the one question he never thought to ask: If the women in his life are wearing borrowed identities… then who has been shaping his? In a story of seduction, deception, and emotional obsession, All the Names She Wore explores the dangerous terrain between love and control—and what happens when the truth becomes the most terrifying lie of all.

Promise was born into silence — a silence woven from an oath made before she could speak. Her village called it tradition. Her mother called it survival. But to Promise, it was a prison. She dreamed of Lagos, of lights and cameras, of a life that stretched beyond clay walls and whispered fears. Yet when the truth of her birth is revealed, everything she longs for seems impossibly far. The elders insist she must never leave. Her mother pleads with her to stay. And the weight of generations threatens to bury her voice. Between love and loyalty, fear and freedom, Promise must choose whether to surrender to a curse or defy it — even if it means breaking her world apart. The Girl Who Broke the Silence is a sweeping tale of tradition and defiance, of love and survival. It is the story of one girl’s fight to claim her name in a world that tried to silence her.

Helen Sinclair walked out of a penthouse with nothing but a bag she'd packed four months before she needed it. No note. No explanation. Just a text — I can't do this anymore — and she left. She had married Alexander Sinclair because her father's company was drowning and the Sinclair name was the only life raft available. Nobody told her that. She figured it out herself, eighteen months too late, sitting on a cold bathroom floor with a positive pregnancy test while her husband's voice carried through the wall on another call that mattered more than she did. So she left. Three years later she is Helen Carter, living in Boston. Small apartment, a plant named Gerald, a job she earned herself. A quiet life entirely hers. She is also fourteen weeks pregnant with a child Alexander doesn't know exists. Then Julian Cross calls. He knows you're in Boston. He's coming himself. Alexander arrives with no team, no lawyers, no plan — which is so unlike him it frightens her. He says he just needed to see she was okay. She almost believes him. Then his eyes drop to her stomach and she watches him understand everything without a single word. What follows is a collision neither of them is prepared for. Alexander, who has never chased anything, now refuses to leave. Helen, who rebuilt herself from nothing, refuses to be pulled back. Julian Cross is realizing he has feelings for the woman his employer never deserved. And Nina Sinclair is about to blow everything open before Helen gets to decide anything herself. This is not a story about a woman who gets rescued. It's about one who makes the man who lost her prove he's worth finding again — on her terms, or not at all.