October was a great month for fans of happy endings: Three bestselling romance authors shared more details about their upcoming books. Emily Henry, Lucy Score and Katherine Center participated in romance cover reveals for their highly anticipated 2025 releases (and we couldn’t be more excited!). Keep scrolling to see the gorgeous covers, learn more about each book and find out what the authors told FIRST regarding their new love stories.
Known for her charming, humorous and emotional love stories, Katherine Center delighted readers with her romance cover reveal on October 17.
“The Love Haters is the story of a woman who’s filming a video about a U.S. Coast Guard rescue swimmer and accidentally falls in love with him,” Katherine Center, New York Times bestselling author of The Rom-Commers, told FIRST. “It’s a book about saying yes, even when it’s scary—to your messy life, to all your possibilities and to your long-neglected self.”
The writing process has also been unlike anything Center has done previously. “This is the first book I’ve written where one of the main characters is in the military, and the Coast Guard very kindly let me spend several days at Air Station Houston interviewing folks there,” Center told FIRST. She even got to take a ride in a rescue helicopter! “Safe to say, it’s the most intense research I’ve ever done for a book—and the most fun.”
Tropes you can expect: Look forward to themes of forced proximity, adversaries-to-lovers and an only-one-bed situation, “not to mention a plot-driving situation that I absolutely adore in love stories where one person gets trapped in a lie and can’t tell the truth without risking it all,” Center told FIRST.
The Love Haters releases on May 20, 2025.
Renowned romance author Emily Henry is back with another love story. Henry first teased her upcoming novel—Great Big Beautiful Life—in her newsletter, The Grocery List, on Friday, September 6, and shared the cover reveal and synopsis on October 16.
Her latest romance novel follows two competing writers fighting to tell the larger-than-life story of a woman with more than a few plot twists up her sleeve. Alice Scott and Hayden Anderson are both on Little Crescent Island to write the biography of a woman no one has seen in years—or at least to meet with the octogenarian who claims to be Margaret Ives.
“Like I’ve been telling you, this book is a little bit different, though still very much a love story (and a romance, to be clear), and I do know I say this every time, but I’ve genuinely never been more nervous to share something with you,” Henry said in her newsletter. “Writing this book consumed me, tore me up and challenged me like nothing has in years. It felt like the right book for me at the moment, and I hope that means that some of you reading this will feel the same way when the time comes.”
Tropes you can expect: What would a Henry book be without forced proximity and total yearning? It’s also set in the summertime, with a bit of enemies-to-lovers.
Great Big Beautiful Life releases on April 22, 2025.
Rom-com queen Lucy Score shared her romance cover reveal on Instagram on October 24 and described her next book—Story of My Life— as Gilmore Girls meets Schitt’s Creek.
Story of My Life is the first installment in the Story Lake series, a humorous small-town rom-com. “Hazel’s a big-city author who lost her creative mojo in a divorce and moves to a small town to rediscover her inspiration,” Score exclusively told FIRST. “Hello, hot blue-collar contractor inspiration!”
“I was inspired to write this book by the universal reader experience of devouring a book and then wishing you could move to that town, that world,” Score shared with FIRST. “I wanted to give readers a place on the page where they belong, a place they could claim as their own.”
Score adds that Story of My Life is a “love letter to readers.” “They’ve given me a place where I belong, and I hope I’ve managed to do the same for them on the page.”
Tropes you can expect: Score shared that Story of My Life is “stuffed full” with her favorite tropes, including opposites attract, grumpy sunshine, fake dating, secret relationships, forced proximity and found family.
Story of My Life releases on March 11, 2025.
