All About Romance : 5 Favourite Paige Toon Reads

Paige Toon is a Sunday Times bestselling British author known for warm, emotionally rich contemporary romances set in sun-drenched locations from Cornwall to Australia and the American Midwest. A former magazine journalist, Toon has now sold over 3 million copies across nearly two dozen novels. She's celebrated for layered, flawed characters, evocative settings, and stories that balance genuine heartbreak with hope, often built around second chances, found family, and life-altering secrets. What makes her so beloved is her rare gift for making readers laugh and sob in the same chapter, it's comfort reading with real emotional depth.

Only Love Can Hurt Like This (2023)

Wren's fiancé falls in love with someone else, so she retreats to her dad's farm in Indiana to heal, and promptly collides with Anders, a grieving widower carrying a secret heavy enough to derail things before they've properly begun. Toon does what she does best here: sun-soaked settings (cornfields and fireflies this time, rather than her usual coastline), an ensemble of warm, flawed family members, and a slow-burn romance that earns every ounce of its eventual payoff. The tone is tender rather than frothy, funny in places, but never afraid to sit in genuine grief. This is a healing love story, built on the idea that you can only truly move forward once you've properly grieved what you lost, and that the right person waits rather than rushes. It's an emotional, unhurried read that trusts its characters' pain as much as their chemistry, and by the final chapters it earns the full-blown tears its readers have come to expect from Toon. A quiet, patient romance about second chapters, not second choices.

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Seven Summers (2024)

Told across seven pivotal summers, this one follows Liv as she's drawn between two brothers — steady, guarded Anders and troubled Jonas, against a backdrop of family secrets and mental health struggles. Toon's structure here is genuinely clever, letting time skip forward in bursts so the reader, like Liv, only gradually understands what's really at stake beneath the surface. The tone leans heavier than some of her breezier work, more family drama than pure escapism, though her trademark warmth and readability never disappear. This is a slow-unfurling, will-they-won't-they love story, less about swept-off-your-feet romance and more about loyalty, timing, and the people who quietly shape us over years rather than moments.

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Five Years From Now (2018)

Meg and her once-in-a-lifetime connection keep finding each other every five years, at completely different, often inconvenient points in their lives, timing forever working against them. It's Toon's most purely romantic premise: a soulmates story that trades insta-love for something achier and more patient, built on the agony of near-misses and bad timing rather than obstacles. The tone is wistful and warm, unashamedly nostalgic, the sort of book that makes you root for two people the universe seems determined to keep apart. A genuine slow-burn, second-chance romance for anyone who believes some connections are simply worth the wait.

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Someone I Used To Know (2021)

A mid-flight text from a stranger, claiming to be sleeping with her boyfriend, throws Lucy's world sideways, and a sun-drenched trip becomes a reckoning between dependable James and free-spirited surfer Nathan. Toon's tone is lighter and breezier here, closer to classic escapist romance, though her emotional intelligence about indecision and self-discovery still runs underneath it. This is a choice-between-two-loves story at heart, less about which man is "right" and more about which life, and which version of herself, Lucy actually wants.

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The One We Fell in Love With (2016)

Identical triplets Phoebe, Eliza, and Rose have all, at some point, loved the same man, Angus, their childhood neighbour, now engaged to Phoebe. Told from all three perspectives, it's an unusually tender exploration of sisterhood strained by shared desire, before a devastating mid-book twist reframes everything. Toon's tone shifts from cosy to genuinely heart-wrenching, balancing warmth with real grief. This is less a love triangle than a "what if" story, about the paths not taken, and how loving the same person can pull sisters apart and knit them back together.

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