Infamous: 'Bridgerton's wild little sister. So much fun!' Sarra Manning

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Agnes,” Gwen said, sitting up in bed and fixing her with a well-practised and rather imperious look, “don’t you have water to fetch, or something?” Do not get ink on my polished walnut table,” Mrs. Miller said from her customary chair in the corner. Eddie rolled her eyes. After supper they gathered in the drawing room, as was customary, although their approach to the whole ceremony was noticeably lax. In other houses across London, men would be huddling to discuss war, finances, or recent sporting endeavors, and ladies would be laughing from behind their fans or preparing to entertain with a jaunty tune on the pianoforte; at the Millers’, Beatrice was clinging on to Simon’s leg like a limpet as he walked, and Eddie was holding a piece of cake in her mouth, shedding crumbs as she led them into the room.

Rose snorted into her ivory glove. “If you were queen, everything would be burning down around us. It would be the sequel to the Great Fire of London—the even greater fire of London. And anyway, mad genius, you’d have had to marry the King to become queen.” Emily's charges - sisters - rebellious Aster and kind-hearted, pleaser Grace keep Emily on her toes - particularly Aster and never mind their father - Captain Edwards - who Emily initially mistakes for a stable hand. Largely because of the popularity of Netflix’s Bridgerton, there’s a new demand for queer regency romcoms. One such historical romance is Alexis Hall’s A Lady for a Duke , which has a transgender heroine. Meanwhile Lex Croucher’s Infamous, out in July, is described on the cover as “ Booksmart meets Bridgerton”, and includes bisexual, lesbian and non-binary characters. Croucher’s previous novel Reputation was another regency-era romcom. “The publishing industry is coming to the realisation that there is an audience for this stuff, there is money to be made telling these stories,” Croucher says. the queer rep was so well done. both the mc and the li are bi, and despite the time period it’s not seen as a big deal amongst the main cast. their is also side gay and trans characters!You’d all better be quiet if you want me to read it,” she said sternly. There were general noises of assent, except from Lucy-Anne, who only played the harp more loudly. You can stop ringing the bell now, Trix,” Eddie said, ruffling her youngest sister’s alarming hair as she walked past her in the direction of the dining room. It was the very first sign that Rose did not in fact coinhabit Eddie’s brain, and it was extremely jarring.

The large dining room already seemed rather full. Mr. and Mrs. Miller sat at either end of the table, and between them in varying states of patience sat their three middle children. Simon, who was twelve and perpetually disappointed, was staring morosely down at the table as if he suspected supper might never come. Amelia, who had just recently celebrated her fourteenth birthday by campaigning for her own horse and crying for an impressive six days when she only received one made of wood, was humming under her breath. Lucy-Anne, who fancied herself the eldest and most mature of them all, even though she decidedly was not on either count, was glaring openly at Eddie from across the room.

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With their first novel, Reputation, Lex Croucher wrote a regency rom com that was as much about friendship as romance and told a historically detailed story with a modern voice. Infamous is a sort of spiritual sequel, with the same mood of twenty-first-century-sensibility-meets-Regency-style. In this work, however, the scope is broader and the story feels bigger than a young woman's misadventures (even though, on a literal level, that's more or less what it is). Infamous is primarily about love rather than friendship, and it's about the world: art and its importance, power and who wields it, the rules society makes and who is allowed to bend or break them. Their coming out itself had gone mostly without incident. They did not have to present themselves to the Queen herself due to her ill health, which Rose said was a blessing, as “Eddie would have undoubtedly done something so heinous and inappropriate that she’d have been executed right then and there in the middle of the ballroom.” They had been sitting apart, leaning across the space between them, but it suddenly occurred to Eddie that it might make more sense, logistically speaking, to press her body closer to Rose’s—so she did. That certainly improved matters even more. She could feel the swell of Rose’s chest pressing into hers now, smell the faint scent of lilac in her hair. It all seemed to be going swimmingly until Rose shifted against her and let slip a breathy, half-restrained gasp into her mouth. and when it comes to love . . . you know. the heart wants what it wants. and the heart is also terminally stupid. a dangerous combination.”

It’s a little under a year since I read @Lex’s first book and, honestly? They just keep getting better. Compulsively readable, hysterically funny, and touchingly relatable casting genuinely human characters who are clearly more than a little Neurodiverse chafing against the stifling manners of regency England. I knew that some people were going to ask why I put the word ‘chill’ in the book and if anything that made me double-down. It was a very intentional choice.” Toying with freedom For authors writing queer romcoms, though, there is the added complexity of deciding when to represent the traumas that many LGBTQ+ still face, such as discrimination and familial rejection. Indeed, authors quoted in this article stressed the importance of having books focusing on these issues, coexisting with the positive stories.The bell was ringing quite insistently already, with the sort of urgency that indicated an imminent fire or that the French might be coming. Eddie disentangled herself from Rose, got to her feet, and held out a hand; Rose hesitated, looking dazed, and then took it and allowed herself to be hauled upright. There was the matter of the lantern to be dealt with, but Eddie had recently innovated a particularly ingenious method of scaling the ladder with it swinging festively from her mouth. Rose, who seemed very concerned with telling Eddie which materials were and were not flammable, did not approve. Rose had been asked to dance many, many times, and Eddie only a few; she hadn’t minded that at all, although she had resented the fact that she had to watch Rose line up again and again, her painstakingly fashioned ringlets flying as she was whirled and courted by all manner of eager, pink-faced gentlemen. When Gwen woke up, she knew she’d had the dream again—and that she’d been loud. She knew she’d had the dream because she was feeling exhilarated, loose-limbed and a little flushed in the face; she knew she’d been vocal about it because Agnes, the dark-haired lady-in-waiting who slept in the adjoining chamber, kept biting her lip to keep from laughing and wouldn’t look her in the eye.