The enemies-to-lovers trope has me in a chokehold and I refuse to be normal about it. I am a sucker for the version where one of them is actively trying to ruin the other's life and they're forced into proximity by some sort of fantasy plot device. So with that as my qualifying criteria, here are the seven fantasy romance books I keep coming back to.

The Faerie King by Deborah J Martins

I'm putting my own book first because it would be weird not to. The Faerie King is technically friends-to-enemies-to-lovers-to (you'll have to read it), set in a Faerie that is actively a hellscape, with a sadistic king who has been waiting for the heroine since they were children. She's cursed to die at twenty. He's her father's sworn enemy and they've been stealing forbidden nights for years. On her twentieth birthday the curse comes for...her mother. Book two is Queen of Blood. The first three chapters are available here.

ACOTAR by Sarah J Maas

A Court of Thorns and Roses is the book that taught a generation of women they were allowed to want a 600-year-old fae lord more than the boy from their secondary school. The enemies-to-lovers in book one is technically Tamlin, but if I'm being honest the real banger is book two, which is functionally a different trope entirely and which I won't spoil.

The Cruel Prince by Holly Black

In Holly Black's The Cruel Prince, Jude is mortal in a court of cruel immortal fae and Cardan is the worst of them. He bullies her. She schemes against him. There is one scene in a river that lives rent-free in my head and the entire enemies-to-lovers genre has been chasing that scene ever since. Holly Black is mean about her characters in the way the best writers are mean about their characters, which is to say she lets them be genuinely awful before she lets them be loved. The way it should be.

From Blood and Ash by Jennifer L Armentrout

In From Blood and Ash, Poppy is the Maiden. Hawke is the guard assigned to protect her, but he has a secret. The slow burn in book one is masterful, the reveal is a punch in the throat, and the series goes on for approximately twelve thousand pages, which I love, because I am a person who lives in series. JLA has done a lot of things in her career but this is the one. If you finish Crown of Gilded Bones without screaming I don't know what to tell you.

The Shadows Between Us by Tricia Levenseller

In The Shadows Between Us, Alessandra arrives at court with a plan: seduce the Shadow King, marry him, kill him, rule. The Shadow King, it turns out, is super hot and inconveniently smarter than she gave him credit for. This is one of my favourite trope subversions in the genre; the heroine is the morally grey one, the heroine is the one with the body count, and the love interest is the one who keeps catching her out. I read it three years ago and think about it weekly.

The Bridge Kingdom by Danielle L Jensen

Lara is raised as an assassin to be sent as a bride to her father's enemy in The Bridge Kingdom. She gets to her husband's kingdom and immediately starts gathering intelligence. He, of course, knows, but he falls for her anyway. It's a beautiful slow burn, partly because both of them are competent in a way you rarely get in romantasy, and partly because the betrayal in this book has teeth. The kind of teeth that make you have to put the book down and walk around your flat for a bit.

An Enchantment of Ravens by Margaret Rogerson

An Enchantment of Ravens is a standalone about a mortal portrait artist who paints sorrow in a fae prince's eyes; an unforgivable crime in his world. He drags her into Faerie to stand trial. Faerie, predictably, has other ideas. The prose is gorgeous, the worldbuilding is delicate and weird, and the ending lands without dragging the whole thing into a trilogy that doesn't need to exist.