What is fated mates? Fated mates is a romance trope in which the bond between the lovers is decided before they meet: a mate a wolf recognises by scent, a soul tethered to a stranger’s pulse by a family curse, a name the universe has already written down. The couple’s task is not to fall…
7 min read
What is paranormal romance? Paranormal romance is any love story in which one of the lovers, or the world around them, is not quite human: vampires, shapeshifters, witches, ghosts, fae, demons, reapers, sirens, and beings that refuse a label. It is the broadest of the supernatural romance shelves and, by a long way, the most…
6 min read
What is sci-fi romance? Sci-fi romance is a love story in which science fiction supplies the obstacle: distance measured in light years, a body that is not human, a mind you can suddenly feel from across a laboratory, four centuries of travel between departure and arrival. It is the only romance subgenre that can invent…
6 min read
What is Celtic romance? Celtic romance is a love story drawn from the myths of Ireland, Scotland and Wales: selkies who shed their skins for the land, the Tuatha Dé Danann and their fairy mounds, the Morrígan choosing a champion, a holy well that opens both ways. Most of it, on this site, is set…
7 min read
What is vampire romance? Vampire romance is a love story between a mortal and an immortal who needs blood to live. The three things that make the vampire dangerous, the hunger, the centuries, and the fact that one of them will outlive the other, are also the three things that make the romance work. That…
7 min read
The keening began at midnight, as it always did, and Dr. Declan O’Sullivan, who had been listening to it for three weeks from his rented cottage on the Dingle Peninsula, put down his whiskey and went outside to find the source. He was an ethnomusicologist, specialising in the traditional lament traditions of Ireland, and the…
9 min read
The cauldron was found in a bog in County Roscommon by a farmer named Paddy Coyle, who was digging drainage ditches and expecting to find nothing more interesting than the usual complement of waterlogged timber and Bronze Age butter. What he found instead was a vessel of hammered bronze, three feet across, decorated with figures…
9 min read
The music came from underground. Orla Kavanagh heard it first on Midsummer’s Eve, walking home from the pub in Knocknarea at an hour when the sensible people of County Sligo were in bed and only the foxes and the fools were abroad. She was neither fox nor fool — she was a traditional musician, a…
9 min read
The seal skin was hidden in the chimney of the old croft house on the headland above Achiltibuie, wrapped in oilcloth that had been there so long it had become part of the stonework. Caitriona MacLeod found it on the afternoon she moved in, when the removal of a bird’s nest dislodged a stone that…
11 min read
Niamh Brennan did not believe in the old gods. This was ironic, given that one of them had been following her for the better part of a year. She first noticed the crow in January, perched on the railing of her balcony in Galway, watching her through the glass door with an intelligence that no…
9 min read