Every August 9 is National Book Lovers Day, and we’re betting you’ll love the books these bookstagrammers recommend!
Yes, Instagram has become a worldwide book club, and the #MMromance hashtag is your one-stop shop for pages smoldering with male-on-male heat.
Luckily for us, we’re living through a boom of LGBTQ+ romance, and gay romance in particular. The blog Romancing the Data shows more than 33,000 LGBTQ+ romance books hit Amazon’s U.S. Kindle Store in 2025, more than eight times 2015’s total. The number of gay romance books, in particular, rose 70% between 2024 and 2025, nearly reaching 20,000 titles.
Of course, the success of the book Heated Rivalry and its TV adaptation have led readers—many of them women—to other MM romance titles. “This is not just one more in a long string of little trends,” Kim Allee, marketing director at the book discussion platform Fable, told CNBC in June. “This feels like something much more significant than that.”
How about we take this to the next level?
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Heated Rivalry, of course, is just the tip of the iceberg—or the surface of the hockey rink, if you will. If you’re looking for your next #MMromance read, check out the titles the Instagram users below recommend, including some promotion from the authors themselves.
God of Fury by Rina Kent
(@timothycanactuallyread_)
(@dr.romancemm)From Beijing, With Love by Bei Lin
Dearly Departed by Chip Pons
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I’ll Have What He’s Having by Adib Khorram
Renovating the Model by Nora Phoenix
Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid
Spitting Off the Edge of the World by Courtney W. Dixon
Limerence by Scarlett Drake
(@rileythekeegster)Bromantasy by Máire Roche
Meetings With the Minotaur by M.A. Wardell
The Emperor and the Endless Palace by Justinian Huang
Be Still My Unbeating Heart by Josh Winning
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