Love on the Brain
Ali Hazelwood, 2022
A neuroscientist lands her dream NASA project and finds her grad-school nemesis is co-leading it. Enemies, engineering, and a narrator with a stand-up's timing. A bright, joke-forward romance with a sharp academic voice, quick banter, and a current of longing under the ambition.
Feels like joy and longing. About love and ambition.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy enemies-to-lovers banter, workplace science, and a narrator who cracks jokes while chasing a NASA project. The comic voice is relentless and the academic detail is constant, so a quieter, slower romance may suit you better.
Why read it
It offers a funny, science-flavored romance about ambition and attraction, with enough lab detail to make the NASA setting feel lived in.
A page from the book
Every romance is also a lesson in the many ways people disappear.
Of course, this story becomes significantly less cool if you fast forward ten years or so, to when Pierre got himself run over by a carriage and left Marie and their two daughters alone in the world. Zoom into 1906, and that’s where you’ll find the real moral of this tale: trusting people to stick around is a bad idea. One way or another they’ll end up gone. Maybe they’ll slip on the Rue Dauphine on a rainy morning and get their skull crushed by a horse-drawn cart. Maybe they’ll be kidnapped by aliens and vanish into the vastness of space. Or maybe they’ll have sex with your best friend six months before you’re due to get married, forcing you to call off the wedding and lose tons of cash in security deposits. Ali Hazelwood.Ali Hazelwood is a pen name. By day she is a neuroscience professor who has published peer-reviewed research on the brain, writing novels around the academic work.
Books that feel like this
More by Ali Hazelwood
The Love Hypothesis
Ali Hazelwood, 2021
To convince her best friend she is over a crush, a graduate student kisses a stranger in a lab hallway — who turns out to be the most feared professor in her department.
Bride
Ali Hazelwood, 2024
A Vampyre raised among Humans is summoned home and offered up as a bride to a Werewolf alpha. Fangs, snark, and a very reluctant alliance.
Love, Theoretically
Ali Hazelwood, 2023
A theoretical physicist pays her student loans by working as a professional fake girlfriend, then meets the one person who seems to see through every version of her.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is Love on the Brain for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy enemies-to-lovers banter, workplace science, and a narrator who cracks jokes while chasing a NASA project. The comic voice is relentless and the academic detail is constant, so a quieter, slower romance may suit you better.
- What is Love on the Brain like?
- A bright, joke-forward romance with a sharp academic voice, quick banter, and a current of longing under the ambition. Feels like joy and longing. About love and ambition.
- What should I read after Love on the Brain?
- If you liked Love on the Brain, try Better Than the Movies (Lynn Painter), Play Along (Liz Tomforde) and The Ex Hex (Erin Sterling).
A taste of the feed
A mother, a sundress, a stolen base: the anatomy of a kept memory.
All the neighborhood kids played kickball in the street for hours that night, and the adults even joined us for a game. At one point, my mother was high-fiving Michael after stealing home base in her floral sundress and wedge sandals. That moment was pressed in my memories like a yellowed photograph in an antique album.
Better Than the Movies · Lynn Painter
To be the one always understood, and never the one doing the understanding.
I never had to beg for your attention, and I’m not sure you’ll ever fully understand how safe that became for me, knowing you were giving it to me willingly. I never had to ask you to see me, to understand me, and I’m sorry that I haven’t allowed you to be able to say the same. But I promise you, Isaiah, now that my eyes have been opened, I can’t keep them off you.
Play Along · Liz Tomforde
The kiss that makes the years before it feel like sleep.
What Rhys knew was that kissing her had felt like waking up. Like he’d been drifting sleepily through everything for the past nine years until he tasted her mouth again and remembered what actually being alive felt like. Better than any magic, Vivienne’s kiss.
The Ex Hex · Erin Sterling
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