NEW YORK, May 26, 2026 — Annabel Monaghan has, over four novels in five years, quietly become the writer American commercial romance did not know it was waiting for. NORA GOES OFF SCRIPT arrived in 2022 and became a word-of-mouth phenomenon. SAME TIME NEXT SUMMER, in 2023, confirmed she was not a one-book writer. SUMMER ROMANCE, in 2024, established that whatever she was doing was reproducible and durable. DOLLY ALL THE TIME, published today by G.P. Putnam’s Sons, has arrived on the New York Times bestseller list in its first week and has been selected as this month’s Good Morning America Book Club Pick. It is Monaghan’s most confident novel to date, and the book that closes any remaining argument about her place in her genre.

Carley Fortune, whose own novels have set the tone for a certain kind of contemporary romance, summarized DOLLY ALL THE TIME with unusual precision in her early blurb: A luminous story of love, duty, and the tension between the two, DOLLY ALL THE TIME is less like a novel and more like a place I never wanted to leave. This might be my new favorite. Fortune is not a writer given to easy superlatives. The blurb reflects what a growing number of readers are discovering this week: that Monaghan has written her most immersive book, and that the world she has built inside it is the kind readers will spend the summer refusing to leave.

What the Book Is

Dolly Brick is thirty-nine years old, a single mother, and someone who has spent her life solving problems for other people. Her mother left when she was twelve. Her father and brother are, at present, on the verge of losing the family home in Whitfield, Rhode Island. Dolly, with her son in tow, has moved back to the seaside town of her childhood for the summer to hold everything together, again, because holding things together is what Dolly does.

Stewart Whitfield is the scion of the family the town is named after. He is annoyingly handsome. He is a workaholic. He is also, when Dolly meets him, standing next to a flat tire and the wreckage of a very public, very humiliating breakup. Because Dolly is Dolly, she stops to help. Because Stewart is desperate and improvising, he proposes an arrangement: a fake summer relationship, mutually beneficial, no strings, no complications, no risk to either of them.

Neither of them will make it to Labor Day with those terms intact.

Why Monaghan Works, and Keeps Working

The fake-dating arrangement is one of the oldest engines in the romance genre, which means that a novelist attempting it is essentially auditioning against every predecessor who has ever tried the same setup. What Monaghan does with the trope is what she does with every trope she takes on: she treats it as scaffolding for character rather than as a plot to be executed. Dolly is not a woman waiting to be rescued from her competence. Stewart is not a distant hero waiting to be softened by the love of a good woman. Both of them are, from the first chapter, fully realized adults with actual problems that predate the arrangement and will outlast it, and the pleasure of the novel is watching two people who have spent their lives protecting themselves stop protecting themselves in real time.

Monaghan’s sentences carry a specific warmth that is nearly impossible to fake and that has become her signature. She writes small-town Rhode Island the way Elin Hilderbrand writes Nantucket: as a place readers can smell, hear, and taste. She writes the interior lives of women in their thirties and forties with the specificity and generosity that romance readers of a certain generation have been waiting for. She trusts her audience to be smart, tired, funny, and hungry for a book that respects them. That trust is repaid, book after book, in sales and in the kind of reader loyalty most novelists in any genre never build.

Why the GMA Selection Matters

The Good Morning America Book Club has, over its run, become one of the most reliable engines of book discovery in American publishing. GMA’s readership overlaps significantly with the audience that has already been buying Monaghan for years, and this selection formalizes what her sales figures have been demonstrating quietly for two years: she is no longer a rising commercial romance writer. She is a top-of-market commercial romance writer with the platform and the readership to match.

The instant New York Times bestseller placement, arriving in the same week as the GMA selection and the theatrical rhythms of a Memorial Day launch, is not an accident. It is the market catching up to a writer who has been operating at this level for four books running. DOLLY ALL THE TIME is the book that makes it impossible for the industry to categorize her as a beach-read writer with a devoted niche. She is, on the evidence of this launch, one of the most commercially significant novelists writing contemporary romance in America.

The Verdict

DOLLY ALL THE TIME is the book that readers will pack in their summer bags, finish on the porch in a single sitting, and immediately loan to their sisters, their mothers, their book clubs, and the friend they have been trying to get to read a romance novel for years. It is Monaghan at the height of her craft. It is a novel that understands, and honors, the specific pleasure that keeps readers returning to romance: the pleasure of watching two people who did not think they could risk it decide, chapter by chapter, that they can.

For readers who have not yet found Annabel Monaghan, DOLLY ALL THE TIME is the perfect place to begin. For readers who have, it is the confirmation that everything they told their friends about her was right.

DOLLY ALL THE TIME by Annabel Monaghan is available in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook wherever books are sold. Published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons.

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