Jane Costello Books in Order

If you want to start at the beginning: Bridesmaids → The Nearly-Weds → My Single Friend
If you want classic romantic comedy chaos: The Wish List → Girl on the Run → The Love Shack
If you want a holiday escape: The Time of Our Lives → Summer Nights at the Moonlight Hotel
If you want midlife romance: It's Getting Hot in Here → Forty Love

Jane Costello was born in Liverpool, grew up there, and still lives in the city today. Before she wrote novels, she worked in newspapers, starting as a trainee at the Liverpool Echo, then moving through regional journalism until she became editor of the Liverpool Daily Post.

Her route into fiction was practical rather than glamorous. While on maternity leave with her first son, she wrote Bridesmaids, the story that became her debut novel and kicked off her career as a romantic comedy writer.

That changed everything.

Bridesmaids was a bestseller, and the books that followed quickly showed what Costello does so well. The Nearly-Weds won a Romantic Novelists' Association award, and readers kept coming back for the same mix of big comic set pieces, emotional wobble, and heroines who are trying very hard to hold life together.

She has a gift for taking ordinary problems and nudging them into delightful chaos. In My Single Friend, a makeover plan between lifelong friends gets complicated fast. In Girl on the Run, fitness, romance, and wounded pride collide. In The Wish List, a woman close to thirty digs up the dreams she wrote down as a teenager and discovers that ticking them off is harder than it sounds.

The same approach runs through books like All the Single Ladies and The Love Shack, where relationships are tested by bad timing, cramped living arrangements, and the kind of emotional mess that looks very funny from the outside and much less funny when you are living it. Even when the setups are broad and comic, the feelings underneath are usually familiar: wanting more, making do, second-guessing yourself, and hoping love might still work out.

She also writes great holiday and summer stories. The Time of Our Lives sends a single mother and her friends off to Barcelona for a supposedly glamorous break that refuses to stay restful. Summer Nights at the Moonlight Hotel pairs lakeside nostalgia, a beloved old hotel, and a reluctant spark between a woman rooted in memory and the man changing the place she loves.

And she has never been interested in pretending romance belongs only to the young.

That is clear in later books like It's Getting Hot in Here and Forty Love, both centered on women in midlife juggling work, family, desire, and the shock of realizing a fresh start may still be possible. Across her fiction, you see some steady patterns: sharp female friendship, work stress, family baggage, awkward attraction, and women who are funny because they are recognizable, not because they are perfect.

Alongside the Jane Costello romcoms, she has also published emotional love stories under the name Catherine Isaac. Her books have been translated into 26 languages, one was chosen for the Richard and Judy Book Club, and several have been optioned for film. She still lives in Liverpool with her husband and three sons. When she is not writing, she has said you will often find her on the tennis court, wishing she had started much earlier, which feels like a very Jane Costello detail.