Everyone knows what cosy speculative fiction is. No one actually seems to agree on that definition, though. Early in 2025, author Jenny Sandiford compiled a list of all the cosy fantasy books she could find for that year on her website. Of these 42 books, 35—that’s 83%!—of them are fantasy romance novels. When Book Riot made a list of “20 Must-Read Cozy Fantasy Books” in 2023, 7 of those titles did not have a romance plot strong enough to be mentioned in the description or in reader reviews. 5 of those 7 books are considered middle-grade[1]. That leaves 18 books aimed at adults or young adults and, like with Sandiford’s list, it puts around 89% of those books firmly in the fantasy romance category. As such, it would not be surprising if people believed that cosy speculative fiction books must be a subgenre of Romance. There is no such requirement, and the volume of Romance novels in a non-Romance subgenre is crowding out a wealth of other stories.
© S. L Dove Cooper
What actually constitutes cosy speculative fiction can be difficult or tricky to discuss because for many readers the most important, sometimes sole, criterium for the genre is the elusive element of ‘vibes’ or, more ungenerously, the feeling of “it felt comfortable and contained nothing upsetting to me, personally”. This results in discussions on whether books like Rebecca Thorne’s Can’t Spell Treason without Tea is actually cosy fantasy or not because some readers will think the stakes are too high and others feel it hits the vibes are just right.
I have previously examined and compared literary critics’ definitions of cosy fantasy to find points of agreement, but within popular discussions among readers and in marketing it is consistently the subjective quality of ‘vibe’ that wins out. Casey Blair defines cosy fantasy as “vibe. It's mood, tone, atmosphere.”, while Sarah Beth Durst describes it as “a new name for the type of optimistic fantasy / comfort read that’s descended from books like Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones and Beauty by Robin McKinley. It’s often described as low stakes or slice-of-life fantasy. It’s not about saving the world; it’s about saving a heart or a soul.” Both authors provide a fuller discussion of how writers can achieve that particular feeling, but these quotes are how they chose to explain what it is authors are looking for.
The books Durst mentions as inspiration for cosy fantasy both include a romantic subplot, though neither are fantasy romance. Howl’s Moving Castle is a children’s book while Beauty is more focused on the main character’s daily life with some reviewers remarking on how disappointing it was to see how little romance the book actually contained. Another frequently cited inspiration for the genre is Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, notably the Watch subseries, which is likewise not a series that includes a strong romantic element, based as they are on crime novels. Like the other two, it has a romantic subplot in the relationship between Vimes and Sybil Ramkin, but it a very small element of the narrative.
Tellingly, Durst also specifically describes cosy fantasy as a comfort read. As Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books notes in a Kirkus article, “comfort read” is a “familiar term to romance readers” and goes on to explain that
[r]omance is, if you haven't gathered, a very intimate genre, not only because it depicts the emotions surrounding courtship, but also because it invites empathy from the reader based on those same emotions. So if you think about the emotions you feel in a relationship – love, fear, joy, attraction, for example – and you think about the fact that romance is asking the reader to identify with or even feel a portion of those same emotions, you can understand how re-reading a much loved book can be a heady, absorbing experience.
Comfort reads are a specific type of re-reading. Comfort reads are those books that are the reading equivalent of your favorite pajamas, the most fuzzy blanket, the familiar recipe, warm beverages, and everything that makes your body feel cared for and, well, comforted. Books that inspire that same feeling of being cared for are what I call comfort reads, and each reader's comfort read list is a little different.
This emotional connection and invitation for empathy Wendell describes also occurs in cosy speculative fiction and the ways she describes comfort reads are often used to describe cosy speculative fiction reads as well. Julie Leong’s The Teller of Small Fortunes includes 12 review quotes/blurbs. Half of them explicitly use ‘cosy’ or ‘comforting’. It is likened to a hug thrice, with another twice for a warm cup of tea. It is explicitly described as comfort read once as well. The emotions that are most mentioned in the quotes are ‘love’ and ‘joy’, two of the ones Wendell mentioned as important ones to connect to in a romance novel.
© Julie Leong
Though Teller has a romantic subplot, it is very small and the book as a whole does not centre romantic relationships, meaning that it serves as a strong example of how cosy speculative fiction and romance rely on similar emotions within their storytelling. The ubiquity of romance in cosy speculative fiction, even in books like Teller that don’t centre on it, makes sense when one considers how much of society is structured around romantic (and sexual) expectations for individuals. It is expected of people, as they grow from child into adult, to develop an interest in romance (and sex) and to find a partner to build an exclusive romantic (and sexual) relationship with.
Sherronda J. Brown defines compulsory sexuality as “the idea that sex is universally desired as a feature of human nature, that we are essentially obligated to participate in sex at some point in life, and that there is something fundamentally wrong with anyone who does not want to—whether it be perceived as a defect of morality, psychology, or physiology”. (Refusing Compulsory Sexuality, p.7) Amatonormativity is slightly different. In her preface to Minimizing Marriage, Elizabeth Brake describes the term as “the focus on marital and amorous love relationships as special sites of value” and she offers as an example that “the assumption that the most valuable relationships must be marital or amorous devalues friendships”. These two concepts often go hand-in-hand as they do here.
Discussion is frequently made fraught by vocal puritans who think sex and romance has no place in (speculative) fiction as well as by the frequency with which asexual and aromantic people affected by compulsory sexuality and amatonormativity are thrown under the bus as a counter-argument to this puritanical rhetoric. This essay is not the space for either of those. Romance and/or sex are, for the majority of people, an important element of their lives and, as such, it frequently shows up in fiction. As children grow into teenagers and young adults, they are expected to start dating and to find a partner to form a nuclear family with. By thirty, media seems to suggest, a person is supposed to have found their partner and started a life together, if not have gotten married and had at least one child.
It makes sense, then, that romantic plots show up frequently in general. Not only that but Romance is the biggest and best-selling genre overall. Factor in that, as mentioned, there is a level of overlap between Romance and cosy speculative fiction in the emotional connection readers are looking for and the techniques used to create those connections and it is little surprise that so many cosy speculative fiction books are also romances. So what, more concretely, does this overlap look like?
For a book to be considered a Romance, it needs to have a happy ending, whether for now (HFN) or forever (HEA). This is, Romance readers and writers will tell you, the one thing an author cannot skip. If the book does not end with the protagonists in a for-them happy relationship, it is not a Romance, full stop. Likewise, for a speculative fiction story to be considered cosy it must end with the protagonists in a better place than they started. This frequently means the protagonist finding a group of friends, and with social norms dictating that a show of success and happiness require a (monogamous) romantic (and sexual) relationship, by the end of the story that group of friends tends to include a partner or the promise of one. Romance’s stakes of two people getting together, especially combined with the surety that they will, is, arguably, the type of low stakes that people are looking for within cosy speculative fiction.
The narrative devices to create, maintain or diffuse tension are often similar as certain elements of tension are simply not going to be as stressful, especially in stories that require the author to make and hold to a promise for a certain ending. If the couple in a Romance breaks up, the very fact that it is a Romance novel already diffuses that tension because they are guaranteed to resolve the reasons why and get back together. What authors are exploring is less the racked-up tension of whatever caused the fall-out, but the ways in which the couple resolves that tension and reconnects.
In the historical romance The Duke Who Didn’t by Courtney Milan, for example, one of the points of tension for Jeremy is that he has not told Chloe, the protagonist, that he is the Duke so ridiculed in her village. Rather than a huge emotional fall-out, wherein both Chloe and Jeremy deal with the betrayal once that truth comes out, Milan resolves this by noting that everyone already knew and spent years indulging Jeremy in his deception. Chloe, meanwhile, has been burned by Jeremy before and is determined not to be hurt again. Milan’s narrative, as is common in Romance, is character-driven, focused not on the ways Chloe and Jeremy come together to get one up on the white men who cheated Chloe’s father out of a fortune or who bullied Jeremy for being half-Chinese, but on the intimate connections both characters make to each other and the supporting cast. To echo Durst’s description of cosy fantasy, it’s not about saving the world (or in this case punching upwards against racists) but about saving one heart or soul (two, here since the connections they make to each other and, to a lesser extent the people around them, allow them to heal from past hurts and move on into a brighter, romantically entwined future together).
© A. T. Qureshi
Similarly, A.T. Qureshi’s The Baby Dragon Café stars Saphira and Aiden, both people who have lost the person dearest to them and who find healing and growth in each other. Aiden is an introverted gardener unwilling to bond with or effectively train his baby dragon, Sparky, due to the pressures of his family. Saphira is struggling to run a baby dragon-friendly café and finds herself accepting Aiden’s request for her to train his dragon. The emotional tension of Saphira eventually losing Sparky takes a backseat to exploring how she finds joy and beauty in the dragon’s antics and how this affects Aiden in turn.
In The Tea Princess Chronicles by Casey Blair, the relationship between Miyara and Deniel is secondary to Miyara’s desire to find a place within the town she finds herself in after having rejected her life as a royal princess as much as she can. Unlike Milan and Qureshi’s books, The Tea Princess Chronicles are not Romance, but fantasy. The series just happens to include a fairly prominent romantic plot. Like the other two books, though, Blair’s novels are character-driven and focus on the dynamics and relationships Miyara develops with the other cast members. Tensions between the characters are often solved by improved communication and the focus is shifted from exploring the potential fall-out to how such a fall-out can be defused. Though its plot and stakes gain prominence as the series continues into saving the world territory, which makes the stakes too high for some readers, the way the books accomplish this is by focusing on the individuals and the connections they make with each other.
Similar threads emerge in cosy speculative books that don’t focus on (or include) romantic subplots. Claudie Arsenault’s Chronicles of Nerezia novella series, for example, is a character-driven (science) fantasy narrative in which the stakes gradually grow larger. In Awakenings Horace meets Aliyah, an amnesiac elf with the unique ability to absorb Fragments, dangerous motes that can take over or kill people. As the series progresses, they learn more about Aliyah’s history and strange powers, slowly shifting the plot from the small-scale narrative of people trying to find their place in life into something shaping up to involve a more traditional epic fantasy Chosen One narrative. Yet, for all that, it is not Aliyah, the potential Chosen One, who takes centre stage in these novellas. It’s Horace, the series’ main viewpoint character, who is the series’ central figure and the story’s driving force. Whenever the novellas have a chance to move into a plot-driven quest fantasy, they do not. Arseneault will provide enough details to imagine the world and understand the plot, but the novellas’ focus remains on the character dynamics between Horace, Aliyah, Rumi, and Keza. Flooded Secrets focuses far more on Keza and her reasons for joining the others than it ever does on discovering anything about Aliyah’s mysterious powers. Motes of Inspiration does not hesitate to upend readers’ understanding of the world and its history, but grounds itself deeply in Rumi’s discovery of self-worth. The stakes may involve saving the world, but that world is saved by caring about people.
© S. L Dove Cooper
Arseneault’s work is explicitly and deliberately aromantic and asexual and it often engages with elements and tropes that readers strongly associate with Romance in a non-romantic light. In The Chronicles of Nerezia this further highlights how little cosy speculative fiction itself relies on romance, specifically. One of the romance tropes Arseneault specifically subverts in this novella series is There’s Only One Bed, utilising it to showcase Horace and Aliyah’s close friendship.
Horace froze, eir back against the now cold wall, eir chest and toes uncovered, and eir heart hammering. Aliyah settled, sleeping still, clinging to the blanket, shoulders hunched and knees brought up into a small protective ball. They seemed minuscule and frail, and Horace fought the urge to wrap eir big arms around them and bring them into a reassuring embrace. Aliyah wasn’t one of the kids from home who’d run to em after nightmares. They didn’t know each other, and from the way Aliyah had pushed away earlier, they needed space. Horace pushed emself harder against the wall in a pointless attempt to give them most of the bed. (Awakenings, chapter 5)
In this scene, Horace and Aliyah don’t yet know each other fairly well, but they are clearly sharing a single bed with nary a romantic or sexual thought to the experience. In fact, Horace is trying to give Aliyah as much space as they need and the closest emotional relationship contrast Arseneault has offered is one of Horace acting like a family member. Later in the book, after the two have been travelling and have fought off Fragments together, the description becomes
When they slipped into bed again, they did away with the forced space between them. Horace still leaned against the wall, but this time e brought one arm over Aliyah, bringing them closer. For a time, eir mind drifted to eir desperate run through the possessed dead and the way Aliyah’s thin frame had bucked and tensed against eir chest. E wondered how much they remembered, if anything, and if eir presence would evoke the countless bodies crushing them. But Aliyah only nestled in the space with a quiet sigh, and e felt the tension ebb from their muscles little by little until sleep found them. (Awakenings, chapter 8)
As can be seen, Horace’s viewpoint is practical. The novella links eir experience exclusively to bed-sharing with friends or other children. Physical descriptions initially exist to create distance and when Horace and Aliyah settle into sharing the mattress properly, while there is clear intimacy and trust in the sharing, Horace’s only thought is whether eir weight will remind Aliyah of a recent traumatic experience. The second half of this citation is the emotional release of the novella, the quiet before the story ends. Arseneault’s use of the trope drives home the depths a friendship can have. Sharing a bed platonically is something readers may recognise from their own lives, though they may have to think back to their childhood and realise that this gradually became less acceptable as they aged and amatonormativity and compulsory sexuality pushed sharing a mattress or a blanket into something strictly romantic or sexual.
Arseneault’s exploration of found family goes further than Horace and Aliyah’s closeness, of course. Keza and Rumi have an abrasive yet protective friendship, while Horace and Keza settle into a mentor/mentee role division. Aliyah’s love for the others is shown through subtle gestures and quiet attentiveness. Throughout the novella series, the characters are shown to share meals or play games, the ‘downtime’ from the plot of discovering Aliyah’s past being treated as just as, if not more, important than said plot. Always, at the heart of each story, the reader finds Horace’s desire for connection to others and eir willingness to treat people with openness and kindness, as well as Horace’s deep affection for eir friends. It is not a story about how Aliyah defeats the Fragments with magic and skill. It is a story about how support and care makes us stronger and more resilient. Aliyah may be the key to saving the world from Fragments, but this story is about who saves Aliyah from losing themself, who they are, wholly to that purpose.
That said, explicit aromantic and asexual fiction is of course not the only type of fiction which prioritises relationships other than romantic/sexual. The earlier discussed Teller of Small Fortunes is another prime example. This too is a story about friendship and (found) family. While it does have a romantic subplot present between Silt and Kina, it is a minor thread and treated more as comic relief than anything vital to the narrative. Indeed, by the end of the book, the romance between them has not progressed beyond “[Kina] looked upon the thief with something soft and unspoken—something perhaps just a little more than friendship.” (Teller, Chapter 18) The quote also tells us that the book is not an aromantic one since it linguistically prioritises romance over friendship even as the narrative keeps its focus largely on friendship and family ties, with Mash’s relationship to his wife Anna as the one exception thanks to his deep love for his daughter.
Throughout the book, small hints indicate that Tao has never considered romance (or sex) before and chapter 9 even states it outright: [Tao]’d never been in love herself—funny how romance didn’t seem to feature much, when you lived in a wagon and never stayed in the same place longer than a week—and it seemed rather a messy business, altogether” (Teller, ch 9).
Tao’s experience contrasts to the travelling innkeeper, Eino, from Kate Valent’s The Driftcap Inn whom the reader first meets, in chapter 1, after a one-night-stand, inviting that person to travel with him, and expressing that he invites people he has known for less than a day along frequently because he is lonely and his friendship with his cook is not fulfilling enough to him. It must be noted that a part of the implied reason why Tao has no expressed experience with or interest in romance is racism, which does not appear to be the case for Eino. Reading Tao through an aromantic lens would put her firmly in an Outsider trope, unlovable and undesirable precisely because she is foreign and Other, denied a proper place within Eshteran society because she is not like them and incapable of experiencing feelings the same way.
Intersectionally, this is an explicit part of the narrative as Tao is a Shinn immigrant who moved to Eshtera as a small child and lost much of her cultural heritage trying to fit in with Eshteran society. Throughout the book, Tao struggles with the question of who she is and where she belongs. When she attempts to avoid reading a great fortune, the book actively and explicitly calls out the idea that Tao does not care about Eshteran people, or the country she spent most of her life in.
It will not even let Tao pretend to herself that she only cares about her friends and is only helping the High Mage because their guild can leverage resources and people to look for her friend’s missing daughter. Like Durst’s definition of cosy fantasy and shown in Nerezia, Teller is a story that chooses to prioritise saving one person without narratively sacrificing the potential for higher stakes. “There’s no such thing as greater good—there’s just good, and the more if it we can do, the better[,]” Tao tells the High Mage in chapter 16. Tao is not there to save the kingdom or to save the world, to be heroically sacrificing for some nebulous impact on a country she has ambivalent feelings about. She is there, at the story’s core, because it is something she can do to help others, to help a friend who has repeatedly given up his chance to find his daughter to save Tao. Tao reads her great fortune, saves the kingdom of Eshtera in essence, simply because she wants to help her friend.
Becky Chambers’ Monk and Robot series (Monk) is about Dex, a tea monk who is looking for … something, a robot looking to understand what humans need, and the journey they go on together to discover whether there even is an answer. The two novellas focus first on Dex’s dissatisfaction in life as they leave their comfortable life in the human half of Panga behind to look for a monastery in the wilderness, then on Mosscap’s exploration of human settlements and its own dissatisfaction as it discovers robots too can struggle as much with the question of what a person needs. Just as in Nerezia, Teller and Driftcap, the forward momentum of Monk comes in the form of a road trip. The second novella especially explores the ways in which someone existing is enough, that people don’t need a purpose or fulfil a function to be of value. Monk is a philosophical series, and a more introspective presentation than other cosy speculative fiction narratives.
When the vast majority of a non-Romance genre has become Romance, platonic relationships such as these are pushed to the wayside, perpetuating the idea identified by Brake that non-romantic relationships such as friendship, parenthood, collegiality, siblingship, etc aren’t worth exploring or telling stories about. Viv from Travis Baldree’s Legends and Lattes may end up with a romantic partner, but that plotline is an element of the community and home she has found rather than the core answer to what she was looking for. It is, in effect, a bonus, not the grand prize.
Guerric Haché’s A Slice of Mars is as much about the sibling relationship between Hett and San, as they work out how to run a successful restaurant together, as it is about the friend group they build through that work and the tensions between people with vastly different experiences and views.
© Guerric Haché
Joyce Chng’s Water into Wine, a novella written and published in 2017, about half a decade before cosy fantasy became an apparent juggernaut of a term, is a story about a single parent, qar family and qar relation to gender identity during an interstellar war. Though the book has a romantic subplot between Xin and Galliano, the fact that the novella isn’t a romance allows for a vastly different relationship dynamic between them and a more bittersweet ending. In chapter 13 of book 1, Xin says nothing as soldiers come to take Galliano, a traitor, away from the vineyard. Though the narrative keeps a distance from Xin’s emotions at this point, it has already demonstrated that qar will kill to protect qar children, and protesting Galliano’s arrest would threaten everyone’s safety. When he returns in book 2, after having escaped the prison he was in, Xin lets him stay even though his presence could endanger them all, but when Galliano walks out to meet the ship looking for him, Xin does not try to stop him and qar even comments on this choice in the narrative.
© Joyce Chng
Without the imperative that Xin and Galliano need to be in a happy relationship in the end, Chng is able to tell a story that centralises familial and self-love. At the start of the novella, Xin learns qar was left a vineyard by qar grandfather. Xin had forgotten once telling qar Ye Ye that this was what qar wanted, but he hadn’t and, out of love for his grandchild, he made sure Xin’s childhood dream could come true. There are hints suggesting that now, as an adult, Xin does not want a vineyard at all, but qar is determined to make the venture a success both because that was a promise qar made qar grandfather and because doing so allows Xin to be true to qarself.
Unlike the other cosy speculative fiction novels discussed, one can argue that Xin is worse off than when the novella started thereby breaking the rule for a cosy ending. After all, Xin’s lover gave himself up, incarcerated or dead; qar closest neighbour and friend on the planet fled the war and may not return; qar mother has died; qar son has joined the army and one of qar daughters wants to leave to become a nurse. Yet the novella ends with a promise of new life, hope for what the future will bring, and with Xin fully embracing who qar is.
© S. L Dove Cooper
A few years before Chng’s novella, I published A Promise Broken, a cosy fantasy novel about a young girl, Eiryn, and her uncle dealing with grief and bullying. Unlike most cosy speculative fiction, this book does not feature a romantic plotline. Its focus is on both exploring the bonds between Eiryn and her uncle as he, and the community around him, work out how to raise a precocious, sensitive child as well as the friendships between the characters around them.
Even earlier in 2014, Becky Chambers published The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Planet). In her 2012 Kickstarter video, Chambers describes that “what [she’s] really interested in is what it’s like for an ordinary person to live in one of those fantastic futures” (Kickstarter video). Though Chambers never mentions the word ‘cosy’ in her video or her main Kickstarter promotional material, her description of the story she wants to tell fits neatly onto the hallmarks of what would, several years later, become known as cosy fantasy. Planet contains a central romance arc between Rosemary and Sissix as well as one between Lovey and Jenks. However, the overarching story would resolve itself just fine without either as it is focused on the crew’s overall dynamics and not Rosemary’s romantic relationship status.
The books noted at the start of this essay as inspirations on cosy speculative fiction—Howl’s Moving Castle, Beauty and Discworld—would all function without a romantic plot element. Studio Ghibli’s most cited work in cosy speculative fiction fields—Kiki’s Delivery Service—may have some hints of romantic feelings between Kiki and Tombo, they are only hints. The majority of the film[2] centres around Kiki’s relationships with the townspeople in general. Like in many of the other cosy speculative fiction titles mentioned so far, it is friendship, family and mentorship that takes centre stage in the types of relationships the viewer experiences, from Osono’s maternal instincts towards Kiki to Kiki’s friendship with the artist Ursula and with Tombo. The story itself is a coming-of-age story, with Kiki setting off into the wider world on her own to find her independence and build a life of her own away from her parental home.
Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle (Castle), whether one takes the book or the Ghibli adaptation, is likewise a story about a girl leaving home and discovering who she is. After a witch’s curse transforms Sophie Hatter into an old lady, Sophie sets out to find a cure and ends up working as a cleaning lady in the titular moving castle of the wizard Howl. Castle’s central romance between Sophie and Howl fits more within the bounds of amatonormative storytelling than Kiki’s relationship with Tombo. As Sophie is an adult, part of finding herself and her place in the world involves finding a romantic partner, but she also befriends the demon Calcifer and Howl’s young apprentice. Throughout the story, Sophie learns to have self-confidence and in the later sequel House of Many Ways one of Sophie’s main relationships is to her son, Morgan. Though Howl is present, he is pretending to be a child and Sophie’s nephew, effectively casting Sophie in a parental role rather than that of a romantic and sexual partner there as well.
Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series explored a wide variety of relationship types, but its most cited subseries in relation to cosy speculative fiction, City Watch, tends to keep its focus on the relationships between Vimes and his squad and Lord Vetinari. Though Sybil Ramkin and Vimes get engaged in the first book in the series (Guards! Guards!), and married in the second, their relationship is kept largely to the background, as can be expected from a series that draws on crime novels for its plots. Even cosy mysteries do not concern themselves overly with the detectives’ personal lives. When in Thud! Vimes (finally) snaps and loses control after an assassination attempt on his wife and son as well as having had a near-Death experience himself, his fury shows in a recital of the story he tells his son every evening. It is fatherly love, not romantic or sexual, that takes the central spot in his mind in this moment.
The origins of cosy speculative fiction have always treated romance as an element of a larger whole, exploring the breadth of relationships and affections people may have. Yet as the numbers showed, contemporary cosy speculative fiction has a strong tendency to push its romance plot front and centre, leaving the story’s platonic relationships without a spotlight and upholding the ideas that romantic relationships and sex are the ultimate goal of community-building. It reduces a broad spectrum of relationships into a single, narrow point and pushes out the variety that once was set up to become part and parcel of the genre. Cosy speculative fiction with its focus on community and everyday life is uniquely shaped to celebrate the power of all types of relationships and to demonstrate a world of what people can achieve by working together and respecting one another. Yet much of this potential is currently not being realised as so many narratives have become less about finding family and more about fitting oneself into amatonormative society.
References
Arseneault, Claudie. Awakenings . The Kraken Collective, 2024. ebook.
—. Flooded Secrets . The Kraken Collective, 2024. ebook.
—. Motes of Inspiration. The Kraken Collective, 2025. ebook.
Baldree, Travis. Legends & Lattes. Tor, 2022. ebook.
Blair, Casey. A Coup of Tea. self-published, 2017. ebook.
—. Cozy Fantasy Starts with Narrative Outlook. 18 December 2024. 15 January 2026. <https://www.campfirewriting.com/learn/cozy-fantasy-starts-with-narrative-outlook>.
—. Royal Tea Service. self-published, 2022. ebook.
—. Tea Set and Match. self-published, 2018. ebook.
Brake, Elizabeth. Minimizing Marriage: Morality, Marriage, and the Law. Oxford University Press, 2012. ebook.
Brown, Sherronda J. Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture. North Atlantic Books, 2022. paperback.
Chambers, Becky. A Prayer for the Crown-Shy. Tordotcom, 2022. ebook.
—. A Psalm for the Wild-Built. Tordotcom, 2021. ebook.
—. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. 22 August 2019. 15 January 2026. <https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/beckychambers/the-long-way-to-a-small-angry-planet?_pxhc=1657459177273>.
—. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. self-published, 2014. ebook.
Chng, Joyce. Water into Wine. Annorlunda Books, 2017. ebook.
Cooper, S.L. Dove. A Promise Broken. Dovelet Books, 2015. print.
—. Cosy SFF: A Comparison Of Definitions. 31 March 2024. 15 January 2026. <https://medium.com/@dovelynnwriter/cosy-sff-31aaa6599bc4>.
Durst, Sarah Beth. What Makes Fantasy So Cozy – GUEST POST by Sarah Beth Durst (THE SPELLSHOP). 18 September 2024. 15 January 2026. <https://fantasy-hive.co.uk/2024/09/what-makes-fantasy-so-cozy-guest-post-by-sarah-beth-durst-the-spellshop/>.
Haché, Guerric. A Slice of Mars. self-published, 2023. ebook.
Leong, Julie. The Teller of Small Fortunes. Ace, 2024. ebook.
Milan, Courtney. The Duke Who Didn’t. Femtopress LLC, 2020. ebook.
Popp, Isabelle. 20 Must-Read Cozy Fantasy Books. 26 December 2023. 15 January 2026. <https://bookriot.com/best-cozy-fantasy-books/>.
Qureshi, A.T. The Baby Dragon Café. Avon, 2025. ebook.
Sandiford, Jenni. Snuggle Up with These Cozy Fantasy New Releases in 2025! 24 April 2025. 15 January 2026. <https://www.jennysandiford.com/book-reviews-latest/cozy-fantasy-new-releases-2025>.
Valent, Kate. The Driftcap Inn. Valiant Ink, 2025. ebook.
Wendell, Sarah. Smart Bitches, Trashy Books: Comfort Reading. 21 November 2012. 15 January 2026. <https://www.kirkusreviews.com/news-and-features/articles/smart-bitches-trashy-books-comfort-reading/>.
[1] Which for people not used to the English book classifications means they’re aimed at around 8-12-year-olds and, though romantic plots can occur, are less likely to have them.
[2] Itself based on Eiko Kadono’s 1985 children’s fantasy novel of the same name.
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