My second novel, The End of Romance, comes out on February 3rd, 2026 from Viking. You can pre-order it here, here, or, best of all, from your favorite independent bookstore. Here’s what it’s about:
Sylvie Broder was taught early to embrace joy. The granddaughter of Holocaust survivors who’d developed a system of thought that focused on enjoying the life they’d snatched back from Hitler, Sylvie grew up believing in the tenacious pursuit of pleasure. So, when she finds herself trapped in a suffocating, emotionally abusive marriage, no one is more unmoored than Sylvie herself. With enormous fortitude, Sylvie frees herself and turns to graduate school, determined to prove her new philosophy: Straight women will find true liberation and happiness only once romance is eradicated.
Sylvie uses her new-found freedom to enjoy men, but never to commit to one, priding herself in separating sex from tenderness. She doesn’t sleep over, certainly doesn’t cuddle, and never hooks up with a man more than once. Then she meets Robbie and Abie…and finds her philosophy sorely tested. A warm and gentle man, Robbie treats Sylvie with patience and enormous kindness, offering her the soft place to land she hasn’t had since childhood. Abie, on the other hand, is passionate and dynamic, a man who challenges Sylvie, and with whom she finds herself constantly disarmed. With both men, she feels a deep desire that looks, worryingly, a lot like love.
Cleverly constructed, delightfully funny, and beautifully written, The End of Romance is an anti-romance romance novel that charts its fallible heroine’s tumultuous journey to love and happiness with erudition and deep feeling—a story for anyone who, despite their very best efforts, has fallen in love, and wondered why.
“It is one of many delightful ironies in Lily Meyer’s gripping and incisive novel, The End of Romance, that her unforgettable heroine, Sylvie Broder, finds herself constantly untangling herself from love. It is also one of its many pleasures that you root for Sylvie at every turn, from her loveless childhood to her flight from an abusive marriage to a life of passion and intellectual pursuit…Meyer has created a woman I learned from, suffered with and, now that I’ve finished this terrific novel, miss terribly.” – Adam Ross, author of NYTBR Editor’s Choice Playworld