Sounds Like Love

Sounds Like Love by Ashley Poston is a standalone contemporary romance published in June 2025, an instant New York Times bestseller and her fourth adult novel following The Dead Romantics, The Seven Year Slip, and A Novel Love Story. It continues the gentle thread of magical realism that's become her signature, this time woven through music rather than ghosts or time.

Joni Lark writes the songs other people get famous for. She's one of the most sought-after songwriters in LA, which would feel like more of an achievement if she could actually write anything lately - there's an emptiness she can't seem to fill, and no amount of professional success is touching it. She heads home to Vienna Shores, North Carolina, hoping the ocean, the surf, and the familiar stage at The Revelry, her family's struggling music venue, might shake something loose. What she finds instead is a town in flux: her mother's memory is fading fast, her best friend is keeping her at arm's length, and The Revelry itself is on the verge of closing for good. And then, out of nowhere, a melody arrives in her head - half-formed, lyric-less, and attached to a voice that isn't hers.

That voice belongs to Sebastian, a wry, guarded musician with his own reasons for being just as unsettled by their sudden, inexplicable Telepathy as Joni is. Neither of them asked for this connection, and neither can quite explain it, which gives the novel's Paranormal thread a genuinely unsettled, urgent quality rather than a cosy gimmick - the two of them are drawn together by something neither fully controls, and have to figure out what to do with it before they can figure out what to do with each other. Finishing the song stuck in both their heads becomes the excuse; getting to know the actual person behind the voice becomes the real story.

What makes this such a recognisably Poston book is how seriously grief sits alongside the whimsy. Joni's relationship with her mother, and the slow loss of memories neither of them can hold onto, gives the novel a current of real Trauma and Healing beneath its sun-drenched coastal setting, and Poston doesn't rush Joni's reckoning with it. Watching her open up - to her family, to Sebastian, to the parts of herself she's spent years protecting behind professional success - is the book's real emotional throughline, and her Found Confidence by the end feels properly earned rather than convenient.

The Small Town Romance backdrop of Vienna Shores does plenty of work too, anchored by the Found Family of Joni's eccentric, loving relatives and the community built around The Revelry. Joni and Sebastian's Opposites Attract dynamic - her open warmth against his guarded prickliness - plays out through plenty of Witty Banter & Sharp Dialogue, and the Emotional Vulnerability both have to risk in order to let the other one in gives the romance real weight beneath its magical premise.

For longtime Poston readers, Sounds Like Love delivers exactly what her fans come back for: a story that hums rather than shouts, blending grief, music, and a little unexplainable magic into something genuinely tender by the time the last chord lands.