Boyfriend Material

Luc O'Donnell has spent years being famous for all the wrong reasons — specifically, for being the son of a rock star who keeps making headlines. When a new scandal threatens to torpedo his already precarious reputation, Luc's solution is equal parts desperate and logical: find someone so relentlessly upstanding that respectability rubs off by association. Oliver Blackwood, barrister and walking embodiment of having his life together, agrees to play the role. What neither of them plans for is how convincingly they sell it — to other people, and to themselves.

Hall writes romantic comedy with a distinctly British wit that earns its laughs through specificity rather than farce. The banter is genuinely sharp, but the book's real achievement is Luc's voice: self-deprecating to a fault, achingly aware of his own flaws, and somehow disarming because of it. Hall understands that the best fake-dating stories aren't really about the fake part — they're about two people who need the fiction as cover to risk something real. The emotional beats land because the characters feel like actual people stumbling toward each other, not archetypes hitting their marks.