Insufferable: A Sweet Pride and Prejudice Modern Retelling: A Pride and Prejudice Variation

Lizzy Bennet has strong opinions. Will Darcy has stronger ones. Meryton has popcorn.

A food critic who destroys restaurants for a living. A celebrity chef who has never been told he's wrong. A charity cooking competition neither of them can back out of without looking like a monster.

Lizzy Bennet's review of Will Darcy's new Meryton restaurant goes viral on a Tuesday night. It is precise. It is fair. It is, she will admit to herself and no one else, quietly devastating in the way that only the truth can be. She goes to bed feeling very good about herself and wakes up to seventeen missed calls and the information that she has been confirmed, in writing, as Darcy's co-host for the Meryton Charity Cook-Off.

Five Saturdays. One tent on the common. Twelve amateur cooks who have no idea what they've walked into.

Darcy is brilliant, exacting, and socially disastrous in the specific way of someone who has spent his adult life in professional kitchens where bluntness is currency. He says the wrong thing constantly, not out of malice but because tact has never been required of him and he has never learned it. He is also, Lizzy discovers against her will, extraordinary at what he does. Privately kind. Genuinely good with people when there is a task at hand. The kind of person who sends prep notes on Tuesday mornings and means every word of them.

Lizzy is sharp, funny, and has been making up her mind about people quickly her whole life. She arrived with a position. She is beginning to suspect the position needs revision.

Their arguments are the best thing on camera. The production crew loves them. The crowd loves them. Meryton, which has been watching this unfold from the audience section with folding chairs and flasks of tea, is not surprised by any of it.

The only people who haven't caught up yet are Lizzy and Darcy.

Funny, warm, and full of the slow-burn tension of two people who are extremely well matched and both furious about it, Insufferable is a sweet enemies-to-lovers romantic comedy and the first book in The Meryton three standalone Pride and Prejudice retellings set in a small English market town where everyone knows everyone, nobody minds their own business, and every love story gets exactly the happy ending it has earned.

Sharp wit. Slow burn. Guaranteed swoon. No cliffhangers.