Attachments by Rainbow Rowell

Tropes: mf/straight romance, secret identity, workplace

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☕️ Cozy ↔ Angst Scale

1: Too Many Cupcakes!

🔥 Heat Level

0/5 Closed Door

💕 Instalove ↔ Slow Burn Pace

4: Agonizingly

Synopsis

Set at the dawn of workplace email monitoring, an IT employee tasked with flagging staff for misusing company email instead finds himself falling for one half of a hilarious, ongoing email thread between two women journalists — without either of them knowing he exists. A Y2K-era epistolary romance built entirely on voice.

Why We Loved It

This is a romance that falls in love with someone’s writing before anything else — no meet-cute, no physical spark, just two people’s inbox banter being funny and specific enough to fall for. It’s a good reminder that voice can carry an entire book, and the surveillance-adjacent premise gives it a slightly uncomfortable, very of-its-moment edge that keeps it from being just a cute gimmick. Pull quote: “these two women journalists are emailing back and forth with each other and the man who’s reading their emails… falls in love with one of the women without even knowing who she is.”