> ARRIVALS

Flowers and chocolates might be on the shopping list this week, along with these new novels of love, both lost and found.

The Matchmaker’s List Sonya Lalli Raina made a deal with her grandmother. If Raina hasn’t found a husband by age 29, her nani will compile a list of suitable suitors. Our heroine — half-Indian, half-white, fully Canadian — tells herself that modern matchmaking is really just “arranged dating” and she won’t actually have to marry one of nani’s seven prospects. A smart and amusing entry into the chick-lit canon, this is the Saskatchewan-born, Torontobased author’s first novel.

The Best of Us Robyn Carr Robyn Carr writes cosy romances that take readers to gorgeous natural locales throughout America. This is the fourth Sullivan’s Crossing novel, set high in the Rockies at the intersection of the Colorado and Continental Divide trails. We meet Dr. Leigh Culver, who has recently arrived from Chicago to practice medicine in Timberlake, Col. Soon mystery novelist Helen Culver, the beloved aunt who raised Leigh, comes to town for a visit. It isn’t long before Leigh is involved with the local pub owner and Helen has fallen for Sully, owner of Sullivan’s Crossing itself.

Rotten Peaches Lisa de Nikolits “I am not a killer. I just fell in love with the wrong man.” That’s Leonie, a brilliant beauty-products chemist, petty thief and married mom who falls hard for the charismatic JayRay, who has a doomed plan to get rich quick. They’re the peaches rotting in the summer sun (an Elton John reference). The other woman in this crazy romp is Bernice, halfsibling to JayRay and a successful South African self-help author with her own desperate romantic entanglement. This is the Toronto writer’s eighth novel.

This is Not a Love Story Brendan Mathews The title does not lie. Most of the marriages and romantic liaisons in Brendan Mathews’ first collection are shortlived and end badly. In Airborne, a husband insists that mould festering behind the drywall is endangering his family; his wife is equally convinced it i sn’t. In How Long Does the First Part Last?, a man ponders tales of unrequited love while his wife gives him the silent treatment. But there is romance, too: the collection opens with Heroes of the Revolution, about a thwarted flirtation in an apple orchard outside Chicago involving two foreign journalists, a man from Lithuania, a woman from Bosnia, both scarred by the past.

Willa & Hesper Amy Feltman Twenty-somethings Willa and Hesper meet in New York, where they attend Columbia’s MFA program, and embark on their first same-sex relationship. But shortly after they come together they are pulled apart — Hesper to her roots in Tbilisi, Ga.; Willa to explore her heritage at Holocaust sites overseas. These two millennials take turns narrating their bittersweet journeys of self-discovery.