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Ashley Poston, the New York Times bestselling author of The Seven Year Slip, A Novel Love Story, and The Dead Romantics, doesn’t have anything against what she calls “straight contemporary romance.” But as a writer who grew up, like so many, on a steady diet of fantasy-adjacent fanfiction, she gravitates toward the uncanny. “I’m like, ‘Okay, I’m bored,’” she says, laughing. “‘Where are the aliens?’” Her romances aren’t Sarah J. Maas-leaning romantasys, but they’re infused with a tiny twist of magical realism: A book publicist falls in love with her roommate, who lives seven years in the past; a literature professor’s car breaks down in the small town from her favorite novel series; a ghostwriter’s editor is…actually a ghost. And in Poston’s latest, upcoming novel? A songwriter and a musician communicate via telepathy.
That upcoming novel—which Poston is discussing exclusively with ELLE.com for the first time—is Sounds Like Love, out June 17, 2025 from Berkley. She pitches the plot as follows: “A burnt-out songwriter and a has-been musician find out they have an inexplicable telepathic connection while battling burnout and the future of what they thought their dreams would be,” she says. “It’s about being not as alone as you think you are, and finding out that like calls to like.”
That burnt-out but super-successful songwriter is protagonist Joni Lark, who returns early in the novel to her hometown of Vienna Shores, North Carolina, where her mother is dealing with early onset dementia, and her family’s music venue is on the brink of closure. In Vienna Shores, Joni suddenly hears a melody in her head—only to realize it doesn’t belong entirely to her own imagination. It also belongs to a man, whom Poston is quick to introduce as “Hozier, but with a Backstreet Boys past,” she says. “Man bun included. Don’t worry. Couldn’t take me to church any other way.”
Poston is well-acquainted with the sort of burnout that plagues Joni and her boy-band-Hozier. She is currently rolling out a book a year—“People should always expect a book from me in June, unless otherwise stated,” she says—after having transitioned from YA literature to adult romance with The Dead Romantics. She keeps herself grounded and refreshed by continuing to write fanfiction, which she pens under a secret username. The reasoning is that “there’s no stress there,” she explains. “There’s no, ‘Well, can I monetize this? Will this be a six-figure deal if I take it out there?’ It’s not about any of that. It’s just about me and my love for telling this story. ”
The Dead Romantics itself started as a fanfiction Poston had written while struggling to land other YA and middle-grade stories. She tweaked it to become an original paranormal romance, and her now-editor, Amanda Bergeron at Berkley, fell in love with it. As a neurodivergent child with a speech impediment, Poston had turned to writing—and to fanfiction, in particular—“because it was something that I knew I could control,” she says. “It was how I managed to see the rest of the world, and it was how I informed how I felt.” Even as she now builds her career on original romances, she uses her work to process “a question or a feeling that I have that I might not understand, but I go through the story searching for the answer to it.”
After earning an English degree from the University of South Carolina and working a stint in New York at Bloomsbury Publishing, Poston started writing full-time “from my parents’ basement, basically.” Sometimes, she finds it difficult to reconcile those humble beginnings with her burgeoning popularity. Only last week, she was visiting Disney World when a fan recognized her waiting for the Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind ride. “The person in line was like, ‘I’m listening to A Novel Love Story right now!’” Poston recalls, laughing. “I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, I’m getting on Guardians, lovely to meet you!”
That surreal experience—not exactly common amongst most fiction writers—is liable to become more frequent, a reality Poston is beginning to accept. “It’s very strange,” she says, “because I come from the other side of it. I was the one who drove four hours to go see my favorite author, and now people are driving hours to come see me. I get really emotional when I think about it, because I know how they feel. I know it’s one of those things that you really can’t put into words. It’s just a feeling. Like: ‘Oh! You, too?’”
Preorder Sounds Like Love by Ashley Poston on Bookshop.org
Lauren Puckett-Pope is a staff culture writer at ELLE, where she primarily covers film, television and books. She was previously an associate editor at ELLE.