Portia MacIntosh Audiobooks

Yorkshire has produced a fair number of romantic novelists, but few as productive as Portia MacIntosh. She has been writing romantic comedy for well over a decade, has dozens of novels to her name, and has been called the queen of the British romcom often enough that the title has stuck to her.

Her novels rest on a reliable set of pleasures: a heroine at a hinge moment in her life, a location worth the airfare, an ex who materialises at the worst conceivable time, and dialogue quick enough to keep the sentiment honest. She is funny first and romantic second, which is the correct order for the genre.

Recent years have taken her into audio in a serious way, with original commissions written for the ear rather than adapted to it. The move suits her. Comic timing that can look merely brisk on the page becomes properly funny once an actor is given room to land it, and her books have attracted some notably good ones.

Start with Without a Hitch, in which Holly, jilted at the altar, flies to Maui to recover and finds the man who left her already there, marrying somebody else. Charlotte Ritchie narrates, and if you know her comic work on screen you will know precisely how well that pairing works.

A Lot to Unpack is the rivals-to-lovers option, read by Karen Cass, while Ex En Provence sends its heroine to a crumbling chateau in the south of France to claim an inheritance she never expected, with Arty Froushan and Lara Peake sharing the narration.

These are summer listening in the best sense: seven hours or so, warm, quick and eminently quotable. Have a browse below and check back, since her titles reach us in stages.