Crush - Ada Calhoun

Featured on the Today Show as the month's best romance! Kwame Alexander called it “very seductive, an interesting take on marriage and love”

Praised by the Associated Press (“ensnaring… a breezy humor brushes most every page”), Washington Post (“a wry critique of the sexual confines of marriage”), Boston Globe (“feels like a brainy rom-com that could have been adapted by the late great Nora Ephron”), and with a *starred review* at BookPage (“this romp through a middle-aged crush is as smart and sharp as you’d expect from the author of Also a Poet”) and a *starred review* in Booklist (an "angsty, metaphysical, literature-besotted love story")

New York Magazine put Crush in its Approval Matrix—in the Highbrow & Brilliant quadrant—and Emily Gould called the novel “deep and thought-provoking, with hot sex scenes” in her Book Gossip newsletter for The Cut

Appeared on Slate’s “Death Sex, & Money” Podcast, recorded live with Anna Sales in front of an audience during Slate’s On-Air Fest last week, and on WNYC “All of It.”

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2025 according to Time, The Washington Post, Vulture, Marie Claire, The New Yorker, Harper's Bazaar, Bustle, Lit Hub, AARP, The Millions, Goodreads, Bloomberg, The Seattle Times.

Ada Calhoun’s debut novel mines the literary canon and the heart of middle age and turns up fresh wisdom about the danger and liberation of chasing desire, illuminating new ways to embrace freedom, ambition, and partnership.

Those staggered by Calhoun’s “brave, blistering . . . fierce, dissonant, yet compelling”* nonfiction—her critically acclaimed memoir Also A Poet and her New York Times bestseller Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis—will be delighted to find that Crush takes everything Calhoun absorbed about the lives of women and their relationships through her research and—using the bones of her own postpandemic reckoning as a jumping-off point— delivers, in fiction this time, another book that “makes you feel less crazy.”**

Sharp and revelatory, Crush implores us to savor and hold on to everything it’s possible to love—friends, children, parents, passion, lovers, husbands, all of the world’s good books, and most of all one’s own deep sense of purpose.

* The Washington Post on Also a Poet. ** Kelly Ripa on Why We Can’t Sleep

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Download Book Club Questions for CRUSH here!

Q&A with Ada Calhoun

“The word ‘crush’ often conjures the innocence of adolescence—a time when your life story isn’t yet written and anything is possible. But what happens when that dormant feeling is awakened in middle age? Ada Calhoun’s Crush is a gripping fever dream of a book leading the reader into the beguiling depths of desire, ecstasy, and obsession.”
— Molly Ringwald

⭐ "Suspense is the primary draw for this angsty, metaphysical, literature-besotted love story... Crush (such a charged word) interrogates all that we think we know about love and soul mates, commitment and conviction, while tracking the long struggle to fully become oneself and do right."
— Donna Seaman, Booklist

Praise for Crush

"Crush marks Ada Calhoun's arrival as a novelist, and what an incredibly explosive arrival it is. This book is a sumptuous exploration of how desire takes us over without a shred of moral hedging. A vertiginous—yet somehow also clarifying—novel that will grab you by your shoulders and shake you until you feel alive."

—Isaac Fitzgerald, New York Times bestselling author of Dirtbag, Massachusetts

"Calhoun’s debut novel, following the wonderful memoir Also a Poet (2022), is chock-full of great lines, both hers and quotations from other writers...Anything Ada Calhoun wants to write is well worth reading."

—Kirkus Reviews

"In Crush, desire is an irresistible force. Ada Calhoun is a master at capturing the way we live now, and her propulsive, witty, dreamy debut novel made me feel like I was exchanging secrets with my smartest friend. A heady delight."

—Claire Dederer, national bestselling author of Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

“Visceral, intelligent, funny, emotional, and layered. A revolutionary romance for ‘good girls’ among us.”

—Shauna Niequist, author of the New York Times bestseller I Guess I Haven’t Learned That Yet

“I didn’t just read Crush; I inhaled it like it would save my life. Calhoun captures the chaotic experience of a marriage’s dissolution and a new midlife romance with the insight and humor she brings to all her work. I loved this book. And I loved its honest depiction of what love can do to and for us.”

—Bethany Ball, author of The Pessimists

"Calhoun has a gift for explaining complicated emotions with concise, carefully chosen prose. If you’re a woman of a certain age whose hot flashes have reignited other fires within, you will read and feel recognized."

—Vulture's 30 Most Anticipated Books of 2025

"Calhoun (Also a Poet, St. Marks is Dead) makes the leap to fiction with a fizzy and powerful exploration of modern marriage—and the pitfalls and excitements of redefining marriage while you’re inside of it. It’s a story about love, in so many of its forms, and the chaos that can come from a crush. It’s both more than a romance novel and absolutely a romance novel. It’s a delight."

—Lit Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2025

“Crush has been compared to Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, so it's bound to be good. It follows a woman who’s content and happy enough until she sets out on a journey of self-discovery after her husband urges her to identify what might be missing from her life. Suddenly, she finds herself pursuing all the passion and desire she’s been craving deep down.”

—Marie Claire's 15 Best Romance Books of 2025 (So Far)

⭐ "Calhoun’s quick-paced story invites readers to lose themselves to the possibility of love taking unexpected shapes, while also providing a jumping-off point for exploring art and culture... Regardless of how readers engage with the story, they will find in Crush an opportunity to view the world through a new lens.

—BookPage

“[In Crush,] Calhoun’s cleverest feat is blowing us along in this whirlwind of desire and possibility.”

—The Washington Post

“Calhoun’s unnamed heroine is a literary powerhouse bursting at the seams… what becomes abundantly clear is that the true romance at the heart of the book is a recovery of self… Crush reveals the sly ways we delude ourselves into accepting what’s good enough and the liberating ways we can recover our joie de vivre as well as our autonomy.”

—The Boston Globe

“Euphoric, magical... dramatic, and a breezy humor brushes most every page. Oodles of cultural references smatter the text, dropping references to literary classics and buzzy streaming shows alike. Calhoun makes the specific universal by pointing it all back toward the puzzle most of us spend our whole lives working out: love in its many forms. While it provides a plethora of ideas, it also leaves a lot up for discussion, making Crush an excellent pick for book clubs and self ponderance."

—AP

“Calhoun masterfully captures the intoxicating, sometimes perilous thrill of desire—and the complexities that come with it.”

—TheSkimm

"Crush is a charming diversion... a contemporary updating of a 19th-century epistolary romance novel. Imagine if Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning wrote incessant emails to one another."

—New Zealand Herald "Book of the Day"

"In this novel, [the narrator] falls in love with an old friend through this incredible intellectual courtship. They are writing these dreamy, swoony, brilliant letters to one another full of quotations. And unless you consider people finding new forms of happiness stressful, I don’t think it’s a really stressful novel. I had a lot of fun reading it. And I genuinely think it would be a great summer read no matter when it had come out in the year. So I’d pick that one up."

—The Washington Post, "Summer Reads"

"Crush is a gripping read about finding new love in midlife"

—Naomi Watts, Stripes Summer Favorites

"Ada Calhoun’s Crush is sexy and silly and hopeful."

—Lena Dunham, Good Thing Going