Caroline Khoury

Caroline Khoury draws on movement between countries, family expectations, and the long afterlife of first choices in her British Lebanese fiction. It Must Be Love, her debut novel, follows Abbie and Oz from their student meeting into a reunion fifteen years later. London anchors the story, while Istanbul, Paris, and Beirut widen its emotional and cultural geography. Khoury was born in Beirut to a Lebanese mother and Welsh father, grew up in London, and has lived in Hong Kong, Japan, and the United States. Those crossings give her romance a practical interest in how place changes a person’s sense of home. Penguin published the novel in 2022, placing it within contemporary romantic fiction while retaining the author’s attention to family and belonging. Khoury presents love less as a single perfect moment than as a question revisited after careers, distance, and obligations have altered both people. Her work is especially attentive to the tension between an imagined future and the life actually built.