There’s plenty of l’amour to be found in Paris — and romance author Kate Clayborn is ready to explore love in big ways and small in her next novel, The Paris Match.
Coming to shelves on April 6, 2026, The Paris Match follows physician Layla Bailey, who has spent over a year telling herself she’s moved on from her amicable divorce from her college sweetheart. They’ve stayed friends, which felt like a mature choice until Layla is invited to her former sister-in-law’s destination wedding in Paris.
Layla once enjoyed her romantic honeymoon in Paris, which she knows will dredge up painful memories. Never mind the fact that her ex-husband isn’t coming to the wedding alone. With all this on her plate, she’s blindsided when what she believed to be a harmless conversation about her younger self’s choices leads the bride to get cold feet.
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That presents her with a new problem — the groom’s taciturn best man, Griffin, who will stop at nothing to make sure the wedding happens. Griff demands that Layla help him alleviate the couple’s doubts, and she agrees, only to find herself drawing closer to the heartbreak driving Griff and the true depths of her own pain. All while gradually realizing that she might want to do it all over again with Griff.
Check out the exclusive cover reveal below and read on for more from Clayborn.
Penguin
The Paris Match by Kate Clayborn
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: You are known for crafting a sense of community and existing in a smaller world, be it an apartment building in a big city or a small town — so what inspired the move to a book set in Paris?
KATE CLAYBORN: What a lovely thing to be known for! Of course, Paris has such grand romantic associations for a lot of people, and I feel a pull toward places like that as a romance author. The first time I went to Paris years ago, I thought a lot about where these associations come from — stunning pictures you see of the Eiffel Tower at night, or of those perfectly maintained Haussmann buildings with bright, beautifully maintained window boxes of flowers off every balcony, or of rows of perfectly baked, glass-encased pastries—and whether these associations hold up when you’re finally there, after years of pining for it from afar.
For me, so much of Paris does hold up in exactly this way — the Eiffel Tower lighting up still delights me, no matter how many times I see it!—but I also found a lot of unexpected things about Paris even more romantic as I came to know the city better. Small side streets, graffiti on the sidewalks, the banks of the Seine after people get off work, hardly anyone’s phone out at the café you’re sitting in, out-of-the-way specialty shops with strange treasures inside. I wanted to write about all this: the part of Paris that shocks you with its grandeur and gorgeousness, and the part of it that you learn more slowly, more deliberately. It reminds me of falling in love, and that’s my favorite subject. I hope readers will find that sense of community I try to create in all of my books shines through in Paris, too.
What do you think makes Paris romantic?
In The Paris Match one of the things I hope readers will find most romantic is these two specific people in this specific city. The heroine, Layla, has been to Paris before — on her honeymoon, no less! — but the hero, Griff, has not. So her experience is shaped by having really fallen in love with the version of Paris her ex-husband showed her, and his is shaped by having never been there — or really, anywhere beyond his home — at all. I think their shared discovery of the city together is deeply romantic. Because they see the world around them differently, they challenge and complement each other’s experience of being a tourist in this place, and I loved that about writing their story. Paris has particularly romantic charms — the light alone in the city is poetry — but I also think exploration of a place with another person is deeply romantic and inspires a rare kind of opening up. It’s certainly something I’ve written about before and am happy to revisit.
This cover is so beautiful — did you have specific asks in the design or things on your wish list?
It is so stunning, right? I hoped — but wasn’t sure if I could get — a scene of the kind of place that Layla and Griff end up loving most in Paris: a winding, narrow street, full of shops and bakeries and living spaces above, and other out-of-the-way, unexpected gems. I’m absolutely thrilled that the artist, Enya Todd, represented such a detailed scene (I adore the little peek of the Eiffel Tower in the distance, too — these two sides of Paris I love so much represented here!). When we all saw it as a team, there was a lot of collective gasping and incoherent keyboard smashing.
One of the subjects at play here is how you know a relationship is right/whether you should get married. Why is it important to tackle these very real conversations within the romance genre?
For a long time, the assumption — a not-true assumption! — was that all genre romances built toward engagement or marriage as the culmination of the required happily ever after. More recently, books honoring the happily ever after without a marriage have been more visible, which is wonderful. But certainly marriage remains a pretty significant part of how we talk about romantic relationships in the culture at large, and with this book, I was thinking a lot about what marriage means at different stages of one’s life, and about how people change over the course of one. I was thinking, too, about marriage as the joining not just of two people but often of two families, two sets of friends, two sets of ambitions or values that won’t always align over the course of a lifetime.
And finally, I was thinking about what it means when a marriage—the marriage you thought would be your happily ever after — doesn’t mean forever, and how you move in response to that, especially in a world that demands “amicability” of women. As a romance author, I’m most interested in love: of course, the kind of romantic love that forms the central connection of the novel, but also all the kinds of love — including a past marriage! — that have shaped my main characters into the people they are when they meet each other. When people read my books, what I want them to feel is that the culmination for these characters — no matter what ceremony or legalities or plans they do or don’t choose for their relationship — is an honest, lasting, and flexible love. A love of recognition and genuine acceptance. That’s what I want to put at the center, because that’s what I think is most important in romance.
Do you think weddings are a particularly fraught place for dealing with past regrets or emotional baggage?
Well, for a character like Layla — who is attending the wedding of her former sister-in-law — the baggage is pretty acute! But more generally, any kind of event like this — a wedding, a funeral, a holiday party, a vacation — is pretty emotionally charged. You’ve inevitably got alliances and divisions in the room, complicated histories among various attendees, all the lore of families and long friendships. Add in the stress that accompanies the planning and execution of these events, and the adjustments or errors along the way, look, it’s no wonder authors love to set stories with backdrops like these! When I was writing The Paris Match, I kept thinking back to some of my favorite “set piece” scenes in romances — big family dinners or balls or holiday gatherings — and how these scenes could be so simultaneously funny and deep and revealing and moving. I hope I’ve achieved some memorable ones here during this destination wedding week!
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