New adult is a romance category about characters roughly eighteen to twenty-nine: the first flat, university, the first breakup that leaves a mark. It covers growing up after you're technically grown, with more heat and less caution than young adult fiction.
The category named itself a little over a decade ago, when readers found nothing on the shelf between teen fiction and novels about settled adults. New adult filled the gap with characters who are old enough for everything and not yet sure how any of it works. The voice is fast, direct, often first person.
Shared kitchens, lecture halls, night buses. Friends who know everything. Parents who remarry or split and rearrange your world in the process. And a love that, for the first time, has consequences.
In "Next Door," you're an art student in London-Brixton, sharing a three-bedroom flat in a Victorian terraced house with your stepbrother since your parents' wedding—kitchen conversations at four in the morning included. In "Two Meters of Airline," after the breakup, all you have left is the balcony, until someone on the other side stands there with the same ritual.
At Everglow you do not just read it. You are the protagonist, and every chapter ends with your move.