14 Books Like Colleen Hoover, Sorted by Which One You Want

Yasmen and Josiah were married until grief took the marriage apart: a pregnancy lost, then her brother gone, and no room left in the house for each other. Two years after the divorce they still run a restaurant together, still parent together, still cannot stand near each other without static, and the book asks whether people can rebuild on ground that already gave way once. Ryan writes bereavement and therapy directly, on the page, without treating either as a montage on the way to a happy ending. The repair work matters as much here as the falling did.

Evelyn Hugo made it out of Hell's Kitchen, through seven marriages and a Hollywood career built on strategic lies, and now, in her late seventies, she wants one specific magazine writer to take the whole thing down. The husbands are the structure. The actual story runs underneath them and is about a love she spent fifty years hiding. Reid writes it as an interview with a slow burning fuse, so you race through the glamour while a much quieter book assembles itself behind your back.

Macy and Elliot grow up half beside each other, weekends only, in a Californian cabin where they read in the same closet and invent words for things. The book runs in two timelines, the childhood friendship turning into something else and the awkward adult reunion after more than a decade of silence, and it withholds the reason for that silence for a very long time. This is the Christina Lauren book that does not do comedy. It just quietly wrings you out.

Percy spends six teenage summers next door to Sam at a lake in Ontario, and the friendship becomes the fixed point of her whole adolescence. Then it stops, completely, and she does not go back for twelve years until a funeral pulls her there. Fortune alternates past summers with the present weekend, so you always know the crash is coming and never quite when. It is short, it moves, and the writing is warm in a way that makes the eventual damage worse.

Alexis is an emergency room doctor from a family of famous surgeons, still untangling herself from an ex who spent years making her small. Daniel runs a bar, sits on the town council and is ten years younger, and neither of them is in a position to make this work. Jimenez writes comedy and pain in the same paragraph without either cancelling the other, and she is unusually good on what a controlling relationship does to a person's judgement long after it ends.

Jessica returns to her southern university for a reunion weekend a decade after her roommate was killed on campus. The friend group has spent ten years pretending, and one of them turns up determined to reopen everything. Winstead runs the present weekend against their student years, and the trick of the book is that every one of these people is unlikeable in a way you recognise from your own hostel corridor. Ambition, class anxiety and social climbing do more damage here than the murderer does.

Thursday agrees to a polygamous arrangement in modern Seattle, sees her husband one day a week, and knows nothing about the other two women beyond what he chooses to tell her. Then she finds a piece of paper with a name on it, tracks the woman down, and discovers injuries nobody wants explained. Fisher writes short chapters that end like slaps, and the narrator's grip on what is real starts loosening about a third of the way in, taking yours with it.

Naomi arrives in Knockemout to help her twin sister, gets robbed within an hour, and ends up responsible for an eleven year old she has never met. Knox owns the barber shop, wants nothing to do with any of it, and does everything anyway. Score writes long, with a lot of banter and a fair amount of danger from the criminal mess Naomi's sister left behind, and the whole thing runs on the pleasure of two stubborn people losing an argument with themselves.

Anna was genetically selected so that her cells and organs could treat her older sister Kate's leukaemia, and she has been donating since she was born. At thirteen she hires a lawyer and asks a court to stop it. Picoult rotates the narration through the whole family, so you spend the book agreeing with whoever is speaking and then disagreeing with yourself twenty pages later. It is the original template for the issue novel that leaves you unable to argue with anybody at dinner.

Shelby Tebow goes missing from a quiet Chicago suburb. Weeks later Meredith Dickey and her six year old daughter Delilah disappear as well, and the neighbourhood settles into an ugly consensus about what must have happened. Then Delilah reappears, older, and the story starts unpicking itself from three timelines at once. Kubica writes short chapters and withholds efficiently, and while none of the characters go especially deep, the machine underneath the book is built well and never stalls.

Jessica sneaks into a psychology study about ethical decision making because she needs the money, gives more truthful answers than she intended, and finds herself promoted from subject to participant. Doctor Shields begins sending her out to test scenarios in the real world, and the distance between research and manipulation closes chapter by chapter. The book alternates between Jessica's own voice and the cold second person of the questionnaire, which is a genuinely unsettling formal trick and the main reason it stays with you.

Olive needs her best friend to stop worrying about her love life, panics, and kisses the first man in the corridor, who turns out to be Adam Carlsen, the department's most feared professor. They agree to fake it for a few weeks. Hazelwood writes academia with the affection of somebody who lived in it, and the comedy comes from two extremely intelligent people being catastrophically bad at reading a room. There is one serious subplot and it is handled with more care than the tone suggests.

Connell is popular and poor, Marianne is rich and friendless, and their secret relationship at school becomes a much more public and much worse one at university. Rooney writes without quotation marks and with almost no interiority explained to you, so the entire book runs on what people fail to say. Class sits underneath every scene. It is short, it moves quickly, and it produces the exact bruise Hoover readers chase, arriving through an entirely different door.

Hannah needs help passing a philosophy course and Garrett needs to keep his grades high enough to play, so they strike a bargain that neither of them intends to complicate. Kennedy writes college life with a lot of noise and a lot of sex, and the reason this book outlived a hundred like it is Hannah, who is a survivor written as a whole person rather than as a wound with dialogue. Garrett is unusually decent for the era of romance that produced him.