15 Books Like Emily Henry, Matched to the One You Loved Most

Nora writes made-for-television love stories on a strict formula, and she is good at it in the way people are good at a job they do not respect. When her husband walks out, she writes the truth instead, sells it, and a proper film crew turns up to shoot in her actual garden. The lead actor asks to stay on for a week after they wrap. There are two kids in the house, a tea house by the creek, and a running argument about whether a person who writes endings for money is allowed to believe in one.

Katrina and Nathan wrote one hit novel together and then stopped speaking, and neither of them will say precisely why. A contract drags them back into the same rented house to produce the follow-up, with alternating chapters that move between the writing of the first book and the misery of the second. The married writing duo behind it clearly know the industry from the inside, and the scenes about editing, credit and who really wrote which chapter are better than the ones about desire.

Percy spends her teenage summers at a lake house next door to Sam and his family, and the book alternates between those six summers and the present, in which a death brings her back to a town that has every reason to be finished with her. Fortune writes swimming, sunburn and the particular boredom of a small holiday town extremely well. The thing that went wrong between them is held back for most of the book, and when it lands it is smaller and more human than you expect.

Olive considers herself the unlucky twin, and her twin's wedding buffet proves it in reverse: everyone who ate the seafood is unwell, and only Olive and the groom's insufferable brother Ethan are standing. The honeymoon is non-refundable and non-transferable, so they go to Hawaii and pretend to be newlyweds, which requires a shared bed and a great deal of lying at breakfast. It is the funniest book on this list by a clear margin and it never once pretends to be about anything heavy.

Florence writes love stories under someone else's name, misses her deadline, and gets summoned by a new editor who will not grant an extension. Then her father dies and she goes back to the family funeral home in a small southern town, where she has always been able to see the dead. The editor shows up as one of them. The romance is genuinely strange and the grief is not decorative: the best chapters are about a daughter sorting through her father's things and being furious at him for going.

Shay has given ten years to a Seattle public radio station and watched younger men get the shows she wanted. Dominic arrives with a shiny journalism degree and opinions about ethics. To save both their jobs they pitch a programme in which a former couple give relationship advice, then have to sustain the lie in front of listeners, colleagues and eventually Shay's mother. Solomon is very good on ambition in a shrinking industry, and on the specific humiliation of being the most competent person in a room that keeps promoting someone else.

Georgie has spent years as somebody else's assistant, arranging a life that was never hers, and when that job ends she goes back to her Virginia hometown with no plan at all. In a cupboard she finds an old notebook of teenage schemes, and decides to work through the list. Levi, the local outcast with a complicated father, ends up doing it with her. Clayborn writes small kindnesses better than almost anyone in the genre, and the book is about the quiet panic of being thirty and unsure what you actually want.

Eve has loved one of her three closest friends since they were students in Sheffield, and she has arranged her whole life around not saying it. Then one of the four dies with no warning, in the first act, and the rest of the book is the group trying to grieve while a secret surfaces that changes what the friendship even was. McFarlane writes the way funny people actually talk, so the jokes keep landing in the middle of the worst week of these people's lives, which is precisely how it works in real rooms.

Alexis runs an emergency department and carries the full weight of a famous medical family, plus an ex-boyfriend who has taught her to make herself smaller. Daniel is younger, runs a struggling resort, and is the mayor of a tiny Minnesota town where everybody knows everything. The class gap is the actual subject, and Jimenez does not resolve it with a speech. She writes the ex with unusual accuracy too, particularly the way a controlling man keeps sounding reasonable while he narrows your life.

Justin and Emma discover they have the same strange record: every ex of theirs finds the love of their life immediately afterwards. So they make a deal to date, break up, and let the curse pay out. Emma is a travelling nurse with a best friend she moves cities with, Justin has just taken on responsibility for his younger siblings, and what starts as a joke premise becomes a book about people who were parented badly trying to work out what a stable life feels like.

Chani gets a weekend with Gabe Parker, newly cast in the biggest role in film, for a magazine profile that will make her career. The book runs that weekend alongside a second interview ten years later, with everything that the published article did and did not say sitting between them. Sussman writes the mechanics of celebrity journalism convincingly: the handlers, the questions you are told not to ask, the way a quote changes meaning once it is in print.

Lucy and Joshua work for co-chief executives at a publishing house formed by a bad merger, sit facing each other all day, and have invented private games to survive it. Then one job opens above them both. Thorne wrote the modern template here: the staring, the elevator, the tally of small provocations, the moment the hatred turns out to have been something else the whole time. It is a decade old now and a few of the workplace jokes have aged oddly, but the tension in the middle third still works.

Olive needs her best friend to stop worrying about her love life, panics, and kisses the nearest available adult in a corridor. He turns out to be Adam Carlsen, a professor with a reputation for making graduate students cry. He agrees to keep the fake relationship going for reasons of his own. Hazelwood writes academia with real fluency, funding panic and all, and the book is far more interested in women being taken seriously in a lab than the cover suggests.

Piper throws one party too many, gets her card cancelled, and is sent to run the dive bar her late father left behind in a rainy fishing town. Brendan captains a crab boat, wears a beard, and treats her as a tourist who will leave by August. What makes it work is that Piper is not secretly deep, she is a genuinely frivolous person who turns out to be competent, and the book likes her for both. It is much more explicit than anything else on this list.

Chloe has fibromyalgia, a family that treats her as fragile, and a near miss that convinces her she has been living at half volume. So she writes a list: ride a motorbike, go camping, do something bad. Redford, who looks after the building and paints in secret, agrees to help her through it. Hibbert writes chronic pain from the inside, so the fatigue and the planning around it are simply part of the day rather than a lesson, and the book is filthy and very funny.