7 Heart-Wrenching Books Like Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us

If you love Colleen Hoover’s writing style, you’ll love Renée Carlino’s novel for the way the storytelling builds and comes together beautifully, and for the plot that propels you until you’re bleary-eyed at 3 a.m. While WISH YOU WERE HERE definitely doesn’t get as dark as IT ENDS WITH US, it still has similar story developments that’ll keep you reading. Charlotte has a one-night stand with Adam that feels like the beginning of a wonderful love story, but she’s stunned when he’s distant and cold the next morning. She moves on to a new relationship—with Seth—but her perfect night with Adam is always there, confusing her and halting any forward progress. When she begins to search for answers, she realizes that Adam’s closed-off nature is a lot more complicated than she could’ve predicted. Like Lily Bloom, Charlotte is on the cusp of following her passions, but heartbreak and difficult choices upset her plans.    

This book is different from IT ENDS WITH US in many ways—it’s a YA book that takes place mostly in high school—but one of their biggest similarities was the friendship aspect. The bond between Lily and Allysa was one of my favorite elements of IT ENDS WITH US; seeing Allysa’s concern for Lily were some of the most moving scenes. And if you feel the same way, this is a great option to pick up next. The deep friendships and complex personalities in WHEN WE WERE INFINITE are what makes this book resonate so much with me. Beth has an amazing friend group in high school that are the perfect harbor away from her not-so-perfect homelife. But trauma interrupts their last few teenage years as her friend Jason experiences violence at home, disrupting any chance of joy they have and stirring up Beth’s own reflections of love and family. Beth’s personality is so real, and flashbacks to her upbringing show you how she became such a caring person—almost to the point of it becoming harmful. As we watch Beth and her friends struggle with the aftermath of their upbringing, their friendship shines forth.

IN FIVE YEARS has a lot in common with IT ENDS WITH US in that you go in thinking it’ll be a love story, but then it turns out to be very different. Plus, both stories had me sobbing by the end. This book rewards you even more if you go into it without knowing much about the plot, so I won’t go too much into the description—and if you’ve read a lot of vague reviews about it, just know they were probably written that way for a reason! When Manhattanite lawyer Dannie Kohan wakes up five years in the future and finds herself in bed beside a man who is not her fiancé, she is understandably distraught but tries to play it cool. After spending an hour with him, she returns to her present day and is forced to cross paths with that same man. If you go into it without any sort of notion about what will happen, you’ll have a much more enriching reading experience. So that’s all I’ll say about that!

April Sawicki is a young songwriter living in her abusive father’s motorhome in a small town in 1994 in New York. When she finally works up the courage, she “borrows” a neighbor’s car and winds up in Ithaca—and soon befriends a coffee shop owner and the regulars who dine there. The people she meets begin to put her back together, teaching her more about family and trust than her father ever could, and helping her halt the cyclical, pervasive feeling that she’s unwanted. Much like with Lily Bloom's endearing letters to Ellen DeGeneres in IT ENDS WITH US, the snippets of April’s songwriting sprinkled throughout THE PEOPLE WE KEEP give us a different angle into her subconscious.

Speaking of characters who hold a place in my heart, this is another book that made me care for the main character, for the tough situation she finds herself in, and the choices she struggles with to make her life better. Queenie Jenkins is a young Jamaican British woman whose recent breakup with her white boyfriend leaves her feeling insecure and unstable—at work, in friendships, with her family. As she tries to find some sense of peace again, some place where she can feel like she belongs, she runs after terrible men who treat her horribly. Candice Carty-Williams does such an amazing job at making you care for Queenie that you’ll feel like you’re there with her, going through trials and learning the hard way how to trust in her friends, colleagues, and herself.

IT ENDS WITH US is not technically a romance, so while I tried not to include too many romance books, there is one from the romance author duo Christina Lauren that many people recommended to me after I finished IT ENDS WITH US. LOVE AND OTHER WORDS alternates between Then and Now, telling the love story between Elliot and Macy. As high schoolers, they were best friends bonding over books. Eleven years later, they reunite at a coffee shop and slowly uncover what happened that caused them to stop all contact whatsoever. The alternating storyline pattern is genius because you get the cute ramp-up of them becoming childhood sweethearts and then even more of a build in their adult life as the plot makes you wonder: Just what happened to tear these sweet lovebirds apart, and if they can they recover from it and love again? So its premise is basically “What if Atlas and Lily reunited years later and didn’t have dumb Ryle in the middle ruining everything?”—which was something I was wishing for the entire time I was reading IT ENDS WITH US.

And if you want even more Atlas and Lily interaction, we’re getting a sequel from Colleen Hoover this October! IT STARTS WITH US starts after the events of IT ENDS WITH US, and also tells us part of Atlas’s side of the story. I cannot wait. I’ll be counting down the days for this one as I’m sure anyone reading this list will too.

Lily hasn’t always had it easy, but that’s never stopped her from working hard for the life she wants. She’s come a long way from the small town where she grew up. And when she feels a spark with a gorgeous neurosurgeon named Ryle Kincaid, everything in Lily’s life seems too good to be true.

Ryle is assertive, stubborn, maybe even a little arrogant. He’s also sensitive, brilliant, and has a total soft spot for Lily. Lily can’t get him out of her head. But Ryle’s complete aversion to relationships is disturbing. Even as Lily finds herself becoming the exception to his “no dating” rule, she can’t help but wonder what made him that way in the first place.

As questions about her new relationship overwhelm her, so do thoughts of Atlas Corrigan—her first love and a link to the past she left behind. He was her kindred spirit, her protector. When Atlas suddenly reappears, everything Lily has built with Ryle is threatened.