If You Liked It Ends with Us, Read These Books Next
Bookdot Team • •
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It Ends with Us broke something in readers that most romance novels don’t even attempt to reach. Colleen Hoover’s 2016 novel—which exploded into cultural consciousness nearly a decade after its quiet debut—touched something specific and irreducible: the experience of loving someone who hurts you, and the cost of choosing yourself anyway. Lily Bloom is not a passive victim. She is someone who understands, with devastating clarity, both what she is living inside and what it will take to leave it. That specificity is what made ITEWU a phenomenon, and it is exactly what makes finding a satisfying next read so difficult.
The books below are not readalikes in the sense that they retell the same story. They share specific qualities that made ITEWU linger long after the last page: emotional intensity that doesn’t resolve neatly, female protagonists who fight for their own sense of self, relationships where love and damage are genuinely entangled. Some of them are darker. Some are quieter. Several are by the same author. All of them will do something to you.
Still in Your Colleen Hoover Era
If you finished ITEWU and immediately wanted more Hoover—her voice, her emotional precision, her refusal to soften what is real—two novels stand above the rest.
Verity (2018) is the complete tonal inversion. Lowen Ashleigh is a struggling author hired to complete the series of an incapacitated bestselling novelist named Verity Crawford. While staying in the Crawford home, Lowen discovers a manuscript hidden in the walls—an autobiography in which Verity confesses to things too terrible to be real. The question the novel refuses to answer cleanly is whether what Lowen found is the truth or something else entirely. Where ITEWU operates with emotional rawness and transparency, Verity works through sustained uncertainty; the reader never fully knows what to trust, and neither does Lowen. What connects them is Hoover’s understanding of how love and harm can occupy the same space without canceling each other out, and her ability to make you feel implicated in the choices her female protagonists make. If you read it in one sitting and then sat very still for a while afterward—that’s the correct response.
All Your Perfects (2018) asks the question that ITEWU doesn’t have room for: what happens to a marriage that is technically intact but emotionally dissolving—two people who love each other without being able to save what they’ve built? Quinn and Graham begin where ITEWU ends: already past several smaller endings, holding on to something without being sure that holding on is right. Hoover alternates chapters between the couple’s falling-in-love past and their struggling present, and the structural gap between those timelines slowly becomes the subject of the novel. This is quieter than ITEWU, and in some ways harder. There’s no villain here—just two people and the distance that opened between them.
The “I Wasn’t Ready for That Ending” Club
A significant part of the ITEWU experience is being gutted by an ending that earns every ounce of its emotional weight. These two novels deliver equivalent devastation through entirely different mechanisms.
Me Before You by Jojo Moyes (2012) follows Louisa Clark, an out-of-work woman who takes a job as a companion to Will Traynor—a former adventurer, now using a wheelchair following a motorcycle accident, who has made clear his plans for his future. Their dynamic is initially adversarial and becomes something neither anticipated. Moyes builds toward an ending the reader can see long before it arrives and then watches it be more painful than you were prepared for anyway. The ethical complexity at the novel’s center—who has the right to make decisions about a life, and how much another person’s love can or cannot change that calculation—gives the emotional devastation actual intellectual weight. Read this after ITEWU if you’re not ready to return to lighter territory.
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid (2017) is told through a frame narrative: aging Hollywood actress Evelyn Hugo dictates her memoir to a young journalist, moving through seven marriages with increasing candor about what each one was really about and what it cost to survive. What connects it to ITEWU is not plot but project. Both novels are fundamentally about a woman learning, over the course of her life, what she is willing to accept from love—and finally refusing to accept it anymore. Reid’s Evelyn is older, more ruthless, and more strategically self-aware than Lily Bloom, but they are working on the same problem. The ending carries the particular kind of grief that comes from understanding something fully, too late.
When Love and Danger Overlap
ITEWU does not flinch from what it is depicting—the way abusive relationships are often also genuinely loving ones, the way “he was good to me in all these ways” and “he hurt me” can both be true. These novels occupy the same territory with different tones.
Behind Closed Doors by B.A. Paris (2016) follows Jack and Grace Angel, whose marriage looks perfect from every external angle—and which Grace consistently corroborates to the people in her life. The reader understands early that the reality is something different; the tension comes from watching Grace calculate, in increments, what escape might look like and whether it is possible. Paris writes with controlled precision that keeps the thriller elements from overwhelming the psychological portrait. Readers who found the recognition factor in ITEWU difficult and cathartic in equal measure will find similar territory here, with a more overtly structured plot.
Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty (2014) opens at the end: a dead body at a school fundraiser trivia night on Australia’s Monterey Peninsula, and the accounts of three women who were there—Madeline, Celeste, and Jane—slowly building a picture of the domestic architecture that produced the outcome. What Moriarty does that ITEWU also does is refuse to treat private harm as simply private. It shows how much of what happens behind closed doors is made possible by social structures, by the willingness of the people around a situation to accept a comfortable version of events. The novel is considerably funnier than ITEWU in its surface register—Moriarty’s voice is dryer, more sardonic—but the emotional honesty is comparable.
Complex, Messy, and Real
Part of what distinguished ITEWU from formulaic contemporary romance was its refusal to idealize the central relationships or let love resolve into simple narrative. These two novels share that quality.
Normal People by Sally Rooney (2018) follows Connell and Marianne from their school town in rural Ireland through years of their lives at Trinity College Dublin. Their relationship carries the traces of its original power imbalance across every iteration: the times they’re together, the times they’re not, the damage done by the ordinary human failures of cowardice and inadequacy. Rooney writes in close third person with an intimacy that makes the characters’ interior states almost invasively available to the reader, and she is particularly skilled at showing how people who genuinely care about each other can still cause real harm—not through malice, but through the failure to be present when it mattered. This is quieter and more literary than ITEWU, but it reaches for similar emotional truth about what love costs.
People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry (2021) alternates between summers past and a present-day trip: Alex and Poppy have been best friends for a decade, with an annual trip to somewhere new each summer. Two years ago something went wrong and they stopped speaking. The novel slowly excavates both what broke and what it would take to repair it, in a dual-timeline structure similar to ITEWU’s use of backstory. Henry’s ITEWU adjacency is primarily tonal: she writes female protagonists who want things badly enough to sometimes make decisions that look like mistakes from the outside, and who earn their emotional conclusions by doing real work rather than simply being swept into them.
For Readers Who Want to Go Further
For those who found ITEWU’s darkness meaningful rather than overwhelming—and who want to follow it deeper.
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (2015) is not a comfortable readalike. It is a 720-page immersion in trauma, friendship, love, and survival—among the most emotionally demanding novels of the last decade. Four friends navigate New York and their careers across decades; the center of gravity is Jude St. Francis, whose past the reader comes to know in fragments and whose interior experience Yanagihara renders with an intimacy that becomes almost unbearable. What connects it to ITEWU is the understanding that harm done to someone persists and reverberates across an entire life, and that love—while real and important—cannot simply cancel what damage has done. A genuine warning is appropriate here: this is a novel that many readers needed time—sometimes months—to recover from. But for readers who find that meaningful rather than a deterrent, there is nothing quite like it.
Reminders of Him by Colleen Hoover (2022) brings another entry from Hoover that is closer to ITEWU in tone than Verity. Kenna Rowan has served a prison sentence and returned to the town where her four-year-old daughter lives, being raised by the family of the man Kenna loved and lost. She meets Ledger Ward, who knew him, who isn’t sure what he owes the past, and who wants things that complicate his understanding of his own loyalties. Hoover is writing here about grief, guilt, and whether second chances are real—with the same emotional precision she brings to ITEWU’s more explicitly feminist concerns. The dynamic is different; the voice and the willingness to go to uncomfortable places are entirely consistent.
What These Books Have in Common
ITEWU generated its cultural moment because it asked questions that comfort reading typically avoids: What do we owe ourselves? What does love actually look like when it also causes harm? When is leaving the most loving choice? The books above are, in different ways, asking versions of the same questions. Some are gentler. Some are considerably harder. None of them offer simple answers.
The fact that these questions generate enormous readership is itself worth noting. Readers—and particularly women readers—want fiction that takes their emotional lives seriously, that doesn’t resolve complexity into formula. The commercial phenomenon of ITEWU was a signal about what was missing from mainstream romance. The books on this list received that signal and worked with it.
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Frequently Asked Questions
- What should I read after It Ends with Us?
- Great next reads include Verity and All Your Perfects (both by Colleen Hoover), Me Before You by Jojo Moyes, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid, Normal People by Sally Rooney, and Behind Closed Doors by B.A. Paris — each sharing ITEWU's emotional intensity and complex female protagonists.
- Is It Ends with Us a romance or women's fiction?
- It Ends with Us blends both. It opens as a contemporary romance but evolves into women's fiction as it deals with domestic abuse, survival, and a woman choosing herself over a relationship that has become harmful. That tonal shift is part of what makes it so memorable and divisive.
- Is It Ends with Us part of a series?
- Yes. It Ends with Us was followed by It Starts with Us (2022), which continues Lily Bloom's story with Atlas Corrigan after the events of the first book. Most readers recommend reading them in order.