Books Like It Ends with Us

Why Each Pick

Love and Other Words by Christina Lauren

The closest match for Lily and Atlas's story: a first love from the teenage years, a painful separation and a reunion as adults. Christina Lauren tells it in two timelines, much as Hoover uses Lily's childhood journal, so the past fills in slowly. It is gentler, with no abuse storyline, and the focus stays on two childhood best friends and what drove them apart for eleven years.

Me Before You by Jojo Moyes

Another love story that asks its heroine to face a hard decision about the man she loves, told in the same warm, readable first-person voice. Louisa Clark, a small-town young woman, takes a job caring for Will Traynor, who was left paralyzed by an accident. There is no villain here: the conflict is about disability and end-of-life choices rather than violence, and it is a well-known tearjerker.

The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks

For readers who were rooting for the first love. Noah and Allie fall for each other one summer in the 1940s South, are separated by class and family, and meet again years later. Like Lily's journal, the story reaches us through a written record, read aloud by an old man in a nursing home. It is short, at 227 pages, sentimental rather than dark, and has no abuse storyline.

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Another heroine looking back at the people in her life and the choices that cost her, with a secret love running underneath. Evelyn Hugo, an aging Hollywood star, tells her life story to a young reporter, including a marriage that turned violent. It is glamorous and historical, spanning decades of old Hollywood, and its central love story is between two women.

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

Like Lily, Kya grows up watching a violent father, and the damage shapes how she trusts the men who come later. Abandoned by her family, she raises herself in the North Carolina marshes and becomes a self-taught naturalist, and two very different young men enter her life. It adds a murder mystery and long passages of nature writing, so it moves more slowly than Hoover.

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

For readers drawn to Lily's slow reckoning with her childhood. Eleanor keeps a rigid, lonely routine until a kind coworker and a chance good deed start to open her up, and the reason she lives that way surfaces piece by piece. It is a novel about healing from family trauma, often funny, and romance plays only a small part. It touches on abuse, drinking and depression.

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

A true story for readers who connected with the family history in It Ends with Us. Jeannette Walls grew up with a brilliant, unreliable father whose drinking made home dangerous, and a mother who stayed with him. Like Lily, she has to decide how much of that pattern to carry into her own life. It is a memoir, not a romance, told plainly and often with humor, at 288 pages.

Verity by Colleen Hoover

Colleen Hoover's best-known thriller, for readers who want more from the same author. A struggling writer moves into a famous novelist's home to finish her book series and finds a manuscript full of disturbing confessions. Hoover's fast, addictive pacing and messy attraction carry over, but this is a dark psychological thriller with graphic sex and violence, not a story about breaking a cycle.