It Ends with Us
Colleen Hoover, 2016
Romance Economics & businessContemporary fiction
A Boston florist falls for a neurosurgeon, then meets the first boy she loved—and must reckon with what she owes her own history. The voice is warm and plain, moving between tenderness and ache, with a pace that lingers on memory and the pull of first love.
Feels like longing and tenderness. About love, memory and family.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy contemporary romance that moves between a Boston florist’s new relationship and the first boy she loved. Be aware that the story takes on heavy emotional material, including domestic abuse, so it may not suit you if you want a light, purely escapist romance.
Why read it
It offers a close, tender look at how past love and present choice press on one woman’s life, in a direct voice that stays with you.
A page from the book
How a person says you changed them without ever saying it plainly.
Imagine all the people you meet in your life. There are so many. They come in like waves, trickling in and out with the tide. Some waves are much bigger and make more of an impact than others. Sometimes the waves bring with them things from deep in the bottom of the sea and they leave those things tossed onto the shore. Imprints against the grains of sand that prove the waves had once been there, long after the tide recedes. That was what Atlas was telling me when he said “I love you.” He was letting me know that I was the biggest wave he’d ever come across. And I brought so much with me that my impressions would always be there, even when the tide rolled out. Colleen Hoover.Before writing full-time, Colleen Hoover worked as a social worker and a high-school teacher; she self-published her debut novel, Slammed, in 2012.
Books that feel like this
More by Colleen Hoover
Ugly Love
Colleen Hoover, 2014
A nurse restarting her life falls for a man who offers only sex and no past—and discovers how much pain can hide behind a closed door.
November 9
Colleen Hoover, 2015
A scarred former teen actress and a stranger who poses as her boyfriend make a pact to meet every year on the same date.
Maybe Someday
Colleen Hoover, 2014
A music student who hides her own songwriting listens every night to the guitarist across the courtyard — until he catches her watching.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is It Ends with Us for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy contemporary romance that moves between a Boston florist’s new relationship and the first boy she loved. Be aware that the story takes on heavy emotional material, including domestic abuse, so it may not suit you if you want a light, purely escapist romance.
- What is It Ends with Us like?
- The voice is warm and plain, moving between tenderness and ache, with a pace that lingers on memory and the pull of first love. Feels like longing and tenderness. About love, memory and family.
- What should I read after It Ends with Us?
- If you liked It Ends with Us, try Intermezzo (Sally Rooney), Wild Side (Elsie Silver) and Dear John (Nicholas Sparks).
A taste of the feed
Wanting to disappear completely, and to be loved completely, in the same breath.
Yes I would like he thinks to live in such a way that I could vanish into thin air at any time without affecting anyone and in fact I feel that for me this would constitute the perfect and perhaps the only acceptable life. At the same time I want desperately to be loved.
Intermezzo · Sally Rooney
The grief that has no funeral, no memories, no name.
Grieving something that never was and never will be is a special sort of hell.
Wild Side · Elsie Silver
Some love stories are made mostly of the time in between.
I fell in love with her when we were together, then fell deeper in love with her in the years we were apart. Our story has three parts: a beginning, a middle, and an end. And although this is the way all stories unfold, I still can’t believe that ours didn’t go on forever.
Dear John · Nicholas Sparks
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