10 Best Colleen Hoover Books, Ranked

Colleen Hoover has rapidly gone from BookTok sensation to beloved household name over the last few years, and the first movie adaptation of her books, It Ends With Us, she’s been propelled into infamy among fans of the romance and thriller genres. 

CoHo (as she’s affectionately known to fans) has published a staggering 26 books over her 13-year career, with four novels released in 2013 alone. On the list of 25 best-selling books of 2022 by NPD BookScan, Colleen Hoover's published books took up eight spots, including the top three.

She’s an incredibly prolific and popular writer, with die-hard fans all having their preferred ranked lists of her stories. There are entire series of books, standalone titles, and some short stories among her published works.

There’s a formula that many of Hoover’s books share — one person is suddenly thrust into a position they didn’t want to be in, but they meet someone who makes them see the good in that situation through flirting and, eventually, love. She definitely has a preferred plotline, although she deviates from it occasionally, and somehow all the stories end up being uniquely memorable. 

If you want to dive into a CoHo book, it can be hard to figure out where to begin. With that in mind, here are 10 of her best. 

10. Slammed (2012)

Slammed was Hoover’s first published book, and she self-published it through Amazon so that her mother, who had just gotten a Kindle, could read it. Likely, she didn’t expect it to take the number 8 spot on the top-selling list of 2022, ten years later. It’s a tale of loss and slam poetry, with some sweet and transformative romance thrown in for good measure.

9. Heart Bones (2020)

Heart Bones is the story of Beyah Grim, who ends up stuck on a Texas peninsula. She’s drawn to all things morbid and sad and wants to build a better life for herself, away from her poverty-stricken upbringing. Samson is rich, and she can’t see how they have anything in common until she realizes he is also interested in sad things, and of course, that draws them together. A summer fling turns into much more, quite against Beyah’s will. 

8. All Your Perfects (2018)

Hoover breaks away from her boy-meets-girl pattern with All Your Perfects, which instead begins and ends with a married couple on the verge of irreparable damage to their relationship. They each have secrets, they’ve both made mistakes, and circumstances threaten to pull them apart, but their marriage could be saved if they’re willing to stick to promises they made in better times. 

7. Hopeless (2012)

Hopeless is another boy-meets-girl story, but the girl (Sky) already knows the boy (Dean), or at least she thinks she does. She doesn’t want to know him any better than she already does, but something about him captivates and scares the hell out of her in equal measure. Dean has secrets, and discovering them completely upends Sky’s life in a way she never expected. 

6. Too Late (2016)

Although Too Late takes a huge step away from being a basic romance, there is still some involved, although this book is mostly a thriller about a woman who gets caught up with a drug trafficker to pay for her brother’s care. Sloan is in over her head, but DEA agent Carter enters the picture, and attraction blooms amid the illegal chaos that Sloan has found herself in the middle of.

5. November 9 (2015)

If you read the blurb of November 9, you’d think it’s a sweet love story. However, please don’t go into it expecting that because this book is dark. An author named Ben meets a woman named Fallon, and they spend a glorious day together, inspiring his latest novel. But he needs more inspiration, and it needs to be dramatic, and he’ll stop at nothing to use Fallon to his advantage. 

4. Reminders of Him (2022)

CoHo is always a solid choice if you want an emotional rollercoaster. Reminders of Him not only takes you through a seemingly doomed love story between ex (wrongly convicted) convict Kenna and Ledger but also Kenna’s equally doomed endeavors to reunite with her four-year-old daughter, born while she was in prison. 

3. Ugly Love (2014)

For those who read many romance stories, Ugly Love is a basic story of a casual sexual relationship that grows deeper than either party imagined. Tate and Miles are attracted to each other physically, but they aren’t particularly fond of each other in any other way. Neither wants a relationship, but both have needs that the other can fulfill, so they become casual lovers. At least until pesky feelings throw a spanner in the works that neither can avoid. 

2. It Ends With Us

Maybe it’s controversial to put It Ends With Us in the number two spot, considering it is, as of yet, the only CoHo book to have its own star-studded movie adaptation. The first in a two-book series (completed in It Starts With Us), It Ends With Us is a bit of a love triangle with copious secrets, questionable motives, and dark pasts thrown in. 

1. Verity (2018)

Verity is about Lowen, a struggling writer, who is brought in to help ghostwrite the remaining books in a series by a famous and beloved thriller author (Verity) after the latter is left in a comatose state in a car accident. Seems like a dream come true for Lowen, but she soon finds herself falling for Verity’s husband, and not everything is as it seems within the household. Murder, dangerous jealousy, and a psychopathic need for control play a huge role in the story, and the end will leave you questioning everything.

If you've read all of these Colleen Hoover books, check out our list of books like Verity to give you more reading material of the same ilk.

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