The first Colleen Hoover book I read was It Ends With Us, and when I opened it on the tube, I saw that the woman next to me was reading It Starts With Us. This is not likely to happen with many authors; but as of last year, Hoover was the bestselling novelist in the US, occupying the top six places on the New York Times bestseller list. “To even compare her to other successful authors,” wrote Alexandra Alter of that newspaper, “fails to capture the size and loyalty of her audience.” In the UK, her dominance is somewhat challenged by the remarkable sales of Richard Osman, who had three books in four of the Sunday Times top spots in 2022, but she was still named by that paper as “undoubtedly the biggest author of the year”.
A classic Hoover novel circles round the imperatives of romantic love with distinctively 21st-century impediments, two twentysomethings kept apart not by their parents or society or class or money, but by their own emotional affectlessness. They’re too busy, or too damaged, or too empty or numb for love; they just want no-strings sex. The strings then duly appear and catch them in a formulaic but solid cat’s cradle.
