Books like The Thing About Home — picked by fans

This beachside romance features a female entrepreneur who started her business at a young age, which I related to immediately, having started self-publishing books as a freshman in college.

She’s a go-getter with a knack for business and fights for her passions despite the people in her life telling her she shouldn’t. I adored the enemies-to-lovers romance between Cooper and Mac, as well as the message that not everyone is what they initially seem. 

I used to think JFK Jr was better looking than Brad Pitt.

He had everything going for him–true love, wealth, and a family that was as close to American royalty as it gets. Meant To Be by Emily Giffin rewrites his real-life tragedy.

She gives those of us who hopefully and jealously gawked at him and his wife, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, a new ending–one that doesn’t involve their deaths in the cold waters outside of Martha’s Vineyard. It’s part romance, part fiction, part history, and all escapism. 

This is a lovely memoir of falling in true love for the first time. The author was the same age as me when she fell in love for the first time in a magical Paris when she was there as a serious musical student.

As I read, I was transported with her to that time and sent spinning back into my own life at the same age as a serious drama student falling in love in Amsterdam.

The book is romantic at first and so true to the heart, as well as the experience of losing oneself to another for the first time. I loved experiencing Paris with her and her love of music. A not famous author who deserves to be.

In recent years, Lisa Jewell has moved into psychological thriller, which I also love. But she started off writing warm, gorgeously relatable, and touching stories about young people falling in love, sharing houses, and getting to grips with adult life.

They are all beautifully told, but this one stands out to me. A chance meeting at a caravan park as teenagers see Vince and Joy peeling off into their separate lives and navigating their own joys and heartbreaks… I won’t spoil it, but the ending is just as you’d want it to be. 

This book sparked my love for Carian Cole's books, and I've one clicked on her books ever since.

This age-gap romance between Toren and Kenzi happened organically, and I loved watching their platonic love morph into romantic love. Tor’s pet name for Kenzi was Angel, which was fitting for the kind-hearted, strong heroine.

I think what most impacted me about the nickname was how it transformed throughout the book. At first, Angel was just a sweet endearment, but it matured as Kenzi did. Every time she worried about animals or showed concern for her dad, the nickname felt more and more fitting. 

Talk about swoon-worthy: recently divorced regular gal Nora is a Hallmark-style screenwriter until her latest script is tapped for the big screen starring the “sexiest man alive,” Leo.

I was drawn in by the fantasy of crushing on a movie star, but I stayed for the relatability and depth of the main character. This was one I read in about twenty-four hours because I needed to know whether Nora would find her happy ending.

I also appreciated that this book left some things to the imagination. It was heavier on the romance than the sex.

This book rose out of the grave and grabbed me by the ankles. I’ve always loved (and been completely terrified of) zombies. After 28 Days Later scarred me for life (that one scene with the crow and the blood ACK), zombies became somewhat of an obsession. But I always found myself wanting…more. Then this book shambled in my door, and suddenly, I had the twisted, funny, heartwarming zombie fairytale I never knew I needed in my life. It upended the undead genre, and I will love it forever for giving the mix of zombies and romance a big ole bear hug.

This is really terrible–if highly moreish–stuff: a thin, junky, first-drafty picaresque. But it formed the basis of a film starring Jackie’s sister, Joan. The film even had a tie-in aftershave (heavy on the ginseng), promising all kinds of advantages for the wearer. The film and the book both try to suggest a deluxe, upmarket, classy melding of disco culture with the post-permissive society sexual freedoms now available to the 1970s bachelor and (as an ill-informed nod to feminism) the businesswoman.

This imagined milieu was a million miles from the sleazy, criminal experience of London’s Soho, which had traditionally been where all this erotic access was clustered. The aspiration was shared by Paul Raymond, who worked to translate the risqué stage shows of the 1960s (think pre-fame Christine Keeler) to more contemporary fare for the proto-Thatcherite managerial class, keen to see what secular society had to offer them and their new… show more.

This book was THE book that made me want to write a marriage in trouble.

It features characters to absolutely hate in the first few chapters, but then they turn it around and become lovable by the end of the book. I love the idea of a married couple (or engaged one) sleeping in separate rooms because of their distance and then they slowly move back into the same room.

This book also features a terrible mom who gets owned by her kid who’s finally had enough of them, which is always my favorite part of any book. This is a novel to get hooked on, and the ending scene where she finds their wedding invitations in the trash had my jaw on the FLOOR!

I literally could not stop crying through this entire book. When this novel first begins, we find Kenna Rowan has just been released from jail. She is alone, penniless, and scared with all the cards stacked against her, and she is on a mission to find her daughter. Despite the mystery surrounding the incident that causes Kenna’s incarceration, you are instantly drawn into this character’s vulnerability and sheer force of will and determination. She is at once utterly alone on an island while also strong and brave like a warrior, ready to face the demons in her past in order to find a path back to the daughter that was taken from her. I love all of Colleen Hoover’s novels, but this one shredded me. I couldn’t put it down, had to find out what happened, had to know that Kenna was safe, understood, and vindicated.