A Thousand Boy Kisses

A Thousand Boy Kisses was published in 2016 by the British author Tillie Cole, whose earlier fiction ran towards darker romance. This one is a young adult tearjerker built around a single pair and a single question, and it was picked up again years later by the reading community on TikTok, which sent it onto bestseller lists long after its release. Cole continued the story in 2024 with a second novel about Poppy's sister, A Thousand Broken Pieces.

Poppy Litchfield's promise to her dying grandmother shapes the whole book: live as much as you can, and keep a record of a thousand kisses, one for every petal in a jar of cherry blossoms. Rune Kristiansen is the boy who supplies the first of them, and the boy who is sent home to Norway without an explanation when the two of them are fifteen. The distance between Georgia and Norway is the engine of the second act, and Rune's return two years later sets up a book whose tension is not whether the pair love each other but what one of them has been carrying alone.

The novel belongs to a run of young adult romances where grief is the plot rather than the background, and it deals directly with terminal illness. Reviews at the time came from school papers and reader communities rather than the big outlets, and the book's reputation has been rebuilt by recommendation rather than by press. A film adaptation was announced, with Stephen Chbosky attached to direct.