It Starts with Us

It Starts with Us was published in October 2022 as the sequel to Colleen Hoover's It Ends with Us, the book that turned Hoover into one of the best-selling novelists of the decade. The first novel had been written to stand on its own, so the second book exists because readers spent years asking what happened to Lily Bloom and Atlas Corrigan after the last page. Hoover answers that question by giving Atlas a first-person voice for the first time, alternating his chapters with Lily's rather than keeping him at the edge of her story.

Lily's life in Boston is organised around her flower shop and around her daughter, and the co-parenting arrangement she has with Ryle means her former husband stays inside her week whether she wants him there or not. Atlas has his own reasons to stay in the city and a family history he has spent most of his adult life working around. The two of them are adults now, with jobs and obligations and a shared history that never got a proper ending, and the book is about whether an old first love can be rebuilt by people who are no longer the teenagers who met in a small town.

The sequel keeps the structure readers know from Hoover's fiction: short chapters, a pair of viewpoints and a situation in which every honest conversation is also an awkward one. Because it continues a story that ended on a hard-earned note, the new book is less about a courtship beginning than about two people deciding what they owe each other and what they owe the people already in their lives. It sits at the end of the shelf rather than making sense on its own.