8 books like Things We Left Behind by Lucy Score, from The Light We Lost to The Great Alone: emotional reads for after you finish the Knockemout series.
Updated June 10, 2026
Things We Left Behind (2023) closes out Lucy Score's Knockemout trilogy, and it is the most emotionally loaded of the three. Lucian Rollins, the cold, controlled power broker, and Sloane Walton, the small-town librarian who has hated him for decades, share a buried history that the book peels back layer by layer, opening with a funeral and working through grief, old wounds, and the things both of them never said. It is steamy enemies-to-lovers romance, but what readers remember is the ache underneath the heat.
Fair warning about this list: it reaches beyond the romance shelf. If you want a pure love story next, start with The Light We Lost, the closest match in romantic intensity, or The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, which wraps a great love in a page-turning frame. The rest trade kissing for the other things Knockemout readers respond to: grief and resilience (The Great Alone, A Man Called Ove), secrets rippling through a community (Little Fires Everywhere, Before the Fall), and high-concept stories about timing and fate (Oona Out of Order, The Night Circus).
A practical note: Things We Left Behind works best after the first two Knockemout books, Things We Never Got Over and Things We Hide from the Light, since Lucian and Sloane's tension builds in the background of both. If you have not finished the trilogy, do that first; these picks are for the gap that follows.
Read this if you want secrets and aftermath with a thriller engine.
Noah Hawley's novel shares the structure that opens Things We Left Behind: a death that forces a group of connected people to reckon with everything left unresolved. A private plane crashes off Martha's Vineyard, and the book alternates between the investigation and the backstories of everyone aboard, gradually revealing how money, power, and private damage put them all on that flight. Readers who liked the wealthy, controlled, media-entangled world Lucian operates in will recognize the territory.
This is the furthest pick from romance on the list. It is a literary thriller, male-centered, and its emotional core is the bond between the survivor and a young boy rather than any couple. The pleasure is propulsion and reveal, not longing. Pick it for a palate cleanser between romances, or hand it to a thriller-reading partner who wants to understand why you like books about secrets.
Read this if you want star-crossed longing in a completely different costume.
Erin Morgenstern's novel is the wild card here, but the core is recognizable: two people bound together by circumstances set in motion when they were children, locked in opposition, falling for each other anyway. Celia and Marco are rival magicians bound to a mysterious competition staged inside a black-and-white circus that appears without warning, and their slow-burning, forbidden connection carries the same charge as any enemies-to-lovers arc, stretched across years of moves and countermoves.
Everything around that core is different. This is lush, ornate fantasy, more atmosphere than plot, told out of chronological order with long stretches of pure description; readers who need momentum sometimes stall in it. There is no steam, and the romance shares space with a large cast. Pick it when you want to be enveloped rather than rushed, ideally in winter, and accept that it is a mood as much as a story.
Read this if the years of longing between Lucian and Sloane were what hooked you.
Jill Santopolo's novel is the closest thing on this list to the engine that drives Things We Left Behind: two people tied together across more than a decade, repeatedly pulled apart by timing, pride, and the lives they build in between. Lucy and Gabe meet at Columbia on September 11, 2001, and the book follows thirteen years of almosts, an arc that will feel familiar to anyone who loved watching Lucian and Sloane circle each other since their teens.
The difference is the destination. This is a literary love story, not a romance in the genre sense, which means no guaranteed happy ending and far less heat; the intensity is emotional rather than physical, and the final act is built to wreck you. Pick it when you want the longing and the history without needing the safety net. Keep tissues close, because readers consistently report crying through the last chapters.
Read this if you want the damaged-family backstory turned up to full volume.
Lucian's story in Things We Left Behind is shaped by an abusive father and the protectiveness it bred in him, and Kristin Hannah's novel takes that exact material and makes it the whole book. Leni Allbright is thirteen when her volatile father, a POW broken by Vietnam, moves the family off-grid to Alaska, and the novel tracks how she and her mother survive him, alongside a tender first love that persists through everything. The protective, us-against-him bond will resonate hard with readers who connected to Lucian's history.
Be ready for the difference in weight. There is romance here, and it matters, but this is survival fiction first, and Hannah does not soften the violence or the losses the way a genre romance would. The Alaskan wilderness writing is spectacular and the emotional payoff is real, but it is earned through genuinely dark chapters. Choose it when you want to feel everything, not when you want comfort.
Read this for another armored grump cracked open by people who refuse to leave him alone.
Fredrik Backman's beloved novel runs on the same character physics as Lucian Rollins: a rigid, frosty man whose rudeness is grief and old damage wearing a disguise, slowly thawed by people who simply will not go away. Where Knockemout gives Lucian a town full of meddlers and one stubborn librarian, Ove gets a chatty new neighbor family, a stray cat, and a community that needs him more than he will admit. The grumpy-exterior, gold-interior payoff is identical and just as satisfying.
What it is not is a romance; Ove is an elderly widower, and the love story here is told in flashbacks to his late wife while the present-day plot is about found family and a reason to keep living. The humor is drier and more Scandinavian than Score's banter. Pick this when you want the warmth and the character arc without the steam, or as the book to recommend to someone who would never read a romance novel.
Read this if you like watching buried secrets detonate inside a small community.
Celeste Ng's novel scratches the small-town itch from a different angle. Like Knockemout, the planned community of Shaker Heights runs on everybody knowing everybody, and the story is about what happens when newcomers with a hidden past collide with a family that believes it has nothing to hide. The slow excavation of secrets, mothers protecting children, and choices that echo for decades all rhyme with the long-buried history between Lucian and Sloane's families.
There is no central romance and no comfort-read glow; Ng is interested in class, race, motherhood, and judgment, and the book opens with a house already burning. It is the most discussion-worthy pick on this list, which is why it became a book club staple and a Hulu series. Choose it when you want the community drama and moral complication of Knockemout with the love story removed and the stakes made real.
Read this for a compulsive page-turner about love, secrets, and the cost of self-protection.
Taylor Jenkins Reid's novel shares more with Things We Left Behind than it first appears to. Evelyn Hugo, like Lucian Rollins, is someone who built an armored public self to survive a brutal childhood, and the story is about what that armor cost her and the one person she truly loved. The structure, an aging Hollywood icon confessing her life to a young journalist, delivers the same compulsive secret-by-secret reveal that Score uses with Lucian's past.
It is not a romance novel, though there is a great love story at its center, and the tone is glossier and more tragic than Knockemout's banter-heavy small town. There is no dual point of view and no guaranteed ending. This is the pick most likely to pull a romance reader happily into book-club fiction; it reads fast, hits hard, and is the book people hand to friends who claim they do not have time to read.
Read this if the idea of right person, wrong time is what gets you.
Margarita Montimore's novel takes the timing problem at the heart of Lucian and Sloane's story, two people who keep meeting at the wrong moments of their lives, and turns it into a literal premise. Every New Year's Eve, Oona leaps into a different year of her own life out of sequence, so she might be nineteen on the inside and fifty on the outside, falling for people whose shared history with her has not happened yet from her point of view. It is warm, clever, and surprisingly moving about what love means when chronology stops cooperating.
It is a high-concept dramedy rather than a romance; there are loves in Oona's life rather than one destined partner, and the book is finally about identity and family as much as relationships. The tone is lighter than Score's, with less heat and less angst. Pick it when you want something inventive and bittersweet that still leaves you feeling good.
Yes, ideally. The order is Things We Never Got Over, Things We Hide from the Light, then Things We Left Behind. Each book follows a different couple, but Lucian and Sloane's hostility simmers through the first two books, and the third pays off history and town dynamics established earlier. It can technically stand alone, but the payoff is much bigger in sequence.
What should I read after finishing the Knockemout series?
Within Lucy Score's own catalog, many readers go to her standalone small-town romances next, such as By a Thread or Pretend You're Mine. For similar authors, Tessa Bailey and Elsie Silver write in the same steamy small-town lane. From this list, The Light We Lost is the closest emotional match, and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo is the best bridge into book-club fiction.
Are the books on this list romance novels like Things We Left Behind?
Mostly no, and that is deliberate. The Light We Lost is a love story without genre-romance guarantees, and The Night Circus and Oona Out of Order have strong romantic threads. The others (The Great Alone, A Man Called Ove, Little Fires Everywhere, Before the Fall, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo) match the emotional themes of grief, secrets, and second chances rather than the romance format.
What is Things We Left Behind actually about?
It is the third Knockemout novel, an enemies-to-lovers romance between Lucian Rollins, a wealthy, tightly controlled Washington power player, and Sloane Walton, the town librarian who has despised him since they were teenagers. The death of Sloane's father forces them back into each other's orbit, and the book gradually reveals the shared secret from their past that curdled their relationship. Expect dual points of view, high heat, and heavy themes around abuse and grief.
As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. · About & methodology
