Required reading: Heartstopper
Every book seen in Heartstopper, in order of appearance.
Dune Messiah
Frank Herbert, 1969Frank Herbert's 1969 sequel, where the hero of Dune gets everything he wanted and it goes about as well as you'd expect.
Seen in S1 E1, Isaac HendersonBuyNaruto, Vol. 72
Masashi Kishimoto, 2015Masashi Kishimoto's finale for the loud orphan ninja who needs the whole village to notice him.
Seen in S1 E2, Isaac HendersonBuyQuantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum
Leonard Susskind and Art Friedman, 2014Susskind, a Stanford physicist, built the series out of night classes for adults who wanted the real math instead of the documentary version.
Seen in S1 E3, Isaac HendersonBuyProud: My Autobiography
Gareth Thomas, 2014Thomas captained Wales and the British and Irish Lions, then came out in 2009 while he was still playing.
Seen in S1 E4, Isaac HendersonBuyA Good Girl's Guide to Murder
Holly Jackson, 2019Jackson's 2019 debut kicked off a trilogy and then became its own BBC series in 2024, streaming on Netflix outside the UK.
Seen in S1 E4, Isaac HendersonBuyRadio Silence
Alice Oseman, 2016Radio Silence follows Aled Last, who also turns up in the Heartstopper comics.
Seen in S1 E5, Isaac HendersonBuyPride and Prejudice
Jane Austen, 1813Three hundred pages of people misreading each other until somebody finally says what they mean.
Seen in S1 E5, Isaac HendersonBuyGender Explorers: Our Stories of Growing Up Trans and Changing the World
Juno Roche, 2020Roche, a writer and campaigner, collected trans kids and their parents talking about growing up in their own words.
Seen in S1 E7, Isaac HendersonBuyThere Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years
Mike Berners-Lee, 2019Mike Berners-Lee, a Lancaster University researcher, wrote it as a practical guide to the choices that actually move the needle on climate.
Seen in S1 E8, Isaac HendersonBuyAce of Spades
Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé, 2021Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé's 2021 debut, pitched as Gossip Girl meets Get Out.
Seen in S2 E1, Isaac HendersonBuyI Love This Part
Tillie Walden, 2015Tillie Walden published this short book with a small London press in 2015, and three years later her memoir Spinning won an Eisner.
Seen in S2 E1, Isaac HendersonBuyThe Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays
Oscar Wilde, 1895Earnest opened in London in February 1895 and was a hit.
Seen in S2 E2, Isaac HendersonBuyWe Are Okay
Nina LaCour, 2017Nina LaCour's novel about a girl alone in an empty college dorm over winter break, avoiding everything she left behind.
Seen in S2 E2, Isaac HendersonBuyBook Lovers
Emily Henry, 2022Emily Henry's 2022 novel about a cutthroat literary agent who keeps running into the same editor in a tiny North Carolina town.
Seen in S2 E3, Isaac HendersonBuyNight Sky with Exit Wounds
Ocean Vuong, 2016Ocean Vuong's 2016 debut won the T.S. Eliot Prize, one of the biggest poetry awards in Britain.
Seen in S2 E3, Isaac HendersonBuyThe Awakening
Kate Chopin, 1899Kate Chopin's 1899 novel about Edna Pontellier, a married woman in Louisiana who decides she'd like to have her own life, thanks.
Seen in S2 E4, Isaac HendersonBuyThe Little Prince
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1943Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was in exile in New York when he wrote it, and it came out there first, in 1943, in English and French.
Seen in S2 E4, Isaac HendersonBuyLes Misérables
Victor Hugo, 1862Victor Hugo's 1862 doorstop runs past 1,400 pages unabridged, with a 50-plus page detour on the Battle of Waterloo.
Seen in S2 E4, Isaac HendersonBuyThe Outsider (The Stranger)
Albert Camus, 1942Camus's 1942 novel goes by The Outsider in Britain and The Stranger in the US, and it opens with one of the most famous first lines in fiction: Mother died today.
Seen in S2 E5, Isaac HendersonBuyCrush
Richard Siken, 2005Richard Siken's 2005 debut won the Yale Series of Younger Poets, picked by Louise Glück, who later won the Nobel.
Seen in S2 E6, Isaac HendersonBuyAround the World in Eighty Days
Jules Verne, 1872Phileas Fogg bets £20,000 at his London club that he can circle the globe in 80 days, and the book was published in 1872.
Seen in S2 E6, Isaac HendersonBuyBirthday
Meredith Russo, 2019Two kids born on the same day in the same hospital, checked in on every birthday for six years while one of them figures out she's a girl.
Seen in S2 E6, Isaac HendersonBuyWhere's Wally? The Great Picture Hunt
Martin Handford, 2006Martin Handford's 2006 entry sends Wally into famous paintings, which is a good pick for a trip built around the Louvre.
Seen in S2 E6, Isaac HendersonBuyWe Have Always Been Here
Samra Habib, 2019Habib grew up Ahmadi Muslim in Pakistan, moved to Canada as a refugee, and wrote this 2019 memoir about finding a queer Muslim community.
Seen in S2 E7, Isaac HendersonBuyAll Boys Aren't Blue
George M. Johnson, 2020George M. Johnson's 2020 memoir-in-essays about growing up Black and queer in New Jersey.
Seen in S2 E7, Isaac HendersonBuyBoy Erased
Garrard Conley, 2016Garrard Conley's 2016 memoir about being sent to a conversion therapy program in Memphis as a college student, after his parents found out he was gay.
Seen in S2 E7, Isaac HendersonBuyAce: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex
Angela Chen, 2020Angela Chen, a journalist, wrote the 2020 book after interviewing ace people about dating, sex, and how everyone else assumes they work.
Seen in S2 E8, Isaac HendersonBuySummer Bird Blue
Akemi Dawn Bowman, 2018Akemi Dawn Bowman's 2018 novel about Rumi Seto, who moves to Hawaii after her sister dies and starts to work out that she doesn't feel attraction the way people expect.
Seen in S2 E8, Isaac HendersonBuyGender Queer: A Memoir
Maia Kobabe, 2019Kobabe's 2019 memoir about growing up nonbinary and asexual.
Seen in S3 E1, Isaac HendersonBuyThe Argonauts
Maggie Nelson, 2015Maggie Nelson's 2015 book is part memoir and part theory, about falling for the artist Harry Dodge, who is gender-fluid, and building a family.
Seen in S3 E1, Isaac HendersonBuyPeople We Meet on Vacation
Emily Henry, 2021The UK edition in his hand is called You and Me on Vacation.
Seen in S3 E2, Isaac HendersonBuyThe Loneliest Girl in the Universe
Lauren James, 2017Lauren James's 2017 novel about Romy, a teenager alone on a spaceship, whose only contact is messages from Earth that take years to arrive.
Seen in S3 E3, Isaac HendersonBuyThis Is How You Lose the Time War
Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, 2019Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone's 2019 novella is a love story told in letters between two agents on opposite sides of a war across time.
Seen in S3 E3, Isaac HendersonBuyEmma
Jane Austen, 1815Austen's 1815 novel about a matchmaker who's terrible at it.
Seen in S3 E4, Isaac HendersonBuyThe Song of Achilles
Madeline Miller, 2011Madeline Miller's 2011 retelling of the Iliad as a love story between Achilles and Patroclus won the Orange Prize in 2012, then had a second life on BookTok with videos of people sobbing at the ending.
Seen in S3 E4, Isaac HendersonBuyStarfish
Akemi Dawn Bowman, 2017Bowman's 2017 debut follows Kiko Himura, a half-Japanese art student who gets rejected from her dream school and has to work out who she is without it.
Seen in S3 E4, Isaac HendersonBuyPiranesi
Susanna Clarke, 2020Susanna Clarke's 2020 novel about a man living alone in an endless house of statues and tides, happy and a little lost.
Seen in S3 E5, Isaac HendersonBuyChristmas Days: 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days
Jeanette Winterson, 2016Winterson's 2016 collection pairs twelve Christmas stories with twelve recipes, one for each day.
Seen in S3 E5, Isaac HendersonBuyLast Night at the Telegraph Club
Malinda Lo, 2021Lo's 2021 novel won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature.
Seen in S3 E6, Isaac HendersonBuyThe Ethical Slut
Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy, 1997Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy published the first edition in 1997 and it became the standard guide to open relationships.
Seen in S3 E7, Isaac HendersonBuyI'll Give You the Sun
Jandy Nelson, 2014Nelson's 2014 novel about twins Noah and Jude, told by him at 13 and her at 16, with art and grief and first love in both halves.
Seen in S3 E8, Isaac HendersonBuyHopeless Aromantic: An Affirmative Guide to Aromanticism
Samantha Rendle, 2023Rendle wrote the 2023 book as a practical guide for people working out that romance isn't their thing.
Seen in Isaac HendersonBuyLoveless
Alice Oseman, 2020Oseman's 2020 novel about Georgia, a university fresher who realizes she's aromantic and asexual, and it won the YA Book Prize.
Seen in Isaac HendersonBuy
Seen one we missed? Add a book and your handle goes on the entry.