Bestselling author Colleen Hoover is on a high right now, with her 2018 novel Verity recently adapted into a major motion picture starring Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson, and Josh Hartnett. (She’s no stranger to the silver-screen treatment, either; her 2016 romance It Ends with Us was made into another very successful—if also highly contentious—feature film, as was 2019’s Regretting You and 2022’s Reminders of Him.)

Before she was seeing her fiction embraced by Hollywood, however, Hoover was working as a social worker and eagerly reading other authors. For the latest installment of Vogue’s Required Reading series, Hoover rounds up some of the books that most inspired her own work—Verity in particular—from romances to thrillers and beyond. See them all below.

You by Caroline Kepnes

Caroline makes being inside Joe’s mind fascinating and uncomfortable. It’s how I felt while being inside Verity’s mind during the manuscript portions of Verity. You helped me realize that you don’t have to like a character, or even agree with them morally, to want to keep reading about them.