Friends to lovers is the trope I keep going back to. They already know each other when the book opens, they have a friendship that works, and one of them ruins it by wanting more 🥀
Below are the MM friends to lovers books I have loved, sorted by how the friendship started: childhood best friends, flatmates who never planned this, and men thrown together by something much worse. Some are funny and some hurt a lot.
What to Read Tonight, by Mood
Pick the line that sounds like your evening.
You want to laugh out loud
You want gentle and low drama
You want it to hurt
You want fantasy and a long burn
You want young adult
You want a small town hiding something
On this page
Best Friends, Until It Breaks
They were friends first, best friends in both cases, with years of shared history behind them. Then something happens that the friendship cannot absorb. Start here if you want to be wrecked by two people who used to tell each other everything.
Don’t Let The Forest In
Andrew Perrault writes fairy tales and cannot sleep. Thomas Rye draws the monsters in them, stopped speaking to his own family over the summer, and turns up at school with his hands torn to pieces. When Andrew follows him into the woods behind the dormitories he finds the things from Thomas’s drawings walking around out there, and they start going back every night to kill them. Andrew’s twin sister has stopped answering him, the teachers see nothing, and the more Andrew loves Thomas the less he wants to know where the creatures come from.
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Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation: Mo Dao Zu Shi
Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji study together as teenagers, and one of them goes on loving the other through a war and the thirteen years that follow his death. Wei Wuxian comes back in a borrowed body, into a world that still teaches children he was a monster, and Lan Wangji is the only person who walks towards him instead of away. The plot is an actual murder investigation with a body count and a cast of clans who all lie, and the romance moves in millimetres. Volume one covers the resurrection and the first case, so plan for five volumes.
Living in Each Other’s Space
These two see each other constantly, at home or twice a week at the gym, with no polite way of putting distance in between. Nobody here chose to fall in love, they just ran out of excuses to leave. This is the funny end of the list, and the softest.
Leo Loves Aries
Theo needs a lodger, a plan to get his mother back into the world, and ideally a boyfriend for his sister. Jamie Cooper moves into the spare room and turns out to be easy to live with, easy to talk to at two in the morning, and completely unavailable in Theo’s mental filing system. Theo’s scheming is the engine of the book and it goes wrong in ways he deserves. The astrology framing is light, the jokes land, and Theo is the last person to notice what is happening to him.
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The Weight Of It All
Henry Beckett gets dumped for being fat and joins a gym out of spite, which is the worst reason anybody has ever done anything. Reed is the trainer assigned to him, six foot something and tired of men who only want a body. What starts as three sessions a week becomes cooking together, texting all evening and a friendship Henry refuses to risk by admitting anything. Mostly it is Henry and Reed being ridiculous in a car park, and the fat rep is warm all the way through.
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Tell Me It’s Real
Paul Auster is thirty, average by his own repeated insistence, and has a best friend called Sandy who performs as Helena Handbasket and has opinions about his life. Vince is beautiful, a bit odd and interested for reasons Paul cannot work out, so Paul decides the whole thing must be a prank. They do the friendship first, badly, with Paul narrating every disaster. Expect a disastrous dating app profile and a dog called Wheels.
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Here for the whole gang?
Sandy and the questing party are half the fun of these two books. If the group around the couple is what you actually come for, my found family list is built entirely on that.
The One Who Stayed
Someone difficult to love, and a man who sticks around anyway. These three are heavier, and the friendship in them is closer to care than to fun. Read them when you want to be moved.
In The Absence Of Light
Grant Kessler has spent years moving other people’s goods across borders and retires to Durstrand to wait out the FBI’s interest in him. Morgan lives there, is autistic, cannot hold eye contact or tell left from right, and tells Grant exactly what he wants from him within about a week. Grant says no for a long time, mostly because he cannot see past the tics to the man having the conversation. The town is full of people who already know Morgan and have arranged themselves around him, and Grant is the one who has to adjust, which takes him most of the book.
My Brother’s Keeper: The First Three Rules
Marshal Jon Foster saw his dead brother in the middle of a raid, froze, and lived while people he loved did not. He runs to a town called Gilford to stop thinking about it, which works about as well as you would expect. Ellis Harper has spent twenty years in that town looking after his disabled brother Rudy, with days made of chores, cartoons and card games, and no life of his own. A stranger offering a stick of gum is how they start, and the thing buried under Gilford is what they end up dealing with.
Whisper
Kris Caldera was junior staff on the CIA unit that was supposed to find Bin Laden, and ten days after it failed he was in Afghanistan with a Special Forces team. David Haddad is the sergeant he meets there: Arab American, Muslim, gay, and used to being too much of one thing for every room he walks into. They spend years of war being the only safe place the other has, until a mission goes wrong and David disappears into the tribal belt. Years later the CIA starts hearing a new name coming out of Khorasan, and Kris recognises it.
Listen to it for free with the Audible trial, if you have not been a member in the past year.
Surviving Side by Side
If you want forced companionship, or two people on a quest with no way back, this is your section. The friendship comes first and it is the step before everything else, built on shared danger and weeks of walking together. Two of these are young adult and one is old school fantasy.
All That’s Left in the World
A pathogen has killed nearly everyone, and Andrew arrives at Jamie’s door starving with a bear trap injury and a story that does not quite hold together. Jamie takes him in because the alternative is being alone, and the two of them get a few weeks of something like safety before other survivors find the house. They head south together, each carrying a secret the other would want to know, and Jamie’s is that he has stopped thinking of Andrew as a friend. The chapters alternate between them, so you watch both boys decide to trust someone in a world that has taught them not to.
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Luck in the Shadows
Alec of Kerry is nineteen, in a cell for something he did not do, and sharing it with a man whose job description changes depending on the day, somewhere between thief and spy. Seregil gets them both out and offers Alec an apprenticeship, and they spend the book on roads, in ballrooms and under floorboards, gathering information for a war nobody has declared yet. Alec learns the trade and Seregil keeps a great deal to himself. The romance takes several books to arrive, which some readers love and others should know about before starting.
Listen to it for free with the Audible trial, if you have not been a member in the past year.
So This Is Ever After
Arek kills the evil king at seventeen, which he was told was the hard part, and then finds himself on a throne he never wanted. There is a rule nobody mentioned: an unmarried monarch dies before the season turns, so he has about three months to find someone willing to marry him. He goes down the list of his own questing party one awkward proposal at a time, while Matt, his best friend and court wizard, helps him do it. Matt has been in love with him since they were children and Arek has the emotional perception of a brick.
Listen to it for free with the Audible trial, if you have not been a member in the past year.
My Top Three MM Friends to Lovers Books
If you only take one thing away with you, take one of these.
Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation · Mo Xiang Tong Xiu
Twenty years of loyalty from a man who says almost nothing, inside a story big enough to carry it. Five volumes is a lot to ask, and I would happily read five more.
The Weight Of It All · N.R. Walker
The one I reach for when I want to be in a good mood. Henry is wonderful company, the gym scenes are ridiculous, and the friendship arrives long before either of them says anything.
Luck in the Shadows · Lynn Flewelling
Old school fantasy with roads, disguises and a great deal of trouble before anything else happens. Alec and Seregil are worth the seven books.
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MM Friends to Lovers Books: Frequently Asked Questions
Does friends to lovers always mean slow burn?
No. The pairing is already close when the book opens, so an author can go either way: Tell Me It’s Real and The Weight of It All get there inside one volume, while Luck in the Shadows and Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation spread it over a whole series. If you want the tension and not the wait, the contemporaries above are the safer pick.
How explicit are these?
It varies a lot. The adult contemporaries are open door, with Whisper and In the Absence of Light the most explicit of them. The three young adult titles are closed door or nearly, and the danmei keeps almost everything off the page in the official English edition.
Which ones work best on audio?
Tell Me It’s Real, because Klune’s comic timing survives being read aloud, and Whisper, narrated by John Solo. The Weight of It All is a good one for a commute. Luck in the Shadows has an older recording, so sample it before you spend a credit.
Are any of these actually horror rather than romance?
Two of them. Don’t Let the Forest In is horror before it is romance, and My Brother’s Keeper runs a supernatural threat under the love story and gets grim as the trilogy goes on. Everything else here is romance first, whatever else is happening in the plot.
Can I read them without committing to a long series?
Whisper, Don’t Let the Forest In, All That’s Left in the World and So This Is Ever After are complete in one book. Leo Loves Aries, In the Absence of Light and The Weight of It All open series but resolve their own couple. My Brother’s Keeper is the one exception, since the trilogy is really one story cut in three.
Before You Go
There is a bit of everything up there, from a gym romcom to a war novel, and the one thing they share is two men who had something good and risked it anyway. That risk is why I keep reading this trope.
So which one are you starting tonight?
New to MM romance? Start with the map.
