Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper is a gentle coming of age story, with characters exploring themes of friendship, love, sexuality, gender and mental illness. The story centres around two boys who meet at school: the highly-strung, openly gay Charlie, and easy-going, sporty Nick.

Heartstopper is sweet without being sickly sweet. It’s fun and heartwarming, while still feeling grounded in reality. Heartstopper is a joy to read – I keep up with the latest on the Tapas app.

I attended an event earlier this year to celebrate the release of Heartstopper Volume 3 with Alice at St James’s Church Piccadilly in London. It was a wonderful interview, followed by a Q&A with the audience and a book signing.

The story is serialised as an ongoing webcomic which can be read for free on Tapas, Tumblr, and Webtoon, and supported on Patreon. Alice has also collected and published Heartstopper as graphic novels in physical volumes.

If you enjoyed Heartstopper, you might like to check out Duck and Dive – my gay romantic comedy novella about coming out and failing spectacularly.

Duck and Dive is the first in my Rise and Shine series and is similar to Heartstopper in many regards. It features buckets of banter, sweetness, awkwardness, antics, coming out, friends, family, and a British setting. But it also differs in so many other ways, such as being a bit absurd, more suggestive and mature, as well as featuring twenty-somethings and octogenarians.

If that sounds like a bit of you, have a click around and check out the first chapters for free.