Julie Cohen Books in Order (Updated March 5, 2026)

Julie Cohen is a US-born, UK-based novelist whose mainstream novels are standalones, they share themes and emotional intensity, but not an ongoing plotline. Reading order matters here mostly because later books assume you already trust her style, not because you’ll miss story continuity.

One important boundary: she also writes dark comic thrillers as Julie Mae Cohen. That’s a separate shelf you can mix in whenever you want.

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Three good ways to read Julie Cohen (pick one and ignore the rest)

Route A: The clean timeline (best if you like seeing an author evolve).
Read the Julie Cohen novels in publication order (list below).

Route B: Start with her “signature” modern style.
Begin with Together, then loop backward or forward based on premise.

Route C: You want the darker, funnier crime angle.
Jump straight to Bad Men (as Julie Mae Cohen), then continue to Body Count.

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The core Julie Cohen novels (publication order)

These are the books Julie Cohen highlights as her primary novels, and they can be read in any order without spoilers from other titles.

1. Dear Thing (2013): A surrogacy offer between close friends turns intimate and complicated, where everyone’s “best intentions” start pulling against each other.
2. Where Love Lies (2014): A married woman is blindsided by resurfacing memories of a past love, and the story tightens into a question of what’s real, what’s missing, and what regret can do.
3. Falling (2016) (published in the US as After the Fall): Three women in one family carry secrets that can’t stay hidden, and one summer day forces the truth into the open.
4. Together (2017): A long-term couple’s relationship is reframed by an act that looks like abandonment, with the novel built around what love demands when the truth is hard to say out loud.
5. The Two Lives of Louis & Louise (2019): Two parallel lives, same person, different gender, show how identity, class, and small-town expectations reshape destiny in quietly devastating ways.
6. Spirited (2020): A historical story of women pushing against the limits of their era, where grief, faith, and forbidden love collide with social consequence.
7. Summer People (2022): Returning to a small island as one of the “outsiders” re-ignites old loyalties and new desire, and the past refuses to stay buried as the season turns.
8. Paradise (2025): A once-a-year return to Maine becomes the anchor for a story about friendship, love, and the kind of truths that only surface when you stop running.

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Julie Mae Cohen (separate continuity, darker comic thrillers)

Same author, different branding and tone. Read these in order if you want the most satisfying progression of the central vibe.

1. Bad Men (2023): A woman with a very specific hobby, killing “bad men”, tries to manage her private code while dealing with an even messier problem: wanting a boyfriend.
2. Body Count (2025): With her life looking oddly stable, the same serial-killer heroine faces a new target and new complications, as “relationship maintenance” starts to feel like its own kind of danger.

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What about her earlier category romance titles?

Julie Cohen has also published a large number of shorter category romance novels (especially in the mid-2000s into the early 2010s). Public bibliographies for those lists are long and sometimes inconsistent by edition/market, so I’m keeping this page focused on her widely catalogued mainstream novels and her Julie Mae Cohen thrillers.

If you want, I can produce a separate, dedicated “Category Romance (Complete List)” page where every one of those titles gets its own one-line description in publication order.

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The simplest recommendation

If you want one confident starting point: Together (2017). It captures her modern style cleanly, with no continuity requirements. If you specifically want the darker, funnier side first, start with Bad Men (2023) under Julie Mae Cohen.