Chloe Walsh Books

Chloe Walsh is an Irish author from Cork who wrote quietly for years, self-publishing romance while raising a family, until BookTok picked up Binding 13 and turned her into one of the most talked-about names in the genre. The rediscovery was so loud that Bloom Books reissued the Boys of Tommen series in 2023 with new covers, and the books started appearing on bestseller lists years after she first wrote them. It is one of the great indie-to-everywhere stories in romance, and unlike most viral moments, this one was earned by the books themselves.

Binding 13 introduces Johnny Kavanagh, a teenage rugby prodigy at Tommen College with a national team future and a body already falling apart, and Shannon Lynch, a small, bruised girl from the wrong side of Ballylaggin carrying a home life nobody at school knows about. The series is set between 1999 and 2007 in the south of Ireland, before smartphones, when missing someone meant waiting by a landline. Walsh writes teenagers who feel like actual teenagers, awkward and loyal and ridiculous, and she gives them room. These books are enormous. Six hundred pages is a light one.

The series runs six books and is best read in order: Binding 13 and Keeping 13 cover Johnny and Shannon, Saving 6 and Redeeming 6 belong to Shannon's brother Joey and his Aoife, Taming 7 gives the comic relief Gibsie his own devastating story with Claire, and Releasing 10, published in 2025, closes out the set. Reading them in sequence matters because the families overlap and the timeline loops back on itself, showing the same years through different eyes.

What defines Walsh is emotional brutality delivered with warmth. The Lynch household storyline involves domestic violence and neglect, Joey's arc is one of the most unflinching portraits of teenage addiction in popular romance, and she does not tidy any of it up for comfort. Check content warnings before you start, and mean it. What keeps the books from drowning is the humor, most of it courtesy of Gibsie, and the stubborn decency of the Kavanagh family, who quietly absorb every stray the story produces.

Honest criticism: these books are long, and they feel long. Scenes repeat, inner monologues circle, and readers who want plot momentum can find the pacing glacial. The heat is modest too, roughly a 2 on our scale, slow burn with the emphasis firmly on burn. Nobody reads Walsh for spice. You read her because she makes you feel seventeen and terrified and in love, and because the angst payoff, when it comes, is total.

Part of what makes these books feel so distinct is how thoroughly Irish they are. Walsh does not sand off the setting for international readers: the slang stays, the Catholic school politics stay, the rain absolutely stays, and rugby is treated with the seriousness of a religion, which in Munster is roughly accurate. Johnny's storyline digs into the physical cost of elite sport on a growing body, all torn muscles, injections, and adults gambling with a boy's future, and it gives the romance real stakes beyond will-they-won't-they. American readers raised on US high school romance often describe the Tommen books as a system shock in the best way, a reminder that first love reads differently when nobody has a car, a phone, or any privacy whatsoever. The audiobooks, with their full Irish cast, have become their own recommendation path into the series.

Where to start: Binding 13, no exceptions, and go in publication order. Clear your schedule, because Keeping 13 must be within arm's reach when you finish, the cliffhanger is infamous for a reason. If you loved the found-family ache of romantasy series like Fourth Wing but want it grounded in rain, rugby, and 1990s Ireland, this is your next obsession.