Boys of Tommen

Boys of Tommen started quietly in 2018 when Irish author Chloe Walsh self-published Binding 13, a slow-burning love story between rugby prodigy Johnny Kavanagh and Shannon Lynch, a girl carrying far more at home than anyone at her new school realizes. BookTok found the series years later and turned it into a phenomenon, the kind where readers post videos of themselves staring at a wall after finishing. The books were picked up for wide release, hit bestseller lists, and turned Tommen College into one of the most beloved settings in new adult romance.

The reading order matters more here than in almost any romance series, because this is one continuous story told across overlapping timelines. Read them in publication order: Binding 13, then Keeping 13, which complete Johnny and Shannon's arc. Saving 6 and Redeeming 6 follow Joey Lynch, Shannon's older brother, and Aoife Molloy, and run partly parallel to the first two books from a different angle. Taming 7 gives Gibsie and Claire their long-awaited story, and Releasing 10 continues the saga. Do not start anywhere except Binding 13. The payoffs are cumulative, and half the devastation of the later books comes from what you already know.

Be honest with yourself about the content before you start. These are not light sports romances. The series deals with family abuse, addiction, poverty, and chronic illness on the page, and it treats those things with weight rather than as backdrop. The Lynch family storyline in particular is heavy going, and Saving 6 is widely considered the most emotionally brutal book of the set. Heat-wise the series sits low on our spice scale, around a 2. The intensity is emotional, not physical, and the slow burns are measured in hundreds of pages.

What makes it work is the voice. Walsh writes teenage Ireland in the mid-2000s with total specificity, the slang, the rugby obsession, the casseroles and Catholic guilt, and her characters talk like actual people rather than romance archetypes. Johnny Kavanagh is one of the genre's great book boyfriends precisely because he is allowed to be an awkward, overprotective eighteen-year-old rather than a brooding fantasy. And the found-family web that builds across six books rewards series readers the way the best fantasy sagas do.

If you love this series and want something adjacent on our shelf, the emotional-damage-with-found-family lane runs toward our slow burn and found family trope pages, and readers who want the same intensity with fantasy stakes tend to land on Fourth Wing. Start with Binding 13, clear your weekend, and keep the tissues within arm's reach. You have been warned, which is more than Walsh will do for you.