The Three of Us
A standalone novel
At a Glance
- Best for
- Readers who like YA-accessible / New Adult queer contemporary fiction with friendship, first love, and emotional self-discovery.
- Tone
- Soft, earnest, hopeful, awkward, and relationship-focused.
- Reading order
- Standalone.
- Heat / intensity
- Non-explicit intimacy. More coming-of-age than heat-driven romance.
- Content note
- Contains family pressure, anxiety around identity and ambition, romantic confusion, and friendship tension.
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Blurb
One torchlit kiss turns three friends into a triangle.
At the University of Birmingham, Rumi is trying to build a future sturdy enough to hold her family, her ambition, and the parts of herself she does not yet know how to say aloud. Kai has focus, charm, and a place in an electrospun living-fabric lab that could change everything. Sam has hurt, humour, persistence, and a talent for being harder to dismiss than anyone expects.
The kiss should be a mistake they can laugh off. It is not. It changes the balance between friendship, attraction, loyalty, and fear. Lab deadlines keep coming. Families keep needing things. Bodies fail at inconvenient times. Feelings arrive with no respect for the lives people have planned.
As Rumi, Kai, and Sam circle what happened and what it might mean, each has to decide whether honesty is worth the damage it might do to the version of the future they were trying to protect.
The Three of Us is a low-heat New Adult queer campus story about friendship, ambition, identity, family pressure, illness, care, and the dangerous relief of being known.
Why you’ll love it: A gentle, university-age queer coming-of-age novel about friendship, longing, found confidence, and the messy kindness of growing up together.
Behind the Pages
The Three of Us belongs to the tender end of the Jern Tonkoi shelf: a story about the year when friendship, ambition, sexuality, and self-belief all become impossible to keep in separate boxes.Reviews
This book was a very sweet read.
I liked how the author wrote them as flawed, realistic characters, not the perfect ones you usually see in YA/romance stories.
Great story of an unlikely trio of friends - Rumi, Sam and Kai.
Read-alikes
- Loveless — Alice Oseman 2020 · YA / university-age identity fiction
University-age identity, friendship, and questioning what love means.
- Heartstopper Volume One — Alice Oseman 2019 · YA LGBTQ+ coming-of-age
Gentle queer youth readership, friendship, loyalty, and emotional care.
- She Gets the Girl — Rachael Lippincott and Alyson Derrick 2022 · YA college queer romance
College-age romantic confusion and a relationship-helping-relationship structure.
- Carry On — Rainbow Rowell 2015 · YA queer fantasy romance
Emotionally messy young love and queer coming-of-age readership, though fantasy rather than contemporary.