Ugly Love
Ugly Love is Colleen Hoover's 2014 contemporary romance, told in alternating timelines. In the present, Tate Collins moves into her brother Corbin's San Francisco apartment to start nursing school and meets Miles Archer, the pilot who lives across the hall. Miles is gorgeous, distant, and explicit about what he can offer: sex with no questions about his past and no expectation of a future. Tate, exhausted by her schedule and disarmed by the intensity between them, agrees. The second timeline, written in fragmented verse, begins six years earlier, when Miles was a high-school senior in love for the first time. Hoover braids the two threads together until the reader understands, before Tate does, exactly what shaped the man she has fallen for, and whether anything in the present can repair what was broken.
Where Ugly Love keeps showing up
Three of our editors' lists feature this novel.
Also by Colleen Hoover
Books in conversation with Ugly Love
A few of the closest reads from our full list.
What you might want to know about Ugly Love
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
San Francisco neonatal nurse Tate Collins moves into her brother Corbin's apartment and meets his roommate Miles Archer, a tall airline pilot who is barely speaking to anyone. Miles offers Tate a no-strings arrangement on two rules: never ask about his past, never ask for a future.
Yes. Colleen Hoover's Ugly Love has explicit on-page sex scenes and is one of her steamier titles.
Yes. Colleen Hoover's Ugly Love has explicit on-page sex scenes and is one of her steamier titles.
Yes, the back half is heavy. There is a significant tragedy in Miles's past that drives the entire emotional arc.
Not yet. As of 2026 no film or series adaptation has been announced.
Ugly Love was written by Colleen Hoover, published in 2014 by Simon and Schuster.
Ugly Love is 336 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Ugly Love takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
Ugly Love is a standalone novel by Colleen Hoover, not part of a series.
Ugly Love is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
