Confess

Owen places a box outside his studio where strangers can leave handwritten confessions. He selects confessions and creates paintings from them — capturing the raw emotional honesty of an anonymous statement in visual form. The paintings are displayed and sold at gallery shows.

Confess won the Goodreads Choice Award for Romance in 2015, voted on by Goodreads readers. It was one of the first of Hoover's novels to win a major reader-voted award and significantly expanded her mainstream audience.

Yes — a web series adaptation aired on Amazon Prime Video in 2017. It starred Katie Leclerc as Auburn and Ryan Cooper as Owen, and was produced as a short-form digital series rather than a feature film.

Auburn's access to a child she loves depends on an informal arrangement with the child's father's family. The specifics of that arrangement — and why it gives the family leverage over her — are revealed gradually. Her need to protect the arrangement shapes every choice she makes with Owen.

Yes — it is a self-contained story with no sequel and no shared characters with Hoover's other novels.

Owen's confession-based painting practice is not just a backdrop — it functions structurally. Confessions submitted by strangers become plot-relevant, and the act of bearing witness to others' anonymous honesty parallels what Auburn and Owen must eventually do with each other.