Charlie Spring and Nick Nelson are officially boyfriends. After a summer of firsts, Charlie is starting to feel ready to say three words he has never said to anyone — but the timing never seems right, and there is plenty else crowding in. Nick is working up to coming out to his dad, and beneath the happiness of a first proper relationship he has begun to notice something he cannot un-notice: the way Charlie eats, or doesn't.
Volume four is the point where Heartstopper stops being only a love story. A beach trip with Tao, Elle, Tara, Darcy, Aled and Sahar opens the book on friendship and family, and the new school year that follows asks Charlie and Nick a harder question than whether they like each other. Charlie's mental health, and the disordered eating visible at the edges of earlier volumes, moves to the centre of this one, and the people around him have to work out what helping actually looks like.
Written and illustrated by Alice Oseman, Heartstopper: Volume Four handles eating disorders, self-harm and recovery with the same warmth the series brings to everything else — honest about how hard it is, and never bleak. It won the 2022 Goodreads Choice Award for Best Graphic Novels and Comics, and closes with a bonus mini-comic about two of the boys' teachers and a page of real mental-health resources.