They All Fall in Love at the End

by Haili Blassingame

Cat St. Clair is ready for her messy love triangle era now that she’s in an open relationship. But she didn’t foresee a forbidden love triangle with the only two people who are off limits: her boyfriend’s best friend and his girlfriend. Being a twenty-something writer who lives for the plot, she falls for them anyway, with deliciously disastrous consequences, in this electric literary debut for fans of Xochitl Gonzalez, Coco Mellors, Lily King, and Raven Leilani.

It’s the fall of 2024, and twenty-four-year-old Cat isn’t asking for too much: all she wants is three boyfriends, to write her little novels, and to survive another chaotic presidential election. She’s in an open relationship with her college sweetheart Jay, but nonmonogamy isn’t just a hot trend she’s trying. It’s her sliver of freedom in a world eager to wrestle it from her for being a Black woman going after what she wants with reckless abandon.

While political tensions roil the campus where Cat is slowly earning her creative writing degree, she finds herself drawn to Jay’s best friend, Tristan, who’s smart, super hot, and…in a monogamous relationship. And then she meets Tristan’s girlfriend, Nia, a captivating art student with her own gravitational pull.

Friends and family urge her to just be happy with Jay, but Cat is determined to have it all—or blow up her life trying. As she falls for all the wrong people, racking up lies, betrayals, and terrible drafts of her novel, she tries to write her way to a happy ending. But in art, politics, and love, true liberation may take more than rewriting the old scripts. It may mean inventing something entirely new.

Genres: Queer, Adult, Adult Fiction

384 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication June 2, 2026

About the author

Hi!! I write literary and book club fiction about love, desire, and the decisions that feel impossible to make starring plucky, loud-mouth female protagonists of color. My debut is called THEY ALL FALL IN LOVE AT THE END. It has a hot-pink cover that I love more than most things in this world. I'm a producer for 1A, a show from NPR and WAMU. I've written a New York Times Modern Love essay about breaking up with my boyfriend and a piece in The New Republic about Kamala Harris and Gretchen Whitmer. I was in an MFA program in Creative Writing but didn't finish. I live in Washington, D.C with my 10,000 books and no bookshelf.

Reviews

[Helen Wu ✨ · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think I expected a different kind of story. Not in a bad way. This one lives closer to politics, community, and the mess of the real world. Sometimes I wondered if I was missing the point. I loved Jay. I liked Nia. I understood Tristan. Cat, though, pushed every anxious part of me. Maybe staying true to what you want is always hard. The book wrestles with desire, duty, and that pull between who we are and who we think we should become. I felt the weight Cat carries. It pressed on me too. It made me wonder if we are all a little tired inside. The world feels cracked. Do we fight harder or just try to stay afloat. When institutions make choices driven by money and pressure, it is hard to believe in anything steady. And yet perspective shifts when you talk to someone far away. The questions linger. What is the right ending. What is the right life. Do we reject ourselves before anyone else can. Do we bend to fit in. This book stirred a lot in me, even when I wasn’t sure I understood every angle. It left me curious. And unsettled. And thinking.

Thank you NetGalley and Scribner for the ARC!

[Katie Naymon · Rating 5 out of 5]

You know how people say Sally Rooney is writing like the first great millennial classics? Haili Blassingame is writing the first great millennial/Gen Z cusp classics. Biting prose, endlessly insightful, and very very raw. This isn't a romance, but it's a brilliant study on desire in the digital age, when all of the world's atrocities are at our fingertips but we still have to deal with the love triangle brewing on the side--and this excellent book treats both as equally worthy of our attention, because they are. It's also laugh-out-loud funny, precisely tuned to my sense of humor. Seriously can't wait for more of Haili's work - this was just so, so good.

[J R · Rating 5 out of 5]

fantastically impressive book with phenomenal characters and a lot of twists and turns throughout. 5 stars. tysm for the arc.

[Kathryn Fink · Rating 5 out of 5]

everyone go read this!! it’s sexy and profound

[Haili Blassingame · Rating 5 out of 5]

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