Below is the complete list of Chloe Walsh’s Boys of Tommen books in order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Boys of Tommen Books
About Boys of Tommen
Chloe Walsh’s Boys of Tommen series is an interconnected Irish romance saga centered on students at the fictional Tommen College in Ballylaggin, County Cork. Rugby, school rivalries, parties, and first love provide its social framework, but the books are primarily concerned with damaged families, trauma, addiction, mental illness, abuse, loyalty, and the friendships that become a substitute for safety at home. Set largely during the early 2000s, the series has a pre-smartphone atmosphere in which reputations spread through classrooms, buses, sports teams, and tightly connected local communities.
The opening pair, Binding 13 and Keeping 13, follows Shannon Lynch and Johnny Kavanagh. Shannon arrives at Tommen after years of bullying and carries secrets about a violent home life, while Johnny is a celebrated rugby player confronting an injury that could threaten the future he has built around the sport. Their relationship develops slowly because neither is dealing with an ordinary school problem: Shannon has learned that concealment is necessary for survival, and Johnny must decide how to help her without treating love as an easy solution to circumstances he cannot fully understand.
Shannon’s brother Joey moves into the foreground in Saving 6 and Redeeming 6. His story begins years earlier, when the departure of his older brother leaves him functioning as protector to his younger siblings while still a child himself. Joey’s relationship with Aoife Molloy grows through friendship, conflict, attraction, and her increasing awareness of the responsibilities crushing him. These books give the Lynch household a broader history and examine addiction, self-destruction, poverty, parental failure, and the danger of expecting one young person to hold an entire family together.
Taming 7 shifts attention to Gerard “Gibsie” Gibson and Claire Biggs. Gibsie has supplied much of the series’ humor, but his joking personality also functions as protection against unresolved experiences from his past. Claire, his childhood friend and the person most capable of seeing beneath the performance, has loved him for years. Their story changes the meaning of many earlier group scenes by revealing what Gibsie concealed while supporting everyone else. It also demonstrates one of Walsh’s recurring methods: characters who initially appear to occupy familiar roles—the athlete, the class clown, the popular girl—gradually emerge as people carrying private histories their friends have misunderstood.
Releasing 10 centers on Hughie Biggs and Lizzie Young, whose relationship reaches back through the group’s shared childhood and adolescence. Lizzie’s mental illness and severe trauma make this one of the series’ darkest narratives, while Hughie’s desire to protect her raises difficult questions about devotion, secrecy, boundaries, and the limits of what one person can carry for another. The novel overlaps substantially with relationships and conflicts already seen from different viewpoints, revising assumptions formed in the earlier books rather than beginning an isolated romance.
This overlap makes publication order important even though the books focus on different couples. Joey and Aoife’s story begins chronologically before much of Johnny and Shannon’s, but reading it later preserves the revelations and changes of perspective built into the series. Secondary characters continually become protagonists, and events that seemed incidental in one book may prove central when retold by someone who experienced them differently.
Walsh writes at considerable length, allowing friendships, romances, family crises, and recovery to unfold over years rather than compressing them into quick resolutions. The emotional intensity is balanced by Irish humor, group banter, sporting culture, and the warmth of a friendship circle whose members repeatedly protect one another. The series is intended for mature readers and addresses distressing subjects directly. Its defining achievement is the cumulative portrait of young people learning that love may offer refuge, but lasting survival also requires truth, intervention, accountability, and a community willing to remain when circumstances become difficult.