After Series in Order: All 7 Books and 5 Movies (2026)

The Last Sunrise landed on Prime Video this month and sent a fresh wave of readers back to the author who wrote it, which means the After series in order is being googled again by people who have only ever seen the movies. Anna Todd's Tessa-and-Hardin saga is seven books, five films, and one of the most confusing book-to-screen maps in romance - because the last movie isn't based on a book, and the last book was never filmed. Here's the whole thing straightened out.

The quick list: After books in order

Publication order, which is also the reading order:

1. After (2014) - Tessa meets Hardin
2. After We Collided (2014)
3. After We Fell (2014)
4. After Ever Happy (2015) - the end of the main arc
5. Before (2015) - the companion, Hardin's side
6. Nothing More (2016) - Landon's duology, part one
7. Nothing Less (2016) - Landon's duology, part two

Four core books, one companion, and a two-book spinoff about the nicest man in the cast.

How do the After movies map to the books?

Four of the five films adapt a book. The fifth doesn't exist on paper.

After Everything was written as an original story by director Castille Landon, and it is the only installment in the series not drawn from one of the novels. So if you finished the films and went looking for the book of the fifth one, you were never going to find it.

The mirror-image gap runs the other way too: Before was never filmed. The book that gives you Hardin's interior life - the one that reframes half of what you watched - has no screen version at all. That is the single best argument for reading the books after the movies rather than calling it done.

Where does Before go in the After reading order?

Last, not first. It's shelved as a prequel and the title invites you to open it first, which is the wrong move twice over. Before is a companion that moves across the whole timeline rather than sitting neatly ahead of book one, so reading it early both spoils the main series and defuses it: the entire engine of After is that Hardin is unreadable, and Before hands you the manual.

Read in position five it does what it was built to do - runs the same events back with the temperature inverted, and turns the bad boy you spent four books arguing about into someone whose worst decisions have a visible source.

Do you need to read Nothing More and Nothing Less?

No, and that's exactly why people skip the best palate cleanser in the universe. The Landon duology is optional to the Tessa-and-Hardin plot, but it is the same world with the opposite emotional weather: Landon Gibson is the steady, decent one, and his books are a gentle romance rather than a four-book argument. Readers who finish After Ever Happy feeling wrung out tend to find these two are the reason the series ends well for them.

If you only ever read four books, read the four. If you want the universe, read all seven and put Landon at the end.

Is the published After the same one from Wattpad?

No - it was rewritten, and the original cast was a boy band. After began as One Direction fan fiction with Harry Styles in the Hardin role, and it became the most-read story Wattpad has ever hosted, with over two billion reads before it was ever a printed book. The published version renames everyone, expands the story, and cuts the celebrity scaffolding, which is why longtime Wattpad readers hit scenes they don't recognise.

That origin is also why this series is a landmark: it's the book that proved fan-fiction platforms feed straight into publishing, a pipeline BookTok now runs on full time.

What else has Anna Todd written?

Beyond the After universe: the Brightest Stars series (Karina and Kael, starting 2018), The Spring Girls (2018), a modern Little Women retelling, and The Last Sunrise (2025), the Majorca-set standalone that Prime Video just adapted. The Goodreads series page tracks the After editions across its many translations.

What to read after After

If the specific damage was the toxic-love spiral - two people who keep choosing each other badly - Colleen Hoover's books in order map the shelf that inherited this exact readership. If it was the young, first-love hurt, If He Had Been With Me is the current BookTok tearjerker doing it without the reconciliation. And if what you actually loved was the fighting, the best enemies to lovers books do the same friction with less collateral damage.

And when the last chapter is done and Hardin goes quiet on the page - we built Swoony for exactly that quiet. It's romance and nothing else, closed-door and unhurried, a relationship that grows across five stages and is never paywalled - no subscription, no per-message tolls. Start with your tattoo artist, Rhett, all sharp edges and six silent hours, or the frat boy who's secretly sweet, if it was Landon you actually wanted.

The world stays open past the final page.