When my editor emailed me back in August to ask for my thoughts on The Heartbreak Hotel’s cover, I promptly sent her a one-million-page powerpoint presentation that I’d been compiling in secret for months. As is always my way, I was extremely casual and chill about the whole thing.

There were a lot of ideas in there (too many). The cover could’ve landed in a hundred different directions. Luckily for me, it landed right here:

*heavy breathing*

From the mountain sunset to the falling leaves to the house and the tagline and the blurb and the characters… I mean. Every time I look at it, my heart grows three sizes.

About The Heartbreak Hotel, out 9.23.25:

A bed-and-breakfast for the brokenhearted might hold the key to another chance at love in this achingly hopeful debut romance.

Louisa Walsh emerged from a tumultuous childhood with a degree in counseling, a wealthy boyfriend, and her sunny outlook on life mostly intact. But that optimism is tested when she’s dumped and left unable to afford rent on their gorgeous house in the mountains of Colorado. Even with her life in disarray, Lou knows losing the one stable place she’s ever called home is not an option.

Her plan: ask her reclusive landlord, Henry Rhodes, to let her stay for free in exchange for renting out the house’s many rooms as a bed-and-breakfast. She’s shocked when he agrees to her terms, and even more surprised to discover Henry is a handsome thirtysomething veterinarian with silver at his temples and sadness in his eyes. One who does not take it well when Lou starts marketing her B and B as a retreat for the recently heartbroken.

But as the Comeback Inn opens its doors to its weary, hopeful guests, Lou and Henry find themselves dancing around both their undeniable connection and the closely held secrets that threaten to topple this fragile new start. A chance at love, here, could be too close to home…or it could be exactly where their hearts finally heal.

Preorder your copy

One of the images I shared during our initial cover conversations was this one—a painting of a cabin on a winter night:

Nearly everything about this was wrong for the book: The Heartbreak Hotel takes place primarily in the fall, not the winter, and the house Lou lovingly converts into a bed-and-breakfast isn’t a remote log cabin.

But what this painting gets so right is the feeling: it may be cold out, and dark, but you’re coming home. There’s warmth and life inside. Someone is waiting up for you.

When I saw the glowing windows on The Heartbreak Hotel’s cover, I nearly cried. When I boil it down, that’s what this book is about: No matter where you’ve been, there’s still a light on inside, and someone is waiting up for you.

“The Heartbreak Hotel is a lush, romantic, and devastatingly tender story about finding who you are beneath all your broken pieces. It cracked me wide open and filled me to the brim with hope. Ellen O’Clover is absolutely a romance voice to watch.”

—B.K. Borison, USA Today bestselling author of Business Casual

A little commotion for the full cover blurb! I’m such an admirer of B.K. Borison and her romances, and couldn’t be prouder to have her words gracing this book. Truthfully I have not recovered from the DM she sent me after reading, which said “I’ll never be the same, I’m literally just staring at my wall” and sent me into a brief coma. Becs, if you’re reading this, I am so grateful for you.

You might like The Heartbreak Hotel if you like…

⛰️ Mountain settings in autumn. This story is set in Estes Park, Colorado — one of my favorite places on earth, and also where my parents live (hi, Mom & Dad)

❤️‍🩹 Reading about mental health, grief, and heartbreak in all its forms

🐶 Men who love animals, and who animals love right back (Henry, the MMC, is a veterinarian)

👯‍♀️ The Power of Female Friendship™️ (and sisterhood)

🏡 Historic homes full of thrifted treasures and patterned wallpaper

💗 He falls first, and hard

🙃 Late-20s-who-am-I-and-is-my-life-already-a-complete-failure angst

💣 She’s keeping a secret, but he is too, and when both of them find out…?

❤️‍🔥 “I want to take my time with you”

Preorder The Heartbreak Hotel

Preordering a book is the best way to support it (and the nervous person who wrote it). Requesting that your library order a copy is wonderful, too. Creating a summoning circle with romance novels and scented candles to lure the Spirit Guide of Publishing into your home and asking it to smile upon this book also works.

If you’d like a signed/personalized copy of The Heartbreak Hotel, you can order one through Boulder Bookstore. Use the “Order Comments” section at check-out to tell me how you’d like it signed. Signed preorders will come with some exclusive (exclusive!!) goodies, which I will have lots more to say about soon.

Okay. After all that book news, here’s a palate-cleansing photo of my two biggest fans. Cannot read, just happy to be included.

Thank you for being on this ride with me. I love this book, and I can’t wait to share more about it in the months to come—September 23 feels very far away, but I know it’ll sneak up on me how pub dates always do. Be well, and see you back here soon. ❤️

Until next time!

xo, Ellen