Books like The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
What should you read after Taylor Jenkins Reid’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- Taylor Jenkins Reid
- 2017
- 400 pages
- Historical fiction
What did you love about it?
Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall matchDaisy Jones & The Six
Taylor Jenkins Reid
Same author, same structure, different industry: a seventies band reconstructed from interviews, with two people who can't share a room and can't work apart.
- A life told as an interview
- Impossible to put down
- Ruthless ambition
- All dialogue, no narration
Best for old Hollywood glamourCity of Girls
Elizabeth Gilbert
1940s New York theatre rather than Hollywood, narrated at ninety-five by a woman with no regrets to offer. The same appetite for a scandalous life.
- Old Hollywood glamour
- A life told as an interview
- Ruthless ambition
- Broadway, not film
Best for ruthless ambitionCarrie Soto Is Back
Taylor Jenkins Reid
Reid's least likeable and most interesting heroine: a tennis champion coming out of retirement at thirty-seven to defend a record, and refusing to apologise for it.
- Ruthless ambition
- Impossible to put down
- Old Hollywood glamour
- Sport, not glamour
Best for queer love kept secretThe Price of Salt
Patricia Highsmith
The 1950s version, written from inside the 1950s: two women in New York with everything to lose, in a novel that scandalously let them keep each other.
- Queer love kept secret
- Impossible to put down
- Old Hollywood glamour
- No glamour, no fame
Great matchLessons in Chemistry
Bonnie Garmus
A chemist pushed onto a fifties cooking show who refuses to soften — the same era, the same woman working a system built specifically to contain her.
- Impossible to put down
- Ruthless ambition
- Old Hollywood glamour
- Comic where Reid is tragic
Worth a look — with a warningValley of the Dolls
Jacqueline Susann
The original Hollywood scandal novel and the ancestor of every book on this list — three women, a great many pills, and careers eating them alive.
- Old Hollywood glamour
- Ruthless ambition
- Queer love kept secret
- 1966 attitudes throughout
What should you read after The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo?
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid works on several levels at once, and which book you should read next depends on which of those levels got you. For most readers the closest match is Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid — same author, same structure, different industry: a seventies band reconstructed from interviews, with two people who can't share a room and can't work apart.
If what stayed with you was old hollywood glamour, read City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert instead: 1940s New York theatre rather than Hollywood, narrated at ninety-five by a woman with no regrets to offer. The same appetite for a scandalous life. Carrie Soto Is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid is the other strong option — reid's least likeable and most interesting heroine: a tennis champion coming out of retirement at thirty-seven to defend a record, and refusing to apologise for it.
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