Books Like The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo: 11 Sweeping, Unforgettable Reads

Taylor Jenkins Reid’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo works like a secret being told. Elderly Hollywood legend Evelyn Hugo summons an unknown journalist named Monique to her apartment and begins to speak — and what unfolds across seven decades is not the scandal the tabloids printed but the private truth: a life built around a love that could never be public, a series of marriages that were performances, and an ambition so fierce it consumed everything in its path. The novel is simultaneously a glamorous Hollywood saga and a quiet devastation about what it costs to hide who you are.

What makes it so widely beloved is the combination of elements that are rarely found in a single book. It has the propulsive pleasure of a celebrity biography, the emotional depth of literary fiction, a bisexual love story treated with full seriousness, and a frame narrative that generates its own mystery — why Monique, of all people? The books below share at least one of those qualities, and several share most of them. They are books that feel like discovering a secret, books with female protagonists who cannot be reduced to a single reading, and books whose final pages leave you sitting quietly for a few minutes before you can move on.

More Taylor Jenkins Reid: Fame, Women, and the Price of Both

#1 — Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

The most direct companion to Evelyn Hugo in Reid’s catalogue. Daisy Jones is a rock singer in 1970s Los Angeles — beautiful, self-destructive, and magnetically talented — and the novel is told entirely in oral history form, as if assembled from interviews conducted years after the band’s breakup. The format generates the same gap between public story and private truth that Evelyn Hugo does. What the band says publicly and what actually happened between Daisy and Billy Dunne are not the same thing, and the reader pieces together the real story from contradictions and silences. If you loved the Hollywood period detail of Evelyn Hugo, Daisy Jones delivers the rock era equivalent with the same sensory richness.

#2 — Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Four famous siblings — children of a legendary musician and an abandoned wife — throw a party at their Malibu home in August 1983 that ends in fire. Reid tells the story in a single night’s present action intercut with decades of backstory about the family’s origins, their father’s fame, and the private griefs each of them carries. It has Evelyn Hugo’s structural ambition — the long sweep of history compressed into a tight frame — and the same theme of public personas concealing private wounds. The siblings are fully individuated characters, and the ending is as quietly earned as Evelyn Hugo’s.

#3 — Carrie Soto Is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Carrie Soto is a retired tennis champion whose Grand Slam record is about to be broken by a younger player. She comes out of retirement to reclaim it. Reid’s novel is about a woman who is difficult and demanding and brilliant — someone who made the same bargains Evelyn Hugo made, trading softness for achievement — and the private heart she has kept carefully protected. It is a sports novel only on its surface. Underneath, it is about the same question Evelyn Hugo asks: what did you have to sacrifice to become who you are, and was it worth it?

Sweeping Sagas About Women and Hidden Identities

#4 — The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

Twin sisters from a light-skinned Black community in Louisiana take radically different paths: Desiree returns home, while Stella passes as white and never looks back. Bennett follows both sisters and their daughters across decades, examining the costs of a life built around a concealed identity and the ways secrets travel across generations. It has Evelyn Hugo’s scope and its preoccupation with the performance of self — the gap between who you are and who the world is permitted to know — and Bennett’s prose is precise and devastating in similar ways. One of the finest American novels of the past decade.

#5 — Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

In the affluent suburb of Shaker Heights, Ohio, the arrival of a wandering artist and her teenage daughter unsettles a family that has built its life around the performance of stability. Ng weaves together the stories of four teenagers and their mothers, examining how women are judged, how they judge each other, and what they are willing to do to protect what they love. The novel is formally controlled in the way Evelyn Hugo is — every element introduced early is paid off — and the central conflict between Mia Warren and Elena Richardson is one of the most compelling female rivalries in recent fiction.

#6 — Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

Elizabeth Zott is a chemist in 1960s California who ends up as the host of a cooking show, where she treats recipes as chemistry lessons and inadvertently inspires a generation of women. Garmus’s novel is funny — genuinely funny, in a way that Evelyn Hugo is not — but it shares the same fury at the structural constraints placed on talented women and the same admiration for a heroine who refuses to apologize for her intelligence and drive. Elizabeth Zott is as fully realised a protagonist as Evelyn Hugo, and the love story at the novel’s centre is handled with similar emotional intelligence.

#7 — Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

Four generations of a Korean family, from a fishing village in early-twentieth-century Korea through the Japanese occupation, through postwar Japan and its discrimination against Korean residents. Lee’s novel is one of the great multigenerational sagas in contemporary fiction — a book that makes the full weight of history feel personal by following a single family through it. The female characters are particularly drawn with Evelyn Hugo’s combination of strength and constraint: women making impossible choices within systems designed to limit them, and enduring what they cannot change.

Unforgettable Female Protagonists and the Lives They Build

#8 — My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

The first novel in Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, following Elena and Lila from childhood in a poor Naples neighbourhood through adolescence and into adult life. The relationship between them — competitive, devotional, resentful, essential — is the finest portrait of female friendship in contemporary fiction. Ferrante’s project across the four novels is to show how intelligence and ambition are constrained by poverty, gender, and the expectations of a tight community, which is exactly Evelyn Hugo’s project in a different setting. If Evelyn Hugo moved you, the Neapolitan novels will give you more of that feeling across four deeply immersive volumes.

#9 — Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

In 1962, a young Italian innkeeper on a remote stretch of the Cinque Terre coast meets an American actress who arrives at his hotel claiming to be dying. Sixty years later, a Hollywood producer’s assistant encounters a story connected to that meeting. Walter’s novel moves between 1962 Italy and contemporary Hollywood, braiding together a love story and a meditation on the films we make of our own lives. It is formally inventive — the novel incorporates multiple narrative forms, including a play within the story — and it has Evelyn Hugo’s glamour and its wistfulness about the lives that almost were.

#10 — The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab

In 1714 France, a young woman makes a desperate bargain: she will live forever, but everyone who meets her will forget her the moment she leaves their sight. Three hundred years later, a bookshop clerk in New York remembers her. Schwab’s novel is built around a hidden life — a woman who has existed fully for centuries while being invisible to the world — and the emotional devastation of being known by no one. The love story that develops when Addie finally finds someone who can see her carries the same weight as Evelyn and Celia’s relationship in Evelyn Hugo: the relief and terror of finally being seen.

For Readers Who Want Something Darker and Deeper

#11 — A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

Four college friends navigate adult life in New York over several decades, but the novel belongs almost entirely to Jude St. Francis, whose past is revealed slowly and whose capacity for love and suffering is the emotional engine of the whole book. It is among the most demanding novels on this list — longer than Evelyn Hugo, significantly darker, and emotionally brutal in ways that require preparation — but it shares the same essential quality: a life whose full truth is withheld until it can no longer be held back, and a revelation that reframes everything that came before. Readers who want to be changed by a book rather than simply moved by it should start here.

How to Choose Your Next Read

If you want more Taylor Jenkins Reid: Daisy Jones and the Six first, then Malibu Rising.

If you want the same multigenerational sweep: Pachinko or The Vanishing Half.

If you want a hidden love story at the centre: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue or A Little Life.

If you want the same fierce female protagonist: Lessons in Chemistry or My Brilliant Friend.

If you want Hollywood glamour with literary depth: Beautiful Ruins.

Taylor Jenkins Reid Books in Order

For every Taylor Jenkins Reid novel in order — The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Daisy Jones & The Six, Malibu Rising, and more — see our Taylor Jenkins Reid Books in Order guide.

For the Best Fiction Books

For the definitive guide to fiction — the greatest novels across literary fiction, classics, and contemporary writing — see our Best Fiction Books of All Time list.

More Women’s Fiction Reading Guides

• Books Like Daisy Jones and The Six
• Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club: Every Essential Pick

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