Taylor Jenkins Reid Books in Order: Complete Reading Guide (2026)

Taylor Jenkins Reid published four novels between 2013 and 2016 to modest commercial response. The books sold. They were well-reviewed. They did not make her famous. Then, in 2017, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo arrived, and several years later BookTok found it, and everything changed. By 2021 and 2022 the novel was appearing on bestseller lists years after its initial publication — a rare second wave that turned Reid into one of the most discussed authors on social media and brought her entire back catalog into sharp relief.

Her catalog is small but unusually dense with emotional ambition. Five major novels, all standalones, all built around women navigating ambition, desire, and identity in different eras. Three of the five share a loose fictional universe with minor character crossovers that reward attentive readers but require nothing of casual ones. None of them needs to be read in sequence.

If you want a quick answer: start with The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. If you would rather begin in a rock-and-roll setting, start with Daisy Jones and the Six. Both books represent Reid working at full power.

All 5 Taylor Jenkins Reid Books at a Glance

Best starting point: The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo — the novel that defines her reputation and showcases her storytelling at its best.

The Best Book to Start With

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo is the right entry point for almost every reader, and the reasons are architectural rather than simply a matter of popularity.

The novel operates on a dual timeline. In the present, a young journalist named Monique Grant is unexpectedly summoned by aging Hollywood legend Evelyn Hugo, who has chosen her — for reasons that are not immediately clear — to write her biography. In the past, Evelyn’s life unfolds chapter by chapter, each chapter organized around one of her seven marriages. The structure is precise: every husband represents a different phase of her ambition, a different compromise she made, a different version of the woman she was trying to become.

What Reid does with this structure is harder to pull off than it looks. Each marriage functions as a self-contained story about a specific kind of love — romantic love, strategic love, protective love, the love that looks like marriage but means something else entirely. By the time Evelyn’s full story is assembled, what seemed like a glamorous Hollywood confessional has become a meditation on what women sacrifice for success and who they sacrifice it for.

The novel’s final revelation — about why Monique was chosen, and what Evelyn has kept secret for decades — lands with the force of a twist that the book has been building toward from its first pages. The mechanics are fair: every necessary piece of information is present, and a second reading shows exactly where Reid planted it. This is confident, precise storytelling.

The alternative entry point is Daisy Jones and the Six. If the world of 1970s rock music appeals more than Old Hollywood, Daisy Jones is equally strong and structurally bolder. The two books together represent the range of what Reid can do. Reading one will almost certainly send you immediately to the other.

Complete Reading List

All five novels in publication order:

1. One True Loves (2016) — Contemporary; a woman’s first husband, presumed dead after a helicopter crash at sea, returns after she has fallen in love again.
2. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (2017) — 1950s–2000s Hollywood; a fictional Old Hollywood legend recounts her life, her seven marriages, and her secrets to a journalist she has chosen for reasons neither the journalist nor the reader yet understands.
3. Daisy Jones and the Six (2019) — 1970s rock scene; told entirely in oral history format, the story of a legendary band’s rise, the recording of their defining album, and the night they broke apart.
4. Malibu Rising (2021) — Summer 1983; four famous siblings throw their annual Malibu party as their carefully constructed lives begin to come undone over the course of a single night.
5. Carrie Soto Is Back (2022) — 1990s and 2021; a retired tennis champion, watching her Grand Slam record about to be broken, decides to come back and defend it herself.

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo is Reid’s masterpiece, and the novel that most clearly demonstrates what she is trying to do across her entire body of work.

Evelyn Hugo is a fictional Old Hollywood legend — Cuban-born, impossibly beautiful, married seven times, famous for decades. The novel does not pretend that she is based on any specific person, but Reid has acknowledged drawing on the atmosphere of Elizabeth Taylor, Ava Gardner, and their contemporaries. Evelyn is constructed to feel real in the way that those women felt real: as someone the public thought they knew entirely and understood almost nothing about.

The chapter structure — one husband, one era, one version of Evelyn — is what gives the book its unusual emotional range. Early chapters cover her arrival in Hollywood and the strategic marriages she made to gain leverage in a system designed to exploit her. Later chapters grow darker as the compromises accumulate. The book is not sentimental about ambition: it is precise about what ambition costs, and honest about the fact that Evelyn, having paid those costs, would pay them again.

The central themes are ambition, love, identity, and sexuality. Reid handles Evelyn’s bisexuality with a specificity that does not treat it as incidental or symbolic — it is central to the novel’s argument about what the women of Evelyn’s generation were required to conceal and what concealment did to them over time. The final twist is not a clever narrative trick grafted onto a different kind of story. It is the story’s meaning, delivered in full.

Daisy Jones and the Six

Daisy Jones and the Six is Reid’s most formally ambitious novel. The entire book is written as an oral history — a series of interviews with band members, managers, producers, and associates, assembled into a narrative that the reader reconstructs from competing accounts. There is no prose narration. There is no authorial voice outside the interviews themselves.

This format is either immediately engrossing or briefly disorienting, depending on the reader. Those who come from music journalism or documentary film will recognize the conventions immediately. Those who expect conventional narrative structure may need fifty pages to settle into it. The reward for settling in is considerable: the oral history format creates a specific kind of dramatic irony, where different speakers describe the same events in ways that contradict each other without either being entirely wrong, and the gaps between accounts become as significant as the accounts themselves.

The Fleetwood Mac inspiration is open rather than concealed. Reid has confirmed it, and the parallels are deliberate: a band built around two strong creative personalities who are simultaneously collaborators, competitors, and something neither can quite name; a defining album recorded under conditions of maximum personal tension; a dissolution that everyone saw coming and no one could prevent. The fictional album Aurora functions in the novel the way Rumours functions in rock mythology — as the record that captured something real by recording something that was breaking apart.

The Amazon Prime series adaptation (2023) is faithful and visually accomplished. It fills in the images that the book’s format deliberately withholds — what the band looks like performing, what the studio sessions look like from the outside. The book’s version, where those images are left to the reader, is more resonant. Reading first is the right order.

Malibu Rising, Carrie Soto Is Back, and the Shared Universe

Three of Reid’s five novels — The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Daisy Jones and the Six, and Malibu Rising — share a loose fictional universe. The connections are minor rather than structural: Monique Grant, the journalist from Evelyn Hugo, appears as a background character in Malibu Rising; Daisy Jones herself makes a cameo at the Malibu party. Neither crossover is essential to either book’s story. They function as texture for readers who have read all three, and as undetectable gaps for readers who haven’t.

Malibu Rising takes place over a single summer night in 1983. The Riva siblings — four children of a famous singer father who was largely absent from their lives — throw their annual party at their Malibu home. The novel moves between that night and the decades of family history that led to it, using the party as a fixed point around which backstory accumulates. It is Reid’s most structurally intricate book after Daisy Jones, and the one that most directly addresses the children of charismatic, self-involved parents.

Carrie Soto Is Back sits outside the shared universe and is, by most metrics, Reid’s most underrated novel. Carrie Soto is a retired tennis champion who held the record for Grand Slam singles titles until a younger player begins threatening to break it. The novel alternates between the 1990s — Carrie’s competitive prime, her relationship with her father and coach, the sacrifices she made — and 2021, when she decides to come back. It is the most sports-focused book Reid has written, and the most interested in what excellence actually requires: not just talent and dedication, but a specific willingness to be disliked, to be difficult, to prioritize the goal over the relationship. Carrie is not always sympathetic. She is always fully realised.

One True Loves

One True Loves is Reid’s earliest book in her current catalog and the most modest in scope. Emma Blair has built a new life after her husband Jesse was lost at sea and presumed dead. She has fallen in love again. And then Jesse, who did not die, returns.

The premise is a romantic triangle with a genuine structural problem at its centre: both men are good, both loves are real, and neither choice is clearly wrong. Reid handles this with more restraint than the setup might suggest. The novel does not resolve its triangle through convenient revelation — one man is not secretly terrible, one love is not secretly fraudulent. Emma’s difficulty is taken seriously.

What One True Loves demonstrates most clearly is Reid’s craft at the level of character and emotional logic. The ambitions are smaller than Evelyn Hugo or Daisy Jones — there is no formal experiment, no historical sweep, no structural game. It is a precisely constructed emotional story about a woman choosing the shape of her own life. For readers who have worked through the later novels, it reads as a clear view of the concerns that Reid would develop at larger scale in the books that followed.

Taylor Jenkins Reid’s five novels represent a short but coherent body of work. The thread running through all of them is women making difficult choices in systems that constrain those choices — Hollywood in the 1950s, the music industry in the 1970s, professional sport, romantic love. The later novels develop that concern with greater formal ambition and richer historical texture. Start with The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and work outward from there.

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.

For the full Taylor Jenkins Reid bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the Taylor Jenkins Reid author page on Editors Reads.

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