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If You Loved The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Read These Next

If you loved The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid.

Taylor Jenkins Reid’s breakout hooked millions with a glamorous, secret-keeping heroine and a story that treats ambition and love as the same dangerous thing. If you want that again — a larger-than-life woman, a confession unspooling across decades, an ending that rearranges everything — these are the books from our shelves we’d hand you next, each with a full review.

Why these match

  • ambition
  • fame
  • secrets
  • love
  • identity
  • old hollywood
Cover of Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

Pick 01 · Top match

Giovanni's Room

by James Baldwin

4.5 - Outstanding
FictionLiterary FictionLGBTQ+

Where Evelyn Hugo armored herself in glamour to survive a love she couldn't claim, Baldwin strips that denial to the bone. In 1950s Paris, a young American falls for a bartender and recoils from what the love asks of him, narrating his own cowardice in prose so exposed it stings. Readers drawn to Evelyn's queer reckoning and her decade-late honesty will find the unguarded interior version of that ache: a slim, devastating book about shame, self-deception, and a desire its narrator can't bear to claim.

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Kindle$1099$16.00−31%Paperback$1165$16.00−27%Hardcover$1910$26.00−27%

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Cover of A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

Pick 02

A Thousand Splendid Suns

by Khaled Hosseini

4.8 - Incredible
FictionHistorical FictionLiterary Fiction

Where Evelyn made her own legend, Hosseini's two Afghan women have everything chosen for them, married to the same brutal man as their country burns. Yet the fierce bond between them becomes its own defiance. A devastating story of women enduring what history hands them.

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Kindle$899$19.00−53%Paperback$967$19.00−49%Hardcover$1745$29.95−42%

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Cover of The Prophets by Robert Jones Jr.

Pick 04

The Prophets

by Robert Jones Jr.

4.4 - Excellent
FictionHistorical FictionLGBTQ+

Isaiah and Samuel love each other in the one place least built to allow it, a Deep South plantation where their bond is both sanctuary and target. Like Evelyn's hidden love, theirs survives in secret, but Jones tells it in a lyrical chorus of voices that turns survival into scripture. For readers who came to Evelyn for queer love against impossible odds.

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Kindle$1299$19.00−32%Paperback$1219$19.00−36%Hardcover$1196$27.00−56%

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Cover of The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

Pick 05

The God of Small Things

by Arundhati Roy

4.4 - Excellent
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

Roy's Booker winner turns on the same unforgiving question that haunts Evelyn Hugo: who is permitted to love whom, and what it costs to break that law. Following twins through one catastrophic 1969 season in Kerala, it braids forbidden love through caste and violence in spiraling prose. A sweeping family tragedy with sentences as ambitious as its heartbreak.

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Kindle$999$19.00−47%Paperback$1145$19.00−40%Hardcover$3470

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Cover of Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

Pick 06

Small Things Like These

by Claire Keegan

4.2 - Excellent
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

Keegan trades Hollywood spectacle for a coal merchant's conscience in 1985 Ireland, but the moral nerve is Evelyn's own: what you choose to see, and what it costs to act. Delivering coal to the local convent, Bill Furlong finds a girl the town would rather he ignore. A spare, exact novel that says everything about decency in few pages.

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Kindle$902$20.00−55%Hardcover$949$20.00−53%

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Cover of The Help by Kathryn Stockett

Pick 07

The Help

by Kathryn Stockett

4.8 - Incredible
FictionHistorical FictionWomen's Fiction

Evelyn Hugo guards her own story until she decides who gets to tell it; in 1962 Jackson, three women take that same risk on the page. Two Black maids and a would-be white writer set down the truth of domestic work, knowing exactly what it could cost. Voice-rich and built for book clubs, it shares Evelyn's conviction that whose story gets told is the real battle.

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Kindle$1399$33.00−58%Paperback$1056$20.00−47%Hardcover$1179$35.00−66%

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Cover of Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

Pick 08

Lessons in Chemistry

by Bonnie Garmus

4.6 - Outstanding
FictionLiterary FictionWomen's Fiction

Elizabeth Zott shares Evelyn Hugo's refusal to be managed by the men running her industry, only her arena is 1960s science rather than the studios. Sidelined as a chemist, she turns a daytime cooking show into a quiet rebellion. Witty up top and angrier underneath, it gives you the same fierce, underestimated woman bending a hostile world to her terms.

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Kindle$1399$19.00−26%Paperback$1090$19.00−43%Hardcover$1353$29.00−53%

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Cover of The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

Pick 09

The Nightingale

by Kristin Hannah

4.5 - Outstanding
FictionHistorical FictionWomen's Fiction

Two French sisters survive the German occupation by opposite means, one enduring at home, the other running toward the resistance, in the kind of sweeping, decades-marked women's story that made Evelyn Hugo unputdownable. Hannah never holds her feelings at arm's length, and the sacrifices land hard. For readers who want strength, sisterhood, and unabashed emotion.

Buy on Amazon
Kindle$1199$17.99−33%Paperback$1314$17.99−27%Hardcover$2716$35.00−22%

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